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spiderpigEDIT: Silla! I am requesting your kind assistance! :D Specifically!
<3
Here's the essay I'm planning to send in.
Note before you read this: Please do not copy any part of this without my permission. You can use it for reference, such as the examples given, but please do not copy word-for-word.
Name: Tan Min Qi, Alicia
Sex: Female
Date of Birth: 30/11/1988
School: CHIJ St Nicholas Girls’ School
Date of Submission: 10th Jan 2005
Title: “Education in Singapore stifles students’ creativity and inhibits their critical thinking” Do you agree?
Number of Words: 999
Address: *OMIT*
Contact Number: *OMIT*
Email address: *OMIT*
Education.
There is always the horror story about Singaporean graduates who succeed in a string of top schools, attained a degree summa cum laude, yet when they achieve that dream nine to five job, they cannot handle real-life and real-time problems. They stumble and falter.
Then the question arises: what has our world class education done to enable us to think critically in these situations?
In this day and age, education is stressed so heavily because it is the only thing that can almost guarantee us a "car, credit cash, cash, condominium and a country-club membership" or rather the 5Cs, a phrase aptly coined by us. Caught in the eternal hamster wheel, this controversial education system of ours, though having unparallel high standards, does produce inflexible and stiff young minds. Hence, from my first-hand account as a student, I have to agree wholeheartedly with the statement.
There is no question about it, the rigid examination system that every child has to go through at the tender age of twelve. While children elsewhere in the world are deciding which Xbox game they should play next, Singaporean students pore over the endless piles of “ten-year-series” or “five-year-series” in hopes of ‘spotting’ a few questions. Why would they not want to? It has been tried and tested by the countless of generations taking the Primary School Leaving Examinations (PSLE) and GCSE ‘O’ Levels that more often that not, questions repeat themselves. I’m sure many of us remember the infamous “Which pair of feet belongs to this type of bird?” query. No doubt this method drains our ingenuity out of our brains and prohibits us from thinking promptly as we can learn by rote.
Hence the great hullabaloo after 2004’s PSLE Science paper, where students were required to think out of the box. “But this was not in the syllabus!” screeched indignant parents, lamenting over the loss of precious marks, children crying at the end of the exam. The Ministry of Education’s (MOE) reply? It was a thinking question and that the fundamentals were covered in class, the students just had to exercise their creativity and critical thinking.
Another example would be an article featured in the Straits Times earlier last year when a mother was somewhat puzzled over the uncompromising answers in a science worksheet. The question had asked, “Which animal does not belong in this group?”, and the answers to choose from were, “Dog”, “Kangaroo” and “Frog”. The woman’s child had put down the answer as “frog”, with the reasoning that it was not a mammal. Pause for a while and ponder on his answer. Is it not plausible or logical? However, the teacher had marked it incorrect as her answer was the “dog” as dogs do not hop. In this blatant case of rigidity, it is no wonder that our student’s creativity is stifled.
All this just strengthens the fact that yes, our education system is largely based on results and memory work, which does not promote our students to delve into other possible means of doing things, other responses; and to develop their own individuality. Ultimately, it is “a waste of human brain cells”. After all the hard work we have put in to remember all the confoundedly difficult concepts and formulas (most of which we will not use unless we “become rocket scientists”) for just that one exam, we forget it all in a few months although probably having just scored nine or ten distinctions.
As for critical thinking, despite the MOE’s attempts at promoting it and trying to get students to “think-out-of-the-box” by introducing programmes like the Interdisciplinary Project Work (IPW) and Pupil Welfare Improvement Teams (WITs), results in the classroom have more often than not proved results far from the idealistic principle. Of course one cannot deny the seemingly large number of groups that do come up with wonderful and unique ideas.
“Brain-storming” and “critical thinking” sessions in class usually quickly turns into massive gossip conferences; the stabs at trying to lessen the amount of ‘spoon-feeding’ from the teachers results in some teachers trying their best to give information to the students in order to ease the students’ workload.
