More GP Resources
By Kevin
Besides the already-famous GP Blog, I'd like to alert everyone to this other GP blog, by Adrienne. And if teachers' blogs are not enough, there are the one by passionate students, who have continued writing. ERPZ has slowed a bit with updating but we'll try our best to keep it updated!
Failure of Competition
By Kevin
Setting it up properly
Spending more than one and a half decade in a competitive education system like that of Singapore is pretty much enough to give me a good sense of what is wrong with it. It's a really good demonstration of how competition have been exploited way too far to attain an arbitrarily defined sort of excellence that has caused us to lose sight of the original intent of the competition itself. And perhaps this article discussing the state of NUS Lectures provides us with good insights on the effects of the 'Singapore Student Mentality'.
In a competitive set up of our education system, we want students to develop good character, work ethics, working knowledge of their field and an ability to motivate themselves to work hard. The design of our assessment and curriculum will have to match that in order to achieve the objectives of this competitive set up. Lectures and typical lessons should preferably not become 'exam-preps' as they probably are now. And while student feedback on course content and teaching style is good, it should be ignored when trying to drive lessons towards the direction of mind-numbing exam-preparation. At the end of the day, we want students who could go out there in life and perform.
A friend recently commented that bright Singaporean students sometimes face problems with getting in US schools because the top schools there are really not interested in an alumni who simply gets a good job, works hard and be recognized by his boss. These universities are interested in producing students who would be the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg (sorry I'm only thinking about more tech related companies for now). They are not interested in people who can top their cohort with their GPAs, they want people who top their cohort with ideas that the markets applaud, visions that talents would follow and products consumers demand, or influence the economic policies. This makes them bolder when it comes to admitting students who may not have the scores but the great stories about their exploits on trips to exotic places, initiation of eccentric projects, failed entrepreneurship attempts.
If our economy is to transit to greater heights, and human capital is the most important thing to a tiny economy like Singapore then modifying education, and not migration policy is going to be priority.
Rethinking Groupthink
By Kevin
You sure that works?
Finally, after years of bashing the notion of brainstorming, there is research indicating its usefulness. As a matter of fact, people do consistently come up with better ideas on their own when they think hard and deep rather than spending half the time listening to the ideas of others and the other half just waiting around for ideas to pop up. There is, what the researchers call 'evaluation apprehension' - so there's a natural tendency to hold back your ideas when ideating in a group as compared to when doing it on your own. Having led countless project teams and committees at meetings and sessions when we need to come up with ideas for a variety of different sort of stuff, I guess I have a pretty good idea how useful group-brainstorming is.
I was introduced to brainstorming when I was 11, where I attended a course on WITs (Work Improvement Teams) and subsequently represented the school in a WITs competition organized by one of the polytechnics in Singapore. Subsequently, I picked up individual ideation techniques from the Edward De Bono's Six Thinking Hats course when I was in Secondary school. I found it much easier to come up with lots of ideas when you don't feel like you're at risk of being judged.
And books I read about thinking, group work, and management agree with me on that and emphasized the need to create a space for thinking and ideation that suspends judgment completely. And it's not just about verbal judgment, it goes beyond that. Participants must truly believe that they are not being assessed, judged or perceived negatively in that group thinking environment. It works well in a setting with people who are already extremely familiar with each other but may be more difficult amongst strangers.
So why not designate group thinking sessions as meetings where people already came up with lots of individual ideas and then are asked to reconcile them. As mentioned in the research, this 'brainwriting' technique appears to work much better. It is surprising then, that it hasn't quite been used that extensively in work and project settings.
A hint then, for those of you working on PW and frustrated with your teammates who may be 'social loafing'.
Aspirations & the World
By Kevin
About the Cash...
Just went a friend at the LSE studying Law was talking about how the returns on a study of Law is not exactly worth it, The Economist describes how American Law School graduates are finding themselves jobless and under-compensated (compared to what they had expected). But should these students have studied Law because of the prospects of making big bucks?
At times you might find yourself drowning in reality, with people aggressively pursuing high-paying jobs, thinking fast-paced, intense life suits them. People are hungry for success but this success should be something you measure yourself with and not what others measure you with. Staying focused on one's goals are important and it becomes more and more of a challenge as you grow up and become faced with ever increasing alternatives in the world.
In school one usually follows the 'standard goal' of trying to do well and get good results and as you go higher in your education you realise that the co-curricular activities are important as well and then there's the community service; and then there's networking with peers, professionals, even politicians, potential employers, potential superiors and finally, when you're out in the world: trying to do the things you want to do (or you think you want to do). The point is that there are dozens of people out there who are trying to convince you that their idea of success matches yours and you should basically adopt their definition and go along what they defined to be great. You're very much on your own and through your life, you need to sharpen your ability to decide things independently and then bear the consequences of your decisions yourself. In other words, you need to grow up, in the truest sense of the word.
