Education and Social Mobility

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/education/poor-students-struggle-as-class-plays-a-greater-role-in-success.html

Idi Amin Dada Autobiography - Uganda Discovery

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Morning in America

 

 

 Interesting take on the day after the 2012 U.S Presidential Elections by Michael Moore

Morning in America

This country has truly changed, and I believe there will be no going back. Hate lost on Election Day. That is amazing in and of itself. Add to that all the women who were elected and you have a total rebuke of Neanderthal attitudes.
Now the real work begins. Millions of us — the majority — must come together to insist that President Obama and the Democrats stand up and fight for the things we sent them there to do. Mr. President, do not listen to the pundits who call for you to “compromise.” You already tried that. It didn’t work. You can compromise later if you need to, but please, no more beginning by compromising. If the Republican House doesn’t want to play ball, do a massive end run around them with one executive order after another — just like they have done and will do if given the chance again.

Kap / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Kap)

We have to have Obama’s back. As he is blocked and attacked by the Right, we need to be there with him. We are the majority. Let’s act like it.
And please Mr. President, make the banks and Wall Street pay. You’re the boss, not them. Lead the fight to get money out of politics — the spending on this election is shameful and dangerous. Don’t wait until 2014 to bring the troops home — bring them home now. Stop the drone strikes on civilians. End the senseless war on drugs. Act like a pit bull when it comes to climate change — ignore the nuts, and fix this now. Take the profit motive out of things that any civilized country would say, “this is for the common good.” Make higher educational affordable for everyone and don’t send 22-year-olds out into the world already in massive debt. Order a moratorium on home foreclosures and evictions. Enact economic policy that will create good-paying jobs and spend the money that’s needed to do that. Make your second term one for the history books.
Finally, thanks must be given to the Occupy movement who, a year ago, set the tone of this election year by getting everyone to talk about the 1 percent versus the 99 percent. It inspired Obama and his campaign to realize there was a huge popular sentiment against what the wealthy have done to the country, and there was something wrong if just 400 rich guys owned more than 160 million Americans combined (all those moochers and bums). This led to Romney’s “47 percent” remarks, which were the beginning of the end of his campaign. Thank you Mother Jones for releasing that secret tape, and thank you to the minimum wage worker who placed a camera on the serving buffet next to the candle.
The Washington Post’s headline following Election Day said it all: “At Romney headquarters, the defeat of the 1 percent.”
Thank you Sandra Fluke for enduring the insults hurled at you and then becoming an important grassroots leader against the war on women. Thank you Todd Akin for… well, for just being you. Thank you CEOs of Chrysler and GM for coming out forcefully against the Republican(!) candidate, saying he lived in “some parallel universe” when he lied about Jeep. Thank you Governor Christie for your new bromance with Obama. You know, you really didn’t have to!
And you, Mother Nature, with all your horrific damage, death and destruction you caused last week, you became, ironically, the undoing of a Party that didn’t believe in you or your climate changing powers.
Perhaps they’ll believe now.
Once again, thanks to all of you who brought a nonvoter to the polls. In a last minute effort to get Obama an extra million votes he wasn’t counting on, I enjoyed talking and texting with your loved ones and friends yesterday who weren’t going to vote — but then changed their minds after a little nudge and some TLC (“Damn! Michael Moore? I’m getting in to car right now to go vote.”).
To my fellow Americans, I think you’ll agree: it was nice to wake up following the election in the United States of America.

 http://www.cagle.com/2012/11/morning-in-america/
—–
©2012 Michael Moore
Michael Moore is the Oscar and Emmy-winning director of “Roger & Me,” “Bowling for Columbine,” and “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which also won the top prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival and went on to become the highest grossing documentary of all time.
Reach Moore at his Web site is MichaelMoore.com.

Veteran's Day

Shopping on the High Street

  Well, the title of the post might be a little bit misleading,but it just sprung to my mind as I sit at my desk typing after a day out. I went to one of the two IKEA stores in Singapore, and to an ordinary suburban shopping street. Going to IKEA was very nice; every time I step into one and smell the familiar smell of wood distinctive to the IKEA stores I've been to thus far , I feel that I am somewhere else in that hour or two. The desk lamp,the bathroom shades,the clock are all labelled " Made in Sweden" , and it all spells Swedish elegance and a sleek modern European connection. Not to mention, the Swedish meatballs, fried chicken wings ( and Turkey with lingonberry jam at Christmas time) that I always love to eat whenever I tread inside. It is a very special feel, and it just makes me think that I in a world that has got that little bit smaller with the ongoing process of globalisation.

