Lara’s Singapore Blog

NIE, Singapore’s National Institute of Education, will host the Youth Olympic Games arts and cultural events in the evenings during the games.  So for the two weeks of the Games proper, plus a week on either end - in fact, the whole of August - NIE will be non-functional.  But that doesn’t mean its employees get a furlough, other facilities, or time off!

No, what it means is that all public transit to the area will cease, and NIE employees will have to take dedicated buses, which will run only at specified hours. Once the employees have taken the buses (and gone through 3 police check points), they will be restricted to their offices from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on the days they work.  Unable to move about the campus, they will essentially be in lock-down.  Lunches will be delivered to their offices.  Vendors and suppliers will be forbidden to bring things to the building.  And staff who don’t show up during this time must apply for leave.  Ugh.

School, in case you didn’t know, will be in session from July 1 as usual.  Teacher training classes will not start until August 26 - usually it’s three weeks earlier. But those of us who work in schools will still have to juggle workplaces.

What if you have a project that requires you to move about, or leave campus?  Those of us on such projects are concluding that we’d better work from home for that whole month.  I expect a whole lot of computers, printers, data servers and office supplies to begin heading out of the building in July.

YOGI - Youth Olympic Games Insanity.  You’ll excuse me if I refrain from expressing joy and excitement.

March 9th, 2010 | Category: Education, Entertainment, public policy | Leave a comment

This August, the world’s first-ever Youth Olympic Games (YOG) will be held in Singapore. Moreover, they will be held at the university campus where I live and work.

First, inquiring minds want to know, what do they mean by Youth Olympics?  When regular Olympic women gymnasts are routinely 14 years old, will Singapore be hosting even tinier, younger proto-adults?  I don’t know what the age cut-off is.

Second, what does this mean for those of us who live and work here?  Hell on earth, that’s what it means.

At first we thought it was a nice reason to spruce up the place; buildings are getting re-faced and painted, tired plantings are being pruned and reinvigorated.  The whole university is getting a face lift, and we can enjoy the results.

But the construction, painting, water-blasting and renovations have been going on for more than nine months now.  Nine months during which the university athletic fields have been off-limits, while the track and soccer field were scraped down to dust, a new irrigation system was inserted, and then the sod and track were replaced.  Nine months of dust, jackhammers, noise, noise, noise and general inconvenience.  And now we’re nearing the end of it, thank god, and things look very nice.

But aside from looking nicer, are our facilities actually any better?  Did they add any new badminton courts?  (We had four for a student population of 28,000 - this in badminton-addicted Asia.) No. Any new places for kids to play? Well, there’s a shallow warm-up pool next to the high diving board, so there’s at least a place for children to paddle, and that’s new.  But to counterract this, any place that used to be good for skateboarding or rollerblading has now been partitioned with fences and made inaccessible.  So toddlers score, at the expense of older children.

And in some cases things are worse; I have in mind the fencing around the tennis courts.  The old diamond-shaped fencing, sheathed in forest-green plastic, was ripped down and replaced with higher rectangular steel fencing.   Not only does the sun glare off the new fence in ways that dazzle players; balls get stuck in it.

I hope the athletes enjoy their two weeks at NTU; it’s been pretty hard on those of us in residence.  YOGA  - Youth Olympic Games Aggravation.

March 9th, 2010 | Category: Entertainment, public policy | Leave a comment

I haven’t had dental insurance until recently, so I had to pay out of pocket to get my teeth cleaned.  I made an appointment with the local dentist (a very small office in the shopping center adjacent to the train station), and two days later got my teeth checked and cleaned with an ultrasound machine.  This took all of ten minutes, and cost $50 (Sing).

I have also priced a root canal, which is about $1500; the dentist apologized repeatedly for the cost but said it was an expensive procedure.  

I hear it’s even cheaper next door in Malaysia, but haven’t needed to find out yet.

March 8th, 2010 | Category: Money | Leave a comment

Since it’s of interest to anyone watching the U.S. healthcare death struggle, I thought I’d tell you a few prices.

We have health insurance through the university, where my spouse is a professor.  He upgraded coverage for our family of three, to the maximum best-possible coverage, and for this we pay $700 (Singapore currency) a year.  This means we can go to any doctor or clinic that’s on the plan (and that’s most of them on the island), pay a $5 co-pay, and get a consultation, at the end of which we pop by the dispensary (in-clinic pharmacy) and pick up whatever drugs may be prescribed, at no additional cost.  Hospitalization costs are much lower too, with a 10% co-pay. (I’d give you more details but have not been hospitalized, so don’t know them.)

It’s good coverage, but medicine itself is cheaper here as well.  The campus clinic is in a small space next to a lecture theater; it’s the size of two elementary-school classrooms combined, and includes a waiting area, reception/filing area, dispensary, optometry center, small laboratory, and six consulting rooms.  Not a lot of wasted space.  If you need more deluxe treatment you can go to a larger clinic, in the mall or at a hospital.

