On a discipline committee in an IP context

I was wondering if I would ever get the mood to type this log at all...
And I guess I have finally gotten into he mood as I sit on the bus that is going to take me to my destination today (which is bukit merah in case you are wondering)

After staring aimlessly at the scenery and playing some games on the computer, I think it is time for me to chronicle my thoughts on this topic:
The feasilibility of a discipline committee in an IP school.

As many of you should have known by now, rv has officially went IP (much to the displeasure of many people, but that's going to be another story). What does IP means? IP is a programme in which students do not need to sit for the GCE O levels paper, and instead progress for a 6 year education which leads up right to the GCE A level papers.

The theory behind it is that, with a 6 year education that will not be interrupted by O levels, students will be able to have more time to develop other skills rather then a pure "rush for the O levels mentality"

True, the IP program is indeed trying to do that, but many of us feels that O level is still an important indicator of our studying and so on and so forth.
What we are considering right now is the effect of the student council in rv when it has to be the bridge between the new group of students.

Because of the IP program, 2 years from now, RV would have its first batch of 5th year ip students. As we all know, most JCs do not have prefactorial board or even a discipline function inside the student body. The raionale is very simple, as 17-18 year olds, won't we have a sense of maturity and there isn's a need for us to be constantly watched over. Besides, how effective do you think it would be for your friends to discipline you in the first place when you are 17-18 years old:

"Hey, tuck in your shirt!!"
"**** you.... shut the **** up. You think you what? Council chiang ah!!"

Ok, that was just an illustration, but ya, this sort of things could happen...
So we turn our attention back to RV.

In the rv student council, there is a discipline committee. Its job scope included disciplining. I was in that committee for 4 years, and let me tell you that catching others isn't an easy thing. Other then the fact that you'll face this sort of scenario as descirbed above sometimes, you'll also question yourself on what is indeed the direction of the student council. Isn't the student council supposed to help the students??

So, after this ironical part, we move on and we face ourselves with the new 17-18 years old. They are supposed to be more matured and supposed to require less watching over. If we still have a discipline committee in the school, don't you think it might hinder their development. Many of us in JC now are experiencing a different sort of life from what we had lef in secondary school. I feel that this experience is an integral part of our development. If we continue to have a student council in rv, won't it deprive them of this experience? Will they still then be able to be as good as those normal group of students who went through the O levles and got to experience life in a proper JC??

Personally, I don't see how discipline committee can continue to stay alive in the student council. The student council is already undergoing a revamp or something, and the only way I can see discipline committee continuing on in this new environment is to stop being the "bad people" of the school and catching people, because of the maturity factor, and also because of the fact of how effective it would be when your scope include 17-18 year olds.

Probably, discicpline committee can rework itself as the feedback unit or somewhat, which focuses on the discipline part or such or something like that.

Its just some random thoughts that I had over the discipline committee.

Discmon

Some funny and important things

You know, I had been debating with myself on what should be the topic of the post today. A lot of things has been happening recently, especially with my father's sudden interest in waking me up and attempting to scold me at the same time, and then appearing to be sleeping when I finally decides to sleep. Lets just say that that is highly amusing and very laughable...

After much thought and many other considerations, here we go:
Did I mention that the voting process for the 40th student council in NJC has finally ended?
Indeed, it has, and the entire process is highly laughable as well, except that its much much way more sarcastical then the methods I have shown above.

Lets start with campaigning stuff before we move over to other stuff.
Firstly, you guys are heading for a term of office in the council. In this one year or so, how are you going to help us or anything? Sure of course, all of you guys say of "serving the school, the college, the council, the student" blah blah blah. I would notice of course that everyone who wants to be in the student council wants to serve someone. So you've been telling me this telling me that, are you going to tell me how are you really going to serve us? Do you plan to raise our grieviance to the teachers or are you planning to conduct more forums??

You know, it would help our decision making for a lot of us, if you let us know what you are planning to do to help us? If you have a clear action plan, it is more likely that you will stick to it and that it will be more successful. But no, you know what, apparently all the councillors can't tell us much about what they are going to do...
It sounds kinda stupid, but apparently, the councillors are "instructed not to make any promises, nor have any action plans" for whatever they have in mind. This, I feel, totally contradicts the idea of having a student councillor.