In the end, it all defeats the original purpose and students, drowning in the overload of schoolwork and co-curricular activities, cannot be bother to think critically or creatively for that matter.
It is because of this inflexible education system of ours, that students brimming with creative talents, for example in the fine arts, and excellent competence in certain areas, lose out as they are not able to expand their potential.
Nonetheless, one cannot ignore the fact that the MOE is trying to rectify all the loopholes in our world-class education. For example, various programmes such as the Art Elective and Music elective programs promote creativity in those aspects. Pupils who have aptitude in the languages and humanities can take up the Language Elective programs and Humanities scholarship offered by the Ministry. Students in the Gifted Education Programme (GEP) are introduced new and interesting ways of tackling problems through exercises accentuating critical thinking. Curriculum time is now being diverted to stress the importance of critical thinking by infusing more real-time problems into the syllabus.
The objective of the Singapore education endeavours to prepare our students to meet future challenges effectively (hence critical thinking) and to grow up to be useful and responsible citizens. Thus it saddens me to see that many of us, caught in the proverbial rat-race of memorising word-for-word, page-for-page of curriculum, almost never having the chance of employing their creative potential and ability to think quickly and efficiently.
Perhaps I am biased against our education system as I am a victim of it, never being able to conform it’s heavy usage of memory work and strict set of rules and answers. Therefore, with the recent onslaught of education reforms to give a ‘new lease of life’ to our students, it makes me wonder when one of these new policies will actually solve this looming problem.
I'd just like everyone's comments on whether you can understand and if there is a coherent arguement going on. I haven't been writing essays (much less argumentatives) since the beginning of November and I'm quite out of touch with the style.Ignore the fact that I usually don't pay attention to topic sentences, thesis statements and yet used to score 22/30 and above for my essays.
So basically, here are my questions:
1) Am I addressing the statement correctly?
2) Do you think my evidence is convincing?
3) Do you actually know what I'm talking about?
4) Am I coherent? Or is it just disorganized and jumping from here to there?
<3
Here's the essay I'm planning to send in.
Note before you read this: Please do not copy any part of this without my permission. You can use it for reference, such as the examples given, but please do not copy word-for-word.
Name: Tan Min Qi, Alicia
Sex: Female
Date of Birth: 30/11/1988
School: CHIJ St Nicholas Girls’ School
Date of Submission: 10th Jan 2005
Title: “Education in Singapore stifles students’ creativity and inhibits their critical thinking” Do you agree?
Number of Words: 999
Address: *OMIT*
Contact Number: *OMIT*
Email address: *OMIT*
Education.
There is always the horror story about Singaporean graduates who succeed in a string of top schools, attained a degree summa cum laude, yet when they achieve that dream nine to five job, they cannot handle real-life and real-time problems. They stumble and falter.
Then the question arises: what has our world class education done to enable us to think critically in these situations?
In this day and age, education is stressed so heavily because it is the only thing that can almost guarantee us a "car, credit cash, cash, condominium and a country-club membership" or rather the 5Cs, a phrase aptly coined by us. Caught in the eternal hamster wheel, this controversial education system of ours, though having unparallel high standards, does produce inflexible and stiff young minds. Hence, from my first-hand account as a student, I have to agree wholeheartedly with the statement.
There is no question about it, the rigid examination system that every child has to go through at the tender age of twelve. While children elsewhere in the world are deciding which Xbox game they should play next, Singaporean students pore over the endless piles of “ten-year-series” or “five-year-series” in hopes of ‘spotting’ a few questions. Why would they not want to? It has been tried and tested by the countless of generations taking the Primary School Leaving Examinations (PSLE) and GCSE ‘O’ Levels that more often that not, questions repeat themselves. I’m sure many of us remember the infamous “Which pair of feet belongs to this type of bird?” query. No doubt this method drains our ingenuity out of our brains and prohibits us from thinking promptly as we can learn by rote.