There’s no single-payer requirement.  If you’re a Singaporean you have a Medi-Save account, where you store money for future medical expenses, but otherwise you have to purchase insurance or pay full fees.  But you do have various options in case of hospitalization or extended care; there are A facilities, with air conditioning, or B facilities, cheaper, smaller, shared rooms without AC.  Your choice.

March 8th, 2010 | Category: Money, public policy | Leave a comment

In the high-stakes testing system of Singapore education, teachers get financial rewards if their classes do well on the exams.  There is a relentless permeating focus on exam results: students’ names, scores and class rankings are published after every island-wide exam period, and parents and teachers obsess about them.

So teachers have every inducement to teach to the test - and if you read my previous post you’ll see what a questionable idea that is - and besides, it’s a heckuva lot easier to teach rote memorization than it is to teach thinking processes.  A teacher is doing his/her job well, in this system, if s/he instructs students to open the textbook to p. 35, underline particular words, and memorize them because they will be on the test.  Mark homework and exams either correct or wrong (with no explanation) and leave it at that.

The good news is that the MOE (Ministry Of Education) knows that this approach results in half-educated kids who can’t do science or innovation, both things the ministry claims to value for future development of Singapore.  The bad news is that changing the testing regime is simply not on the table.

So why should teachers change?  That’s the question someone posed to a high MOE official.  Why should a teacher take the extra time and trouble to teach thought, rather than rote memorization, when it’s much harder to do, takes extra training, and results in no material benefit to the teacher?

Well, said the official, we’re hoping that some morally courageous teachers will rise up.

Pure idiocy, of course.  Even accounting for professional pride, teachers are no stupider than anyone else.  Confucian ideals aside (is that possible in a majority-Chinese society?), you have to give people a reason to take the harder road.

March 8th, 2010 | Category: Education, Uncategorized, public policy | Leave a comment

This last week the primary school students I observe got back their Continuous Assessments (the exams they took in the eighth week of school), and the teacher went over the answers with them.  In the interests of fairness, the exams are written by a teacher who does not teach the kids taking the exam; theoretically, the exams are vetted by the head of department and checked against the class content before the children are subjected to them.  But there are gaps in the process, to wit:

One exam question asked the kids to predict what would happen if an experimenter had 10 male fish, put them in a tank of water with an air pump running, put the tank in a dark room, and left it there for 3 weeks, without feeding the fish.  The answer is, of course, that most of the fish would be dead at the end of the period.  And the kids all know this!  But the multiple choice test asked them to choose a graph that showed the predicted progress of the fish population, for a class that had not yet learned about graphs.  So the only children who had a shot at the answer were the ones who had stumbled upon graphs on their own.  Not many.  A fair assessment of their science knowledge?  I don’t think so.

Or there’s the general system of marking exams, again by someone who has not taught these particular students, that tests kids’ English and spelling as well as their specific subject knowledge: Spell the answer incorrectly, get no credit for knowing it.  Mis-punctuate, no credit. Only children who are good spellers (i.e., visual learners with good memorization skills) will do well in this system.

Or only stupid children: I was looking through a sample examination book in a shop once, and found this question for P4 kids (fourth graders):  There were line drawings of an empty fish tank, a car tire, and a window, and the task was to choose which object was the odd one out.  The answer they wanted was the tire, since a tire is made of rubber and the other objects are theoretically made of glass.  So a kid who doesn’t think much would get that.  But what if the child knows that many fish tanks are made of acrylic?  And that some rubbers are synthetic?  Then the whole scheme of classifying by materials goes out the window.  Or what if the kid exhibits some higher-order thinking, and realizes that fish tanks and tires are both containers, but the window is not?

I am not against all tests, or even against standardized testing.  But if you’re going to devote so much school time and effort to testing, and make children’s careers dependent on the results, you must have a foolproof system of test generation.  I have yet to see one, anywhere.

March 7th, 2010 | Category: Education | Leave a comment

Dear Gentle Readers,

Just for fun I googled “sex blog Singapore,” since so many of my blog hits are from people who did just that.  And my blog turns up as the tenth search result - just popular enough to get onto the first page of search results, although just barely.  And despite the fact that the Google excerpt on that page of results says that there is little or no sex on the blog, people seem to go ahead and click on it.  This suggests to me several possibilities:

1) The people using “Singapore sex blog” as search terms are really not all that interested in reading about sex; or

2) The people using these search terms have a LOT of time on their hands and are filling it in by reading all the sex blogs; or

3) The people using these search terms are really just exploring the world through the Internet and should be praised for their wide-ranging curiosity.

Of course these possibilities are not mutually exclusive.  At any rate, my stated ambition last April was to be one of the top-ten Singapore sex blogs, and thanks to you, dear readers, I am!  Now I can die happy.

And as a reward for you, I will now proceed to blog about sex:

Specifically, my neighbor’s sex.  You may recall from a previoius entry that one of my neighbors was in the habit of using performance-enhancing drugs and leaving the windows open, so that we were treated to a fairly frequent audio program from the lady involved, who would yelp (in ecstasy, or some other state - boredom?) for hours on end.  Well, the neighbor apparently still lives here, but the symphonies have ceased.  So either he’s laid off the Viagra, or he has learned to shut the windows, or has switched his affections to a quieter partner of his transports.  At any rate, we are no longer treated to extended sessions of having to listen to a lady yelping like a diseased chihuahua.  And this is a good thing.