For one thing, the student councillor is supposed to be the "bridge between the school adminstration and the student body" (I've heard that long enough that I can practically recite it to you without any hesitation) The councillor is supposed to fight for the rights of his/her fellow schoolmates. Without knowing the grieviance of the people who they are serving and not even having a clear action plan of what they may try to do to get to know these problems, how are we supposed to rely on this group of people to help us to solve our problem?

Heard of "you can't survive on a diet of hope"? That totally matches the scenario above.

Also, did somebody notice the very stupid thing about people who don't want to be councillors, but cannot withdraw from the election?
It sounds a bit stupid, but there are indeed a large amount of people who are walking around NJC, telling close friends not to vote for them. Its not a chance of reverse psychology, but they sincerely do not want people to vote for them.

Something bad must have happened for such a large amount of candidate to want to pull out from the campaigning process. It is very scary, especially when it came to the time for me to vote when I noticed that there is a severe lack of choices for us to vote...
Perhaps, the council itself should find out what is wrong with its system, such that such a large amount of candidates want to pull out from the campaigning process. From what I heard, its got something to do with the red tapes that are present all over the council. Doing something requires approval, blah blah blah.
Which reminds me, are we in a JC?

Of course, while I am at it (criticising the things that had happened), lets have some rather amusing "jokes" that we see around the canteen once in a while:
"I am sure you know the lord of the rings, there is a land called Rohan. You will remember me, vote for Rohan"
-Did I mention that I have never read LOTR and did not watch the movie too?
-Oh, did you notice that your name is about... one letter away from Roshan? Should we start killing you? Health regeneration too fast ah...

"Polarbear has fur, NJ has jenni-fur"
-Personally, I nearly vomitted when I first heard the wording.
-Isn't polar bear supposed to be violent...
-Did I mention that the fur-trade is going strong? Better not let people out there know there is a Jenni-fur out in NJ, you wouldn't want NJ to be crawling with hunters do you?
-Although on second thought, this could be quite interesting ^^

"Nj has a lion, it needs a tiger, vote for Mehul (beautiful tiger)"
-This is getting quite corny... sure I remember your name, I just don't see how you are going to help us from this poster...
-Oh ya, did I mention that getting hunted by a lion is hard enough already, we don't need an extra tiger to join in the hunt. We have lost enough lives at the moment.

"Smart people approve Apporv, vote for apporv"
-So if I don't vote for you, I am stupid?!! pfft...
-Which raises an interesting question, how many smart people are there in Nj anyway?

"Special agent for the student body"
-wtf...
-Note that this guys nickname is agent cause he is zhuai, but that's another story altogether...

"The magika of radhika"
-right....
-so eh? who are you anyway? A witch or a fellow njcians?
-You planning to cast magic spells to help the student? Personally I don't mind full body binding all the irritating teachers, and then providing cheering charms for all the students. Add some complex wand-work, and we might soon be locomotor mortis-ing...

Oh ya, I noticed that God was written on one of the posters in that sort of christian style, like bless you whatever...
Does anyone ever notice that NJC is named as National Junior College and not anything that starts with a st. Please do remember that NJC is a secular school. You are not supposed to have a religion.

Oh ya, this applies to Guitar ensemble as well. "Thank God for his amazing Grace..."
Did I mention I know too many Grace already? How many more "amazing" ones are we getting??

Discmon

Simple life...

Well, this marks the end of another hectic week... and a rather hectic weekend ahead of me...
That's not a very good piece of news, especially when you consider the already-reaching-critical-heights homework pile and the incredibly-insanely-large amount of projects that we need to worry about over the entire course of this weekend.

And we've got our NAPFA test tomorrow, another very important item for all of us to worry about...
But, at least we've reached the end of the "weekdays" of the week and are heading into the marvellous weekend, where, hopefully, things would be nice, turn out all right with minimal conflicts and I can get some sleep even though there is a critical-heights homework pile.

Oh yeah, as many of you might have noticed by now, I've finally pushed myself so hard that I managed to get a site meter on to my blog. It took me a long time to get the strength to get that site meter up and running (which for the last two years had not been on my blog because I've been too lazy).