Education and social interactions have great powers in terms of encouraging conformity and you need to always blend-in while retaining yourself. I recently attended a talk and the speaker was quoting an assessment of kids' divergent thinking and 98% of the kids aged 3-5 are classified divergent thinkers but when they get to elementary school, and the assessment was done on the same kids, the figure dropped to 50%. By the time they're in high school, it's 32% and finally, a separate assessment of adults classified only 2% of them as divergent thinkers. Conformity is powerful and illusionarily (if there's such a word) comfortable.
The truths are, you don't have to be rich to be happy; the truth is success is a journey, it's about the trip you make and not the destination of it; the point is the action you took and not so much the outcome of it. The action is what tells people about you; the outcome serves only to tell half the story. So before you follow the flow, think where you wanna go.
True Learning
By Kevin
Make sure it's long term...
I'm finally in London and fulfilling my dream of studying in London School of Economics. I'm hoping to share this little insight about learning from my department's Undergraduate Tutor. She mentioned that the only true learning is by our long term memory and when you're older, with thousand things to remember (such as how much laundry is accumulating, when to get the groceries, what to cook for dinner and plenty of meeting with different friends), your short term memory would have much less space for learning and that's why you may need more time picking up new things.
The advantage is that whatever you pick up will stay with you for a long time to come. On the other hand, the youngsters typical learn things fast since they've got good short term memory (having more space since there's not much matters about life to remember and also less old information) but then they run the risk of quickly forgetting once they no longer practice. It takes a long time to transfer things over from the short term to the long term memory.
So the key to true learning is really to practice, practice, practice and recall stuff now and then.
GP Arguments: Change
By Kevin
Get Thinking, then Write!
This is one new feature I'm trying to introduce into the blog; which I reckon would intrude into the territory of the GP blogs but I find that these are rather rare materials online so I'm setting out to share them. I'll give essay outlines but basically just some ideas for arguments enough to seed an essay. My outlines do not form even a skeleton for the essay, think of it as an embryo with lots of potential for development. And the development part would be the readers' job.
Today our question is
"Change is the only constant in life." Is change necessarily good? Discuss.
This is a really vague question; more like a SAT writing section essay than a GP essay but the A Levels do plant such questions in their papers. It's just that you've 12 to choose from so you probably missed out this sort. Typically, weak students want to choose questions that are narrower and strong students should try their hands on broader topics that they are confident of managing and have a decent scope to work on. This question is one of those broad ones where you'll have to define the scope for yourself.
Pre-Writing Questions
Before you start writing, ask yourself a few questions. These are key questions that can be adapted to any essay questions you get:
1) What is your benchmark for good?
2) What are the various types of 'change' you're going to talk about?
3) How many points on each 'side' are you going to present?
4) How are you going to break out of the question?
The benchmarks can be based on certain values you adopt; it could have something to do with morality, or utilitarianism. So you can consider it good if it provides the largest benefits to the largest group of people. The 'changes' you want to talk about can be economic growth or development/decline; or it can be about changes one undergoes as one grow.
Breaking out of the question is an important part of GP essay that all students needs to appreciate. At the end of the essay the marker wants to see how you can make your essay relevant to the world at large or whether you are able to take on a perspective that is bigger than the question itself and identify the significant portion that needs to be considered. Here's a sample of the points I might use for the essay:
Central Argument: Change offers an opportunity/hope; status quo always provides room for improvements and without change, there can't be improvements.
"Change is Good"
1) Without change, the lives of the poor would forever stay so, with no hope or chances to move up the social ladder or improve their situation.
2) Changes makes actions and choices meaningful; without changes, life is predictable and routine.
3) Even when changes are unpleasant or bad, they train us to take on challenges and grow to be stronger. Growth is essentially change and vice versa.
"Change is Not Good"
1) Change destroys the important cultures or traditions that we value so much. Improvements may sometimes be at the expense of traditions.
2) Change introduces the strange and unfamiliar and throws us into a state of loss.
3) Changes means that all must keep up in order to stay relevant and there are people who would be left behind by changes.
Concluding Point: Change is an inevitable feature of life so it is irrelevant to consider a world without change. Whether change is necessarily good depends on our reaction to it and more often than not, we are armed to embrace changes and make good of it.
Notice how the concluding point zooms out of the entire frame that focused only whether change is good? It demonstrates the fluidity of ideas and that your writing must actively engage in the concepts you're dealing with rather than just merely stating points.