February 21st, 2010 | Category: Entertainment, Icky Stuff | Leave a comment

I have occasionally bemoaned the fact that I am the housekeeper in a large apartment that has both white tile floors and geckos.  Geckos are harmless, slightly squishy little reptiles that lay their eggs in unobtrusive corners and eat insects in the house.  (Hooray!  Despite our best efforts and the weekly thermal fogging, there are always some insects in the house, and they tend to either bite people or get into the human food.)  They have big, bulging eyes and padded toes that let them walk on walls and ceilings.  Sometimes you can catch them and send them outside, but this is a largely futile pursuit.  The cracks between doors or windows and the walls are big enough for the little guys to slip through.

So you soon learn to live with geckos, even though this means that you go around scrubbing their black excrement from the white tile floors, white walls, and yes, even the white ceilings - I am not sure how they manage to poop upwards and make it stick to the ceiling while they’re up there, but they do.  Truly Nature is wondrous.

So I’m not really surprised when I come into the kitchen early in the morning and hear a rustling sound in the trash can.  The geckoes are foraging in there, and when I turn on the lights they skedaddle.  Or when I go to put away the dishes from the drainer, and something with a tail skitters away from me as fast as it can, and climbs the wall to safety on top of the cupboards. I can’t say I regard this as a cheerful morning greeting (before coffee, nothing is a cheerful morning greeting), but these things don’t startle me.

But I do jump when a gecko leaps from the top of the cupboards onto my hair.  A soft little bounce over my left ear, and then the little guy falls squashily to the floor below, landing on his feet, and takes off for parts unknown.

And yesterday I was most surprised at the kitchen counter, when I was making toast.  Unwrap the bread, fine.  Take out two slices and put them in the toaster, well and good. Depress the toaster ignition button, and out flies a shocked and horrified gecko, leaping clear from the toaster cavity by a few inches, landing on the counter and lighting out for the territories.  He’d been peacefully napping or nibbling bread crumbs in the bottom of the toaster, probably hidden himself well out of reach when he saw the bread slices coming, and then was shocked - shocked! - by the wires around him heating up.

I’m just glad he didn’t leave his tail behind.  The toast tasted fine, BTW - no hint of roast reptile to upset even the most delicate gourmand.

February 15th, 2010 | Category: Food, Icky Stuff | Leave a comment

I think I mentioned that school canteens have multiple stations where you can buy a very inexpensive meal, made relatively recently from fresh ingredients, that suits your family’s dietary restrictions.  But did I mention that Singapore has no lunch period?

Kids have to cram in their lunch along with a mid-day recess, whenever the administration can fit that in.  The result is that the canteens never get as crowded, noisy and unruly as American cafeterias; kids themselves decide when and what they will eat, and when kids are done eating they just leave and go play. How cool is that?  They don’t have cafeteria monitors trying to make them eat all their veggies and not start food fights.  They have better things to do.

I’m not sure this happy result was planned.  It’s an effect of the overcrowding of Singapore schools, which the MOE is working on fixing.  Apparently they need twice as many schools as they have - the physical buildings, that is.  So each school is host to two sessions each day, each session having its own teachers, classes, periods, etc.  The older kids have early session, from 7:30 a.m. to 1:30, and younger kids, kindergarten through second grade, attend school from 1:00-6:00 or so. The MOE figured that little kids need to sleep in later, so might as well start school in the afternoon.

This means one thing for the schools: every classroom does double duty, and the music, art and computer rooms serve as holding pens during the mid-day hours, while the older kids get ready to go home and the younger kids get ready to start their school day.  So there’s no such thing as a 12:00 - 1:30 music, computer, or art lesson, a scheduling fact that ripples backwards through the older kids’ timetables.

And it means that for families with more than one child, somebody is ALWAYS wrangling kids - there’s no time off for the houseparent (or nanny, if they hire one).  My neighbor is a case in point.  Her older son is in P5, so he’s on the school bus by 6:40 a.m.  He returns at about 1:00 and the same bus picks up her younger son for P2.  The older one has time to do homework and play with his friends until the younger one gets back at 6:40 p.m.  The younger one has to be awakened, fed, guided through homework and extra-curricular stuff in the morning, before his school day starts.  My neighbor, who gave up a good job to be at home with her children, has no time to herself at all; once Boy A is launched on his school day she has to tend Boy B; when Boy B is at school she has to tend Boy A.  The husband/father is at work from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.  The whole family is home together from 7 p.m. until bedtime, and unless they hire a maid, my friend is housebound.

Actually, the friend only lasted for 8 months of this regime.  She has hired a maid, and now can go for walks or groceries without worrying that a child’s needs are going unmet while she’s out.

So, not exactly a schedule that creates relaxed family time for mothers (or whoever is the stay-at-home parent).  But certainly it’s an efficient use of school buildings.

February 11th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment