Summary/Update - Part 1 of 2
Philosophy of Language exam was with a History Honours exam a few weeks ago, and on that day I observed how carefree and merry those History buffs were. They made jokes in good english and there seemed to be an unspoken cohesiveness amongst them and even their professor chit chatted and laughed with them. Five minutes before entering the exam classroom, you would have thought they were a bunch of friends going into a bar or something.
I've always been envious of such a class. In the first place, it's good enough to meet people who pursue the same intellectual interests as yourself. Even better if you can get along well with them. And to display such a light-hearted attitude toward examinations is surely a refreshing change from the hunched-over-notes atmosphere we find common in Singapore.
One would have thought there would be something similar going on with the Philosophy of Language students. After all, class size was similarly small, the kind that is best for cultivating a warm and jovial atmosphere. And you'd thought people who are interested enough to take such a course would bond well. But it is not the case, for a multitude of reasons I shall not explore here. If past experience is anything to go by, I doubt I'd find myself a nice Philosophy class where I'd get to know some really nice individuals. To date the best class I've been is a non-Philosophy class, and it's likely I would enjoy the company of those classes more than I would Philosophy classes. Surely there's an irony there, because, again, you'd have thought people who share the same intellectual interests would click better. That's a thesis I think that would prove to be untrue with respect to myself. The comeback, of course, would be that people who take the same classes do not necessarily have the same intellectual interests...But let's leave it at that for now.
One more thing can be said about that History class: I think they were as relaxed as they were partly because they knew they're all competent people. They were probably well-prepared for the exam and they knew they would do well. And they also knew that their friends are competent people who would also do well. And some of them probably knew that they knew. When you know that the peers you're talking to are competent people like yourself, there's a feel-good feeling that emerges. It's something akin to fighting close combat against some rivals with a group whose members you know are well-versed in close combat because you've trained with them before.
I wasn't too happy after I took the Introduction to Psychology finals. Firstly, silly sideline things were tested. More important, they told us to study the 1st half of the course for the finals when it was covered in the mid-terms. Nothing wrong with that, but only 1 out of 5 short-answer questions was related to content covered in the 1st half of the semester, and it was a question you probably didn't need to revise to answer. The annoying thing is students expend significant amounts of time and energy to revise the 1st half of the course, because we were told it was examinable for the 5 short-answer questions. Being a conscientious student that was what I did, and so I couldn't help feeling cheated.
That's all for school matters. To be honest, that's not all. I've wanted to write a critique of grading systems in general and this sem's going-ons add more fuel to the fire. It should be emphasised that I'm critical of both desirable and undesirable outcomes, not just the undesirable ones, because there's always a tendency to think people who criticise systems usually do so only because they are disadvantaged by the system. I believe I've been given the advantage in the current system many times, and I believe those advantages, as much as the disadvantages, are unfair, unjustified, incoherent, and contradictory to the tenets of an institute of higher learning. But I shan't. It is ok. I realise the best action I can take short of dropping out of the system completely is to dissasociate myself from reality as far as possible. Our lives aren't accountable to the standards of outsiders. They are to ourselves.
I've always been envious of such a class. In the first place, it's good enough to meet people who pursue the same intellectual interests as yourself. Even better if you can get along well with them. And to display such a light-hearted attitude toward examinations is surely a refreshing change from the hunched-over-notes atmosphere we find common in Singapore.
One would have thought there would be something similar going on with the Philosophy of Language students. After all, class size was similarly small, the kind that is best for cultivating a warm and jovial atmosphere. And you'd thought people who are interested enough to take such a course would bond well. But it is not the case, for a multitude of reasons I shall not explore here. If past experience is anything to go by, I doubt I'd find myself a nice Philosophy class where I'd get to know some really nice individuals. To date the best class I've been is a non-Philosophy class, and it's likely I would enjoy the company of those classes more than I would Philosophy classes. Surely there's an irony there, because, again, you'd have thought people who share the same intellectual interests would click better. That's a thesis I think that would prove to be untrue with respect to myself. The comeback, of course, would be that people who take the same classes do not necessarily have the same intellectual interests...But let's leave it at that for now.
