Vale J.B.

Someone who held out to the end.



We will miss you.

Image of The Great Depression

This is a photo taken in the 1930s. It shows a mother of seven young children staring hopelessly, perhaps wondering if there would be a next meal or maybe even about the future of her children.



Economic uncertainty is a cloud that hangs over all of humanity.

For, behold, the days are coming, in which they shall say,
Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare,
and the paps which never gave suck.
Then shall they begin to say to the mountains,
Fall on us;
and to the hills,
Cover us.

Mid-autumn

The fall equinox.

Beyond an astronomical event where the sun crosses the equator on its southward journey, marking the seasonal reversal in both hemispheres, it is a time when we look forward to bountiful harvests.



Here's wishing everyone a peaceful mid-autumn

On education in 1984-ville

So we had a long talk about what's so wrong about sending kids to public schools in 1984-ville.

My reflections on the problem from a teacher's POV. Talk to any teacher in a local public school and top gripe he or she has is the lack of a defined job scope.

Strange.



Teacher = teach? No?

Apparently not. At least in the eyes of government officials. You would think that the primary job descriptors for teachers are:

(i) Plan lessons
(ii) Deliver lessons
(iii) Assess effectiveness of learning
(iv) Evaluate effectivness of teaching

On average, I step into the classroom for 3 hours a day. That's what it says in my time-table. From experience, I need 2 hours of preparation work (i.e. lesson planning) for every hour of class. That excludes setting and marking assessments as well as coaching weaker students outside of time-table, which probably takes up about an hour a day. There are "peak" periods, especially during exam season. But on the average, I would need to spend about 3 (lesson) + 6 (planning) + 1 (marking & coaching) = 10 hours a day to be an effective teacher. That's 2 hour more than a normal working day.

But on paper, administrators see only the lesson hours (3 hours/day for me). And light bulbs flash in their heads.

Oh, only 3 hours of teaching a day! Wow, that's great. Teachers have at least 5 hours free to do non-teaching projects, sit in committees etc.

Hence you get a blurring of job scopes. It's no longer teaching. It's teaching + other stuff.

Let's see what I've done this year that's not teaching:

1. Organizing an international competition (2 meetings a week & an hour of organization work a day for 3 months)

2. Sitting in a committee overseeing school canteen operations (Monthly inspections + stallholder liaison + administration work)

3. Liaison with government department for coordinating of student research projects on a national level for the past nine months (an hour of e-mail work per week + monthly meetings).

4. Training students for academic competitions (an hour a fortnight).

5. Hosting foreign visitors (ad-hoc basis, but basically I'm on call 24/7 for the duration of their visit).

You know, there's a saying that you hire the right person for the job. Generally you'd want to hire someone qualified or experienced in doing something. So a fireman fights a fire, a gardener tends the garden, a teacher teaches, a banker banks etc. So why are school administrators hiring teachers to be event managers, adminstrators, trainers, hosts, operations managers etc when it says on my name card "Teacher"?

The switch?

Maybe?

I need something reliable after having the X31 die in the middle of dinner time.