  Then I went for my haircut and visit to a stationery shop to photocopy a few pages of a history text to study in camp tomorrow when I book in. It is not exactly a street, that is a misnormer in itself. Perhaps a cluster of suburban shops all located within walking distance? You see people wearing slippers, singlets and t-shirts on a stroll around the place. People live above the shops too as it houses some walk-up apartments. I had a choice between a chain of haircut saloons called " Snip Avenue" that charged $3.80 for a haircut and a neighbourhood haircut saloon that is run by a lady in her late forties or early fifties. She is probably Chinese-educated and cannot speak much English. I chose the second option. It cost more, but I like to think that if no one goes to such mom-and-pop salons ( or shops, for that matter) , it is only a matter of time before they close down. Not to mention, the haircut done by Snip Avenue looked worse than the mauling by a dog, as my mother once said when I came back with a horrid one. Well, if there is something approaching a Singaporean identity,it is to these places that one must go. So this is Singapore, caught between modernity and a slowly vanishing past. I hope it will be a few decades before such clusters of a Singapore I remember from my childhood disappears. I will be sad if they do.

Alice Cooper - I m Eighteen Studio Version

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The Road Not Taken

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Congratulations! On behalf of the National University of Singapore, I am pleased to offer you admission to the following undergraduate course of study in academic year 2014: Arts and Social Sciences. You have presented us with an impressive record of achievements. I am confident you will find the NUS experience enriching and rewarding, and one that will help you realise your full potential.

Congratulations! I am pleased to inform you that your application for reading History at NTU has been successful. I shall eagerly await welcoming you to NTU in academic year 2014-15.
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I am very pleased to receive these offers from the Universities. Truth be told, I never thought I could make it this far when I was young and chided as having a wasted future when I did not do well for the PSLE. At least it is something that I can feel proud of.

This afternoon, I received a reply from the NTU Scholarship Panel regarding the interview I went for 9 days earlier on the 10th April. It read:
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Dear Tng Kwang
Application No.: A00103352
COLLEGE SCHOLARSHIP
Congratulations! We are pleased to inform you that you have been awarded the COLLEGE SCHOLARSHIP to pursue your undergraduate programme in History at the Nanyang Technological University commencing from Academic Year 2014-15.
The Terms and Conditions of the scholarship are stated at the following link COLLEGE SCHOLARSHIP



and we strongly urge you to go through the details.
Please submit your decision on our offer by visiting the online link at https://wis.ntu.edu.sg/pls/webexe/isr_check_schlr_status.login



between Thursday, 19 April 2012 to Friday, 1 June 2012. Kindly note that if you do not indicate your decision by the above deadline, the offer will lapse.
Sincerely yours
Dr Lalit Goel, PhD
Director of Admissions
Nanyang Technological University

The College Scholarship is one level down from the top-level Nanyang Scholarship, and it is the counterpart of the NUS Undergraduate(Merit) Scholarship.

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My heart skipped a beat when I read and re-read the email. It is still something that I am struggling to process. Then I thought of the decisions that lie ahead. NUS or NTU? The bevy of thoughts that accompany this decision particularly befits the opening lines of Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
and sorry that I could not travel both,
and be one traveller, long I stood
And look down one as far as I could,
to where it bent in the undergrowth

I was told by the professors at the interview session that my course choices need not be limited to history. I could choose to take up another major in English Literature, or a possible major in Politics ( which the lead professor said was under serious discussions with the University Administration) , or minors like Philosophy.

On one hand, I am happy for the scholarship offer. The provisions for tuition fees and a living allowance means that I will not impose an additional financial burden on my parents. Of course, my father was quick to assure me that monetary remuneration was not a concern. But I just do not feel comfortable with spending more of his savings than I possibly need to, especially now that I come to realise just how hard it is to earn a monthly stipend in the army.

Much has been said about the supposed 'disparity' between NUS and NTU - how NUS is the better one since it is more established and has a longer history, a longer list of faculty staff, a longer list of contacts and tie-ups with foreign Universities to leverage on. Not forgetting how its world ranking is 18 places above NTU ( varying according to the survey in question) at last count. And on how the pioneer batch of History Major students for NTU will only start studying this year. The enormity of this decision is something that I am struggling to grasp. The question is: do the rankings really matter that much in the outside world? What happens if I pick NUS over NTU, or NTU over NUS?

The stress of being a scholarship recipient also comes into play. I remember reading once about " Scholarships: everyone wants them, but who gets them?". This is something that I have never experienced, and even without the benefit of hindsight, I can tell that the 4 years will not be a course of spending the money given gratis as a living allowance by the University, nor an easy life spent in the sun secure on one's laurels. Instead, it promises to be a journey of many late nights, of the personal pressure and expectations from those around you, of the initial disappointments and struggles spent learning how to write a proper academic essay, how to contend with all the things that separates University from the A levels. The rigour will even exceed that of the A levels, and imagine that for 4 or 6 years running!

So just like the narrator in Frost's poem, I am " sorry that I could not be one traveller, long I stood. And looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth". It is a little ironic, how Life imitates Art at times.

But in it all, I recognise my luck and God's grace.

To whom much is given , much is expected in turn.

It is something that I will have to think very carefully over.

A Point of View: Mourning the loss of the written word

A Point of View: Mourning the loss of the written word


The modernist writer Virginia Woolf called letter writing "the human art, which owes its origins in the love of friends". In our frenetic world of electronic communication, we must remember to write with thought and consideration, says historian Lisa Jardine.

In these days of email, texts and instant messaging, I am not alone, I feel sure, in mourning the demise of the old-fashioned handwritten letter. Exchanges of letters capture nuances of shared thought and feeling to which their electronic replacements simply cannot do justice. Here's an example.

In July 1940, with the country at war, Virginia Woolf published a biography of the artist, Roger Fry - champion of post-impressionism and leading member of the Bloomsbury Group. The timing could hardly have been worse. Fry's reputation was as an ivory tower liberal who believed that art inhabits a self-contained formal space remote from the vulgar world. As France fell to Hitler's troops and German planes pounded the south coast of England with increasingly regular air-raids, such artistic idealism seemed at best out of touch, at worst irrelevant.

Most of Woolf's friends were politely positive about the book. But in early August she received a letter from Ben Nicolson, the 26-year-old art critic son of her close friend Vita Sackville-West, who was serving as a lance-bombardier in an anti-aircraft battery in Kent under the flight-path of the German bombers. As enemy warplanes passed low overhead, Nicolson attacked the adulatory tone of Woolf's biography and accused Fry of failing to engage with the political realities of the inter-war years.

"I am so struck by the fool's paradise in which he and his friends lived," Nicolson wrote. "He shut himself out from all disagreeable actualities and allowed the spirit of Nazism to grow without taking any steps to check it."

Woolf's answering letter did not mince words:

"Lord, I thought to myself," she wrote back. "Roger shut himself out from disagreeable actualities did he? What can Ben mean? Didn't he spend half his life travelling about England addressing masses of people who'd never looked at a picture and making them see what he saw? And wasn't that the best way of checking Nazism?"

Stung by Woolf's condescending tone, and unpersuaded by her argument, Nicolson wrote again, criticising Fry and the Bloomsbury Group in yet stronger terms. This time Woolf took his comments personally and drafted a lengthy, rebarbative reply, in which she turned Nicolson's attack on Fry and herself back on him. Nicolson's own chosen career as art critic was hardly more engaged: "I suppose I'm being obtuse but I can't find your answer in your letter, how it is that you are going to change the attitudes of the mass of people by remaining an art critic."

Reading over what she had written, however, Woolf thought better of her stern tone and did not send the letter. Instead, she rewrote it in more measured terms, moderating her sharp remarks with an opening apology. "I think it's extraordinarily nice of you to write to me," she now began, "I hope I didn't annoy you by what I said. It's very difficult when one writes letters in a hurry as I always do, not to make them sound abrupt."

It is this second version of the letter that was eventually dispatched, and which evidently satisfied its recipient, who called a truce on their differing views of Fry's influence and reputation. In early September, Woolf wrote to arrange for Nicolson to visit, adding: "I love getting your letters," and "I'm so happy you found the life of Roger Fry interesting as well as infuriating."

Two things strike me in this exchange. The first is the simple good manners both correspondents evidence in the way they address one another and present their arguments, in spite of the real, keenly felt differences of opinion.
Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf understood the effects of letters written in haste

The second is the strikingly different outcome arrived at because Virginia Woolf restrained herself from dispatching her first, intemperate draft reply and carefully modified it so as not to hurt the feelings of the young man - a family friend, very much younger and less experienced than herself.

I have, of course, dwelt on this exchange for a purpose. In it, Woolf - using established letter-writing conventions - takes advantage of the time lapses between exchanges to recuperate, clarify, recast and take control of the argument. The result has the elegance of a formal dance - a kind of minuet, in which the participants advance and retreat according to well-understood rules, until they have arrived at a satisfactory outcome.

How unlike the rapid firing off and counter-fire of email messages in which many of us find ourselves engaged nowadays as our predominant means of communicating with colleagues and friends, and even with complete strangers. Each time I broadcast a Point of View, I receive large numbers of emails from people I have never met, while the script posted on the BBC magazine website generates hundreds of anonymous messages.

Very few of these observe the courtesies enshrined in traditional letter-writing. Many adopt a curiously curt tone: I have not consulted my sources correctly, they insist, or I have misled my listeners. "Call yourself a historian" is a regular, shrill opener - emails and posts have mostly dispensed with the niceties of "Dear Lisa" or "Yours sincerely."

Yet if I answer such an email - and I do try to respond to them all - the reply that follows will be couched in very different terms. It will be prefaced by the kind of placatory remark Woolf used in responding to Nicolson: "I did not mean to imply criticism" or "I hope you did not think me rude." It is as if between the first and the second response I have become a person - an actual recipient of the communication - rather than an impersonal post box. So the courtesy and simple good manners of more old-fashioned letter-forms are restored to our correspondence.