Anyway, have you ever asked yourself this question? And that is, how do you want to lead this life that you have?
Do you want to be rich, famous and known throughout history as some person who did some marvellous thing, is a "groundbreaker", or something like that?
Of course, one of the interpretations of life is to live it the best that you can and leave something behind for people to remember you by. It could be anything of course, from being the president of some country, to being the highest level character in Maplestory etc.

But, I don't know how many of you all would agree with me, but isn't it nice to just live life as it is and be happy. I find that being happy, finding the simple pleasures in life is the best thing in life. Things like sitting on the couch and watch tv with someone, type blogs and know that some people out there are reading it, listen to radio, hum songs... Essentially doing the simple things in life, but enjoying it at the same time.

I choose to lead a simple life if I can do it. Get a job which I like and can enjoy myself there, don't try to stand out, lead the simple life as shown in the song "小人物的心声"...
This leads to worrying about less things. If you worry about less things, like all those things above, won't life be much easier? You won't have to worry about this, worry about that, and I don't need to worry about my hair turning white...

...Which is pretty white already, but at least I'm not a lao chio bu!!

Discmon

C&C 3 has arrived...

I wonder how many of you guys remembered the "Top 100 ways to show that you have a lot of time on your hands"?
Today, I am a bit bored and is not in the mood to do any homework. This is probably due to the fact that tomorrow is a really really nice public holdiday. So anyway, I finally managed to get command & conquer 3 to work.

So to celebrate this extrodinary feat of getting command and conquer 3 to work on a laptop...
Unfortunately, I don't have too many inspirations for this list, so I've decided to keep it short.
The Top 10 ways to show that you love command & conquer 3:

10. You went to the release event held on monday at Orchard Lido to collect your special Kane Edition of Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars after having your lessons in school despite the fact that you are very tired and have a lot of homework waiting for you to do.

9. The moment you reached home, you started showing off the awesome box art to everyone in your family and proceeded to celebrate your acquisition of the game that you've been waiting for a long time.

8. You change your desktop wallpaper to those of command and conquer 3. You also devoted a large amount of time on celebrating that Joe Kucan is back to reprise his role as the infamous leader of NOD, KANE!!.

7.You started imagining what would have happened in school should you refuse to do your homework and told your teacher that you were at Lido yesterday. Basically, something like this:
"Why did you never do the homework?? Eh, why you never do the homework uh? uh?uhhh?uhhhhh?"
"Teacher, yesterday I was at shaw towers. Top floor there..."
"OMG, you play C&C 3 too?!!"
"YEAH!! ITS SO COOL!!"
"Anyway, WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?? GDI or NOD or SCRIN?"
"Eh... GDI!!"
"Alright man, you are officially exempted from homework for the whole of this week!! If you had supported NOD... or worse... SCRIN....."
-end of imagination-

6. You went on to wikipedia.org and read the article on the universe of Command & Conquer so that you know what has happened before the tiberium wars.

5. You announced that 26/03/2007 is a very good day regardless of how many homeworks were there, or how many times you got scolded because its the day of the release of Command & Conquer 3.

4.You start talking about how imba late game GDI are. Just imagine, 30 mammoth and about 20 ++ juggernaught. Just imagine, the power!! Somebody, stop him...

3. You stayed up all night playing the game as it is very fun.

2. You start researching on the origin of the name of Kane and of Nod. It apparenlty is inspired by the holy bible. The first murderer, Cain who kill his brother and was banished to some NOD.

1. You look at everybody and start screaming that "KANE LIVES!!"

OK, its a bit short, but its really damn fun haha ^^

Discmon

CT's are supposed to be better then most teachers... right?

I once told myself sometime last year that I'll stop massive criticisms on my blog because I realised that it send me into thinking that the world is a very dark place and that we are unable to escape any of the tortures of life...
Basically, it turned my life upside down and I had to redefine for myself what exactly is happiness...

But I think I had enough of what had happened over the last few days, and it constitutes a post on my blog. I originally wanted to talk about something really abstract, but as it was way way way too abstract, I guess that abstract topic is out of the question. We will, therefore, return to the criticism part...

Have you ever wondered to yourself this delightfully rhetorical question?
Isn't civics class the greatest and most fun lesson to take place in a JC?
Well, about 99.9999999999% of the time, it should be the greatest and most fun lesson in JC. I mean, what other lessons are there in JC where you do not need to learn anything new and you get to talk and crap around with your civics class?

