Why are religious nutjobs so scared of the real world?
I want to see the empirical evidence proving intelligent design / creationism as a legitimate scientific theory. Otherwise it should only be taught as part of a religious knowledge class.
Connecting with the past
I’m finding (well, they’re mainly finding me) so many old classmates on Facebook — I’m especially tickled that one of my old friends, Angela, still loves Gleaming the Cube. Back in the day, we were the tomboys of the bunch, skateboarding like fiends. There’s also Rachel and Jianyan (Karen, Pene, the other Angela, and Jean I’ve been in touch with, so they don’t really get a mention — haha).
Wow. Join the Singapore network and the SNGS group (class of 1992), y’all. So far Angela and I have been saying good morning to all the things (yes,things) Mrs Hwang made us say good morning to every Monday and Wednesday.
Signs I’m getting old
Ah, school uniforms. An academic in Edinburgh thinks school uniforms remind people of the Nazi youth. I remember the days when I (indeed, all students in Singapore) wore a school uniform and hated it. We were so taken by images of American students who could wear whatever they wanted. Mind you, I was in a rather strict school, where jewellery, even the simplest kinds, were not allowed, and if you had long hair, you could only use black or dark blue hair elastics. If you wore your hair short, there couldn’t be any evidence of having used a clipper (how they could tell I’ll never know, I got away with an undercut with designs razored into my scalp for a year — what a rebel).
And now that I’ve reached the wizened old age of 30 (almost 31!), I’ve got boring and am very much in favour of uniforms (although I’d definitely allow simple jewellery, but no precious stones) in school. I was very lucky that there weren’t glaring class issues in my school (it was considered an ‘elite’ school, but I don’t think I really bothered too much about who had or didn’t have, it was all about grades, grades, grades), but I can imagine the pressure kids are under to wear and/or own the ‘right’ things.
Uniforms level the playing field, so to speak. That’s not exactly rocket science. Parents don’t get hassled by their kids to buy them the trendiest clothes more often than they already do. Cliques in school aren’t exacerbated by how well or expensively you dress. There’s already enough peer pressure, and since kids are in school to get a decent education, the focus of pressure should be on educational achievement (by that I mean in extra-curricular activities as well) and not on what brand of clothing you wear.
A word of thanks
If my Chinese tutor from 1983 - 1994 (林老师) is somewhere out there, I would really love to get in touch, if just to tell her about how I’ve spent the last three years in China. Because she’ll probably laugh so hard at the improbability of that fact that she’ll fall over.
My cousins, sister, and I were such difficult students, I’m sure she remembers us — especially since neither of us showed any improvement in our Mandarin despite all that tuition (a lot about excelling in the learning of the language is attitude and a willingness to commit thousands of word combinations to memory, IMHO).
She’ll remember that one of the things we’d do was hide and lock the door in the ensuite bathroom halfway through our school holiday lessons (and eat Froot Loops — yes, while in the bathroom, although that could’ve been just me). She’ll remember that we lived in Bukit Timah, then Newton. She’ll remember my cousin moved to Edinburgh, but still had to pass Chinese for his ‘O’ level exams.
If you’re out there, all those lessons (finally) paid off. I am actually bilingual now, more than a decade after (just) scraping through my exams. You evidently did something very right, because a lot of it came back when I had no choice but to speak Mandarin. I can even switch between spoken English and Mandarin without missing a beat. I am much more aware of Chinese words and phrases and can’t help myself from practising translation when I read signs.
Heehee!
(This also goes out to my secondary school Chinese teacher, 吴老师.)
Little plaid skirts
There’s a great editorial in the Glasgow Herald today, blasting people who feel morally offended by schoolgirls who wear short skirts:
It seems, rather tragically, that we are so scared of young people that we have to take away their freedoms, rather than educate them better into how to use them. The history of fashion is the story of female emancipation: women have spent centuries liberating themselves from the prison of tight bodices, long skirts, bound feet, constricted limbs.
There is, in this respect, something wonderful about the insouciance of modern teenage clothing. Baggy, tight, explicit, baby-doll, extreme: they do it. Because they can.
If you think schoolgirls who wear short skirts are dirty, it’s probably because you’re dirty. Don’t project the blame on to girls because of your guilty fantasies - that’s the gist of the piece.
I went to a convent school - we wore white blouses under our blue pinafores. They weren’t exactly sexy outfits, but we tried our best by puffing up the pinafores above the belts so the skirts would end well above our knees. These days, it’s trendy to wear the belt so loosely that the girls look like newly-pregnant teenagers trying out maternity dresses. I know for a fact that the teachers and principal despair - why do the girls, year after year, wear the uniform the unsanctioned way?
Because we can. Because it makes (made, in my case) us feel individual, different, trendy, rebellious.
Teenagers will always try to rebel, to see how far they can push the rules. They’re in between being adults and children. They’re learning about themselves. The more you try to set rules to regulate behaviour, the more they will break them. Better to teach teenagers self-confidence and promote a sense of self-worth than try to impose rules that mean nothing.
I doubt that if those wanting school uniform regulations to be more strictly enforced were to go quiet, all hell would break loose. If an adult is keen on teenagers / is a paedophile, nothing except their own efforts will stop them from indulging.
Between five and seven children are abducted and murdered a year, a figure unchanged for 30 years. A moral panic over short skirts is as effective as banning men from admiring girls’ legs.
(I’m as bad. I own skirts that play on schoolgirl fetishes because I think they’re great.)