yjblog

Observations from two weeks of edjamacator edjamacation (I mean, NIE):

• The Teaching of Math class is a fucking nightmare. Not only is it 6 units (out of 21 for the semester), but the tutor for my group teaches us like we’re secondary-school kids. She even called for volunteers to complete, on overhead transparencies in front of the class, worksheets on negative numbers. Negative fucking numbers! Gah! Furthermore, the tutor’s well-versed in dodging questions, the way one would when trying to avoid answering questions posed by schoolchildren — ask her anything, and she’ll happily repeat whatever she’d just said in the last five minutes in order to deflect the question. “Isn’t this another way of answering the question?” “The way of answering the question is… [repeats whatever she just taught]” Sorely underdeveloped sense of humour, laughs at her own jokes, complete fucking tool. Ahhh! Stop hurting my brain! Please!
• The Communications Skills class is nearly as bad, but we only meet once a week for two hours. The content is at least vaguely useful, but the tutor’s humourless and boring. And I’m sorry, but if you want to criticise Singaporeans for the widespread mispronunciation of “th” as “t” (“three” as “tree”, for example), the least you could do is not pronounce the letter “h” as “hedge”.
• The Educational Psychology textbook, rewritten for a Singaporean context by a NIE prof, blows major balls. Not only does it have no index and a sorely under-represented glossary, but it slips in and out of its original American and revised Singaporean contexts carelessly, haphazardly skipping case studies for Singaporean schools where inconvenient. A pain to read for something so potentially interesting (though, really, I’ve forgotten how to read textbooks without equations). This is a criticism of the textbook, not the class — the latter is remarkably bearable.
• The remaining classes (Teaching of Physics, Use of IT in Education) are, for the moment at least, not overly offensive. That could be because the respective tutors happily went and cancelled classes at random, or did not schedule make-up classes for the National Day holiday.

From a class today:

Prof: Can anyone name a Ministry of Education initiative from the last few years?
Trainee Teacher: “Thinking Schools, Learning Nation”?
Prof: Yes, that’s right. One of the MOE initiatives was thinking.

Ah, an initiative for thinking. What would we have done without MOE?

Oh man! Cats! And Windows!

• The Kittays can Jump!: Great photography of jumping cats. I don’t know why this amuses me so.
• Stuff On My Cat: “Do you like to put stuff on your cat?” Hilarious. stuff + cats = awesome
• An early look at Windows Vista (CNN.com): A quick preview of Vista by the Associated Press. “Mac users are likely to fume once they see Vista’s graphics.” Ummm. Not in the way the article means, I think.
• Paul Thurrott’s review of Windows Vista Beta 1: Not as Microsoft-apologisty as Thurrott usually is. In fact, quite a balanced review — Vista actually sounds quite good, if only for the fact that Windows will become more like OS X. The search technology sounds promising, and the creation of the least-privileged-user should be a godsend against malware installation. Good stuff, apart from the horrific UI colour choices. Green, grey and black? Eugh.

• Step 1: Move into on-campus housing to avoid the evil temptation of nearly 3 kilograms (01 x 400g, 08 x 300g) of Cadbury chocolate bars (flown in from England — the good shit, like how pot dealers might tell you) sitting in the fridge at home.
• Step 2: Utilise free time to go running in the evening around the nice quiet campus.
• Step 3: After two days of step 2, go for humongous sushi buffet and get rather sick.

Me = dumbass

Ooh, a random and unexpected new Apple product. And someone was just telling me today that he hated Macs because of their silly one-button mice.



Some choice quotes from their blurb:

Capacitive sensors under Mighty Mouse’s seamless top shell detect where your  fingers are and predict your clicking intentions, so you don’t need two buttons  — just two fingers. Click on the left side to use Mighty Mouse in its simplest,  single-button form. Click on the right to access contextual menus within  applications and edit, copy, label or download from your mouse. It’s simple  sleight of hand.

This seems to be stating the obvious… are they telling me that if I click the left side of the mouse, it’d predict that I want a left click? Erm… Whu?! Maybe it’s all about the lack of tactile feedback on a non-moving shell (kinda like the third-generation iPods). Must go take a look at one.

Mighty Mouse even sounds as good as it feels. The audio feedback  built into Mighty Mouse provides an aural sensation that responds to your  movements. A tiny speaker inside Mighty Mouse produces button-clicking and  Scroll Ball-rolling sound effects.

Okay, Apple, you win. A speaker in the mouse for sound effects is clearly ridiculous. Ridiculously cool, yes, but ridiculous.

I’ve moved on-campus. The room’s big and spartan and I feel like we could fit a car between the two beds, if necessary. Today was the first day of classes, mostly introductory fare and largely bearable despite the overly long two-hour lectures.

School (er, “work”, loosely defined) doesn’t feel like anything big and new and terrifying yet — maybe it’ll all sink in when a few of my best friends start leaving in the coming weeks. Aiy, life moves on way too quickly.