Well, welcome to my civics class. We had spent our last few civics lessons stoning at each other. That isn't because we are all introverts or we hate each other. (Firstly, I am a 22-point extrovert and is the noisiest in class without any competition from anyone) Its either because our civics teacher suck-ed, or we started on the wrong foot with our civics teacher.. or so I hoped before we got to know each other "better"...

Lets just recall what happened when we first step into civics class:
I was looking forward to get to interact with my new class because I changed combination of subjects. Civics lesson to me signify a more relaxed atmosphere between teachers and students, allowing both parties to joke around a bit and laugh, creating a bond between the both of them.

We were a bit late because lecture ended late. Anyway, because of the slight hold-up, the moment we entered the civic class venue...
"Do you know what is RESPECT??"
note: the above was spoken in the most haughty and the most 理所当然 way I have ever known...

Of course we know, its just that we, as a new class, are waiting for everyone to come in so that we can all greet you at exactly the same time. Sure, you don't want us to be united, no problem... That, unfortunately, set the mood for the rest of the civics lesson, so we basically just stoned at her, and I decided right there and then, that we are on the brink of war...

She conducted the civics lesson as though it is a disciplinary lesson, requiring our full unstoppable attention. It was way too one-sided for a civics lesson. No one talked, everyone just stared at her talking on and on. She did not even care to give us the chance to have self-intro. She herself doesn't even want to know self-intro in the first place... She alternated between calling our names, and giving us disapproving look when we talk about our past during the whole length of the civics lesson...

Of course as can be expected from most teachers which are like that, they have zero sense of humour. Remind me again, someone has zero sense of humour? For example:
You are late for morning assembly:
Teachers with a bit of sense of humour would say:"Don't be late again, ok?"
"ok"

However, there is this weird breed who has ZERO sense of humour:"I have told you all before, I "expect" (she emphasies the EXPECT) you all to be here before the first bell rings.. (normally, its second bell, but she wants first, so what can I say... Personally, she doesn't even appear until the second bell)"
note: The above was spoken with very very slight variation in tone and a "I hate you and everyone else in this godforsaken world" face. Oh ya, that expression on her face came out in her voice too...
"...(wt...)"

Lets continue shall we?
Physics teacher, Mr Tan decided that he wanted 2 reps for his subject. Personally, I don't see any fault with what he wants. I mean, having 2 representative means that the other can help in case the other isn't here, or the workload gets way too extreme...
You would think there is nothing wrong with it too right? But wait, our civics tutor has a lot to say about it...
"Why are there 2 physic reps in the class, there is supposed to be 1 only"
"But Mr Tan picked for 2 physics rep..."
"How are we supposed to write the testimonial...? (which I think is a horrible reason not to have 2 physics rep)"

A week later:
"Who are the physics rep in class"
"Sashti and Bernice"
"Why are there two physics rep in class, you are only supposed to have one"
"Mr Tan wanted two..."
"No, there will only be one physics rep in class..."

(I got a bit pissed...I hate teachers who tries to exert their influence over other teachers, who teaches much better then her anyway currently)

"Hey, Mrs ___ (censored: the word is too horrible to be seen), look, its Mr Tan who wanted the 2 physics rep, not us. If you are really against this, please find Mr Tan and stop taking it out on us..."
She returned me the "I do not need you to tell me" and "I hate you and the rest of this world" look.
Basically, if I were a bit more vulgar, the "F*** YOU" look...

And she also meddles with our economics class teacher. The economics teacher I think is quite good too, although she just graduated. She managed to clear a lot of my doubts and clarified a lot of things I did not understand.
The ct wanted to exercise control over how she organises our classes schedule...

And she still has to do it with that "F*** YOU" look...

Personally, I had about enough, and I think its the first time I have some much to talk about the misdeeds of a teacher. (other then the legendary L^2M, but, at least that teacher rocks ok) Besides, even discipline teacher (such as Mrs Look and Ms Phua) don't command that sort of hatred from me at all.

I was wondering if there were any people out there who hates their life, hates their job and hates their surrounding, shows it outside with the "I hate you" look, talks with a certain sense of "I am SUPERIOR!!!" ...
...and still can survive...

I just found one...

Discmon

P.S. Oh ya, she maintains her "I hate you" look everywhere she goes, even to the teachers...