yjsoon

Looks like the Ministry of Education’s finally made it official — no more Gifted Education Programme at the secondary level:

Gifted kids to take ‘integrated’ path (Channelnewsasia.com) NOW MOE finally slaughters SACRED COW (The Electric New Paper)

Nothing surprising, apart from the TNP article being bizarrely smug about their “prediction in 2004”. Because YELLING CAPITAL LETTERS in your headline makes you SOUND MORE CREDIBLE.

What’s surprising is that where I teach, the school’s shutting down its internal GE programme as well. A pity — the small class sizes were nice and manageable, and it felt easier to connect with them than the one or two non-GE classes I’ve taught (granted, I’ve only taught 9 GE classes vs. 1 mainstream here and 2 elsewhere). Maybe it’s my own prejudices at work, but I’m not certain it’ll be as easy to amuse the mainstream kids with my nonsense. We’ll see, I guess.

Came across this pretty randomly today — Disco, the mystery Mac application featured for pre-order on MacZOT a while ago (who’ve recently gotten annoyingly kinda caught up in selling “mystery software”) finally has its own website, linked above. It’s from the same people who made AppZapper, a fine piece of shareware, but not much else is known about it other than this screenshot they recently posted:

It’s probably got something to do with burning discs, and their subtitle “We’re having toast for breakfast” seems to imply some form of direct competition with Roxio’s Toast software as well. Just a disc burning tool seems too obvious, so I’m hoping it’s some form of solution for burning media files as consumer electronics-readable discs (e.g. DVDs from xvids).

Link to Disco application website.

Also, umm, more comics at some point, yes. Sorry.

It was no easy task dragging myself back to work after nearly two weeks away from the classroom. At the end of the day, I’ve just about lost my voice, my lesson plans are in disarray, I haven’t finished typing the notes I promised the kids two weeks ago, I owe my bosses all kinds of paperwork, the randomly inserted new timetable slots completely messed up my schedule…

But there were moments in class today when I managed to make the kids laugh madly at one of my usual absurd examples, drawings or voices. And seeing them — especially those who were, just barely a week ago, crying their hearts out — laugh like that, even just for a few seconds, even if they took nothing else away from the lesson, made me glad to be back, and made me glad to be teaching.

Thanks for the card you gave me this time last week. You’ll be dearly missed by your friends and teachers.