Hence the great hullabaloo after 2004’s PSLE Science paper, where students were required to think out of the box. “But this was not in the syllabus!” screeched indignant parents, lamenting over the loss of precious marks, children crying at the end of the exam. The Ministry of Education’s (MOE) reply? It was a thinking question and that the fundamentals were covered in class, the students just had to exercise their creativity and critical thinking.
Another example would be an article featured in the Straits Times earlier last year when a mother was somewhat puzzled over the uncompromising answers in a science worksheet. The question had asked, “Which animal does not belong in this group?”, and the answers to choose from were, “Dog”, “Kangaroo” and “Frog”. The woman’s child had put down the answer as “frog”, with the reasoning that it was not a mammal. Pause for a while and ponder on his answer. Is it not plausible or logical? However, the teacher had marked it incorrect as her answer was the “dog” as dogs do not hop. In this blatant case of rigidity, it is no wonder that our student’s creativity is stifled.
All this just strengthens the fact that yes, our education system is largely based on results and memory work, which does not promote our students to delve into other possible means of doing things, other responses; and to develop their own individuality. Ultimately, it is “a waste of human brain cells”. After all the hard work we have put in to remember all the confoundedly difficult concepts and formulas (most of which we will not use unless we “become rocket scientists”) for just that one exam, we forget it all in a few months although probably having just scored nine or ten distinctions.
As for critical thinking, despite the MOE’s attempts at promoting it and trying to get students to “think-out-of-the-box” by introducing programmes like the Interdisciplinary Project Work (IPW) and Pupil Welfare Improvement Teams (WITs), results in the classroom have more often than not proved results far from the idealistic principle. Of course one cannot deny the seemingly large number of groups that do come up with wonderful and unique ideas.
“Brain-storming” and “critical thinking” sessions in class usually quickly turns into massive gossip conferences; the stabs at trying to lessen the amount of ‘spoon-feeding’ from the teachers results in some teachers trying their best to give information to the students in order to ease the students’ workload.
In the end, it all defeats the original purpose and students, drowning in the overload of schoolwork and co-curricular activities, cannot be bother to think critically or creatively for that matter.
It is because of this inflexible education system of ours, that students brimming with creative talents, for example in the fine arts, and excellent competence in certain areas, lose out as they are not able to expand their potential.
Nonetheless, one cannot ignore the fact that the MOE is trying to rectify all the loopholes in our world-class education. For example, various programmes such as the Art Elective and Music elective programs promote creativity in those aspects. Pupils who have aptitude in the languages and humanities can take up the Language Elective programs and Humanities scholarship offered by the Ministry. Students in the Gifted Education Programme (GEP) are introduced new and interesting ways of tackling problems through exercises accentuating critical thinking. Curriculum time is now being diverted to stress the importance of critical thinking by infusing more real-time problems into the syllabus.
The objective of the Singapore education endeavours to prepare our students to meet future challenges effectively (hence critical thinking) and to grow up to be useful and responsible citizens. Thus it saddens me to see that many of us, caught in the proverbial rat-race of memorising word-for-word, page-for-page of curriculum, almost never having the chance of employing their creative potential and ability to think quickly and efficiently.
Perhaps I am biased against our education system as I am a victim of it, never being able to conform it’s heavy usage of memory work and strict set of rules and answers. Therefore, with the recent onslaught of education reforms to give a ‘new lease of life’ to our students, it makes me wonder when one of these new policies will actually solve this looming problem.
I'd just like everyone's comments on whether you can understand and if there is a coherent arguement going on. I haven't been writing essays (much less argumentatives) since the beginning of November and I'm quite out of touch with the style.
So basically, here are my questions:
1) Am I addressing the statement correctly?
2) Do you think my evidence is convincing?
3) Do you actually know what I'm talking about?
4) Am I coherent? Or is it just disorganized and jumping from here to there?