That's all for this question. I'll try to repeat this for other GP questions out there...
Shocializing
By Kevin
Trash the Bag
Shopping, contrary to what economist might think, is a social affair. Purchasing decisions are not exactly made independently but often with reference to the purchases of friends and people around you. And that's why The Economist thinks that a third generation kind of websites are going to turn e-commerce into a more 'real' shopping experience.
On other issues, video games appears to train people to make faster decisions. They're said to be better with collecting bits of information and data (visual and audio) around them to aid them with decision making. It's perhaps one more good excuse for you to start gaming. My advice though, is that you leave the gaming to those times when you're especially stressed but have absolutely nothing to do - such as waiting for an important result, decision, during the days between papers when you've already studied so hard and with nothing more to study. Spend those times when you're bored learning something and thinking up routines for yourself to complete.
Monkey Business
By Kevin
A Monkey Publication
If you get a monkey to sit in front of the computer/typewriter and type forever, it is definite that it will produce the works of Shakespeare somewhere in that whole writing.
How true is that? That is the Infinite Monkey Theorem. In any case, it illustrates how we cannot think of infinity as a very large finite number. It is not a number, we need to think of it as a 'flow', or like a horizon - it is a concept but not something that physically exists. If you think about the monkey analogy, it is not just the lifespan of the monkey that is in concern
Years ago, a team of lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth took the idea pretty seriously and tried to see how it works out in reality. They placed a computer in the zoo with six Celebes Crested Macaques and see what they'd produce. In a month, they produced quite a huge mess and a five page document, which was actually published and sold for 25 UK Pounds.
I find the experiment pretty interesting and the result is kind of hilarious. Of course, animal behaviour was the more important segment for this 'study' but when you look at the document from the monkeys, you must seriously reconsider the idea that monkeys are potential random number generators. They obviously approach the activity of typing with some sort of intent, albeit it transcends typing - it included 'interacting' (mostly involving urinating and defecating on it) with the computer and provoking it (like attacking it with a stone).
The Ricardian
By Kevin
Nope, he's a businessman
Students doing A Levels Economics should totally take a look at The Ricardian, a magazine written by students doing Economics at A Levels at the Tiffin School. It's an electronic journal on Yudu so just access it here.
The quality of writing is pretty high and it's good for students who are still unable to adapt to the tougher style of The Economist. The design of The Ricardian is obviously inspired by The Economist with short elegant titles on the front page and a simple column design for its contents page. The individual page headers and the location of the page numbers closely resembles that of The Economist.
It a wonder why Singapore JCs often have the 'GP Bulletins' from top JCs (though nowadays they no longer bother to publish them nicely in a booklet form and decide to mass photocopy poorly formatted Word Documents instead) but not some sort of 'Economics Bulletin' that offers Economics tidbits with model essays as well as analysis of questions, issues or topics. Perhaps, the A Levels economists thinks this would be better left to the free market. That's why Mind Lever Education came up with 'Insights' for JC students, an even more awesome JC Economics magazine centered on A Levels Economics. For those who are willing to barter money for good knowledge materials, this magazine is available at some of the Popular Bookstore Branches.
Inspiration Break
By Kevin
Get inspired with new ideas about things in the world by surfing the web beyond the bounds of sites you normally hang out at. Readers of ERPZ probably think I only hang out on Economist.com, Knowledge@Wharton, or basically stuff on our ERPZ reading list. While I subscribe The Economist Free Xchange (Here for RSS) on my Google Reader, I also check out the Threadless Blog very often to find out what sort of designers people are coming up for their Tee Shirts. It may sound kind of lame but these are places where we get ideas or just inspired. It's also a place for a break from the knowledge and structured stuff that we commonly deal with.
Look Ma, no Rulers!
Graphics and concepts links up bits of ideas that might be floating around us all the time. Designer Couch is a good place to look at how design ideas are put into place in products, ads, just about everything that surrounds us, physical or virtual. Not long ago, I chanced upon this 'Constrained Ball' idea by a Korean product designer. I haven't found anyone selling this so I reckon is still an idea but it looks great and should hopefully work in practice. The design featured here is also very elegant and think about how your 'ruler' is no longer going to too long for your pencil case. So yea, by then, 'How do you draw a straight line without a ruler?' won't be such a baffling question anymore.
Otherwise, animations can be awesome source of ideas as well. The following is something cool I discovered:
Sonar from Renaud Hallée on Vimeo.
After that, just give yourself some time to link up what you see with your life and observations in reality. Draw something, sketch your ideas, design something, invent something; then go back to studying.