One more thing can be said about that History class: I think they were as relaxed as they were partly because they knew they're all competent people. They were probably well-prepared for the exam and they knew they would do well. And they also knew that their friends are competent people who would also do well. And some of them probably knew that they knew. When you know that the peers you're talking to are competent people like yourself, there's a feel-good feeling that emerges. It's something akin to fighting close combat against some rivals with a group whose members you know are well-versed in close combat because you've trained with them before.
I wasn't too happy after I took the Introduction to Psychology finals. Firstly, silly sideline things were tested. More important, they told us to study the 1st half of the course for the finals when it was covered in the mid-terms. Nothing wrong with that, but only 1 out of 5 short-answer questions was related to content covered in the 1st half of the semester, and it was a question you probably didn't need to revise to answer. The annoying thing is students expend significant amounts of time and energy to revise the 1st half of the course, because we were told it was examinable for the 5 short-answer questions. Being a conscientious student that was what I did, and so I couldn't help feeling cheated.
That's all for school matters. To be honest, that's not all. I've wanted to write a critique of grading systems in general and this sem's going-ons add more fuel to the fire. It should be emphasised that I'm critical of both desirable and undesirable outcomes, not just the undesirable ones, because there's always a tendency to think people who criticise systems usually do so only because they are disadvantaged by the system. I believe I've been given the advantage in the current system many times, and I believe those advantages, as much as the disadvantages, are unfair, unjustified, incoherent, and contradictory to the tenets of an institute of higher learning. But I shan't. It is ok. I realise the best action I can take short of dropping out of the system completely is to dissasociate myself from reality as far as possible. Our lives aren't accountable to the standards of outsiders. They are to ourselves.
2 Comments:
"helping others is helping self" could be the known fact behind the students of history class as they could have drawn the theory/lesson learnt from the history.
I share your sentiments, oh Sir Whale. After the pieces fell together during my final year, I have been vocal in my displeasure with the system (behind their backs of course). The industrial design course is a charade run by charlatans. Take away the prestigious NUS brand name, and it's not much better than a polytechnic diploma course, perhaps even worse. Frankly it's disgusting. We have this pretentious French professor who indoctrinates us with his pet 'theory', which reductively boils design down into three dimensions: syntactic, pragmatic and semantic. Not only was it stolen wholesale from Charles Morris's model of semiotics, he applies it to design without caring to make us understand it's original meaning first (in fact he makes no mention of Morris). I suspect that he himself has only the most shallow understanding of Morris's work, the nuances of which is totally lost in his application. (for him, syntactic refers to the structural components of a design, pragmatics the usability and ergonomics, and semantics the form inspiration and spirit. A total bastardization of the original theory) The academic sounding terms serve only as perfunctory, pretentious, intellectual-sounding decoration. He forces this mediocre model on his students, with disastrous results. For a university course, it is embarrassingly disdainful of theoretical concerns. I've had a professor (a foreign talent from Taiwan who can't string together a grammatically correct sentence to save his girlfriend's life) tell me about his rationale for eliminating the dissertation part from our thesis. According to him, unlike architects who waste their time on nonconstructive, indulgent theoretical musings, we are more focused on 'doing useful things' rather than 'thinking'. WTF! I think the real reason is that theory was never his strongest suit, and it would put him in an awkward bind to teach and grade something he is uncomfortable with and incompetent at. Our faculty is made up of these strange kinds of people from all over the place, with dubious backgrounds and credentials, including a florist as an adjunct professor(he was a personal friend of the course director) and an ex-board member of the science center, who teaches innovation and invention(also a friend of the course director). The course director himself is a semi-retired architecture professor who treats his job as a way to kill time.
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