"Happy Hours" - Important Information

Dear Guys,

Due to the intensive training for SYF and other national competitions, I understand that many of you are not able to make it for the sessions on tuesday and thursday.

Hence, I have decided to start this program only after the SYFs where you guys will be back on the regular CCA training schedule. Please kindly inform your parents about this.

*** Those on the Structured Maths/Science Remedial Programme for Sec 2s, you are still required to attend those sessions as stated on the letter to your parents. Hence, lessons as usual.

Regards,

Mrs Melissa Lim

Change in Time Table in T2W4

Dear Guys,

Please read the announcement attached, regarding change in time table for the days, 13th & 17th April, affecting lessons on Monday & Friday of that week.

Subjects affected are MT & Maths.

Please note changes & spread the word. A notice will be put up on the noticeboards by the Welfare com.

Have a good week.

Mrs Melissa Lim

2G E-News Issue 1

Dear Guys,

Please see the 1st Issue of our E-News that was also emailed out to your parents. A copy has been put up on our noticeboards in class for your information.

Have a good weekend,
Mrs Melissa Lim

NYAA - Important Update!!!

Dear Guys,

ALL of you have to enrol in NYAA, as it is a school programme. (Please spread the message to all who do not read the blog.) I have since clarified this with Mr Lee BK. You will need to submit your form and your payment, latest by friday 27th March. We need to settle the registration quickly so that the Record Books and Diary will be issued early to you. If you have misplaced your form, please see me for a new copy on thursday when you return to school or print directly from this post.

Please make your $7 payment through a cheque. Please assist to ensure that your name and class is written behind the cheque for identification purposes.

The following names are those who have not submitted, if you have submitted to me but your name appears on this list, please see me on thursday.

JONATHAN ANG*
CHONG MING EN*
ELLIOT SIMON CHAN WEI LIANG*
HANSEL KONSTANTIN TANTOHARI
HO REN YI JONAS
JACOB WEE JUN HAO
KOO CHONG HAO DARYL
LEE HONG MENG JOEL *
LEE JUN HUI LUCAS *
LIU SHUAI CHEN
LUM WEI MING *
MAK KAI FENG DARREN*
NICHOLAS LIM JUN KAI
NICHOLAS TAY BANG YI *
NIKHIL SENAN
PHUA PEH HAN SPENCER *
TAN KIAN MENG *
TAN YAN HAN KENNETH*
TEO EN QUAN *
* Submited on friday 27th March 2009.

Thank you.
Have a good E-Learning day.
Mrs Melissa Lim

Class Photo Taking 2009

Dear Guys,

Please take note that our class photo-taking to be held when school reopens.
Details of the photo-taking are as follows:

Date / Day: 23rd March 2009 / Monday
Time: 9.30am (To report 5min before the designated time)
Venue: School Field
Attire: Full Uniform and School Tie

Enjoy the rest of your break...
Dun forget to test out your password for the E-Learning. Contact Mr Ithnin at ext 261 if you have problems accessing your account. Thank you.

Cheers,
Mrs Melissa Lim

Read This,

Dear Guys,

Read this very inspiring speech by Adrian Tan, a litigator from Drew & Napier and author of the teenage textbook. Hopefully you'll gain some insight on it. ;) Happy Holidays!

P/s: And NO... not all teachers think that learning only is completed with certifications or think successful people are those who are highly qualified. Personally, I think its the heart, mind and soul that can make or break a person, regardless of his qualifications.

Cheers,
Mrs Melissa Lim


"Life and How to Survive It"

I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It’s a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband.

My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me.

On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being disagreeable.

Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife.

And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument.

Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you.

The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You’re done learning.

You’ve probably been told the big lie that “Learning is a lifelong process” and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers.

The good news is that they’re wrong.

The bad news is that you don’t need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You’re in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy.

I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I’m here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.

You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless. There’s very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap.

Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom.

So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper.

Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy.

I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.

After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average.

Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.

That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.

If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don’t need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average.

What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.

Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.

What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over.

Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free.

The most important is this: do not work.

Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable.

Work kills. The Japanese have a term “Karoshi”, which means death from overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust.

There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.

People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan "Arbeit macht frei" was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense.

Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.

Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.

I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I didn’t do that, I would’ve been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction – probably a sports journalist.

So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I’ll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.

Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working.

Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.

In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror.

I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be hated.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.

One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.

The other side of the coin is this: fall in love.

I didn’t say “be loved”. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.

Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable.

Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.

Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.

You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart.

You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you.

Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.

Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.

You’re going to have a busy life. Thank goodness there’s no life expectancy.

Class Outing I: 'PUSH' Movie Mania

Dear Guys,

I have attached the website for the synopsis of PUSH.

http://www.filmgarde.com.sg/Push.aspx

You might also want to catch a snippet of the trailer.... which I found rather intriguing.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/push/medium.html

For those who still wish to join us in the movie mania, you may print out the attached consent form for your parent's acknowledgement.

Have a good holiday!

Mrs Melissa Lim

FAQs for E-Learning

Dear Parents and Pupils of 2G,

Attached are the FAQs for E-Learning for your reference. There are additional information on the VS Portal.

Please ensure that you are equiped with your password for the VS Portal. You need to have it tested out by friday, 13th March. Most of you should have it since you are all doing your OPW.

If you do not, kindly dial ext. 261 outside the staff room to see Mr Ithnin for assistance by tomorrow.

Thank you.

Mrs Melissa Lim

Email to Parents: 11th March 2009

Dear Parents of 2G,

Please be reminded that E-learning for the Secondary 2 Level will take place on the 24th and 25th of March after the Term 1 break.

The attached documents are information that you will find useful for this E-learning week.
You may also view the VS portal for additional information on this matter.

Thank you and have a gd holiday.
Mrs Melissa Lim

E-Learning

Dear Guys,

Please take note of the letter to parents written by Mr Low and the E-Learning schedule for 24th & 25th March 2009. You are advised to follow it closely so as to ensure that all work will be completed as instructed.

Pls spread the word to all in class esp, for those who seldom visit the blog.

Thank you.

Mrs Melissa Lim

*** Important: NYAA

Dear Guys,

You have been given the NYAA Enrolment Form.

Please submit the forms and make your payment tomorrow.

We need to settle the registration quickly so that the Record Books and Diary will be issued early to you.

Please make your payment through a cheque to NYAA @ S$7. Please assist to ensure that your name and class is written behind the cheque for identification purposes.

Late submissions beyond Wednesday will not be entertained. Thank you.

Have a good week.
Mrs Melissa Lim

Sports Day 2009

Dear Guys,

Hope you enjoyed the slack-bonding with your classmates at Sports day. Here are some faces of you...

Have a gd weekend.
Mrs Melissa Lim

Aravind & Jeremy (In the News... )

Dear Guys,

Thanks to Elliot's father, I've managed to obtain the article that was super overdued. But for those who did not manage to catch it in the news during the year end holidays.... here's the article, post-christmas for your reading pleasure. ;)

HO HO HO!!!
Mrs Melissa Lim

Online Project Work (OPW)

Dear Guys,

Please kindly note that you should be embarking on the 5th and 6th stages of the OPW, whether or not I have approved your submissions. I am likely to check the submissions on a twice weekly basis and hence, will need you to keep working at it even before I approve each stage.

Once, I have approved, you are to submit asap the following stage, and once again await approval. I am glad to see that most of you are on task and are finally able to upload your various stages.

Do continue to work hard at it. I have linked the OPW website to our blog for your convenience. ;)

Cheers,
Mrs Melissa Lim

Email to Parents: Parenting Talk

Email to parents on 4th March, 11:15am.

I have heard very positive feedback from parents who have attended. If you are one of them, May I request that you provide some comments to this post to encourage the rest to attend as well. I am attending it personally.... so that I can better understand the boys as a surrogate mum, and to my son, of course. ;)

Cheers,
Mrs Melissa Lim


Dear Parents,

In case you missed this earlier - PSG is organising a School Family Education Talk on 'MAXIMISING PARENT-TEEN RELATIONSHIP' by Jessica Leong on 3 April Friday.

Programme:
6.00 pm Registration/Refreshment
6.35 pm to be seated
6.50 pm Welcome address followed by Talk
9.30 pm End of Talk

Fee:
$16 per VS parent (includes light refreshment)
$25 per Non-VS parent (includes light refreshment)

We strongly recommend for you and spouse to attend this talk as a couple as the Profiling test included in this talk will help each individual better understand ourselves before helping our children.

This is a talk not to be missed and is brought back by popular demand for the 2nd time.

HURRY !
Please visit http://www.vs.moe.edu.sg/psg to register online & secure your seats now !

For enquiries, please contact Gek Eng @ 9126 4046 or Wai Choo @ 9741 1181 or 62912965 ext 250 on Tuesdays and Fridays 8.00 am to 12 pm during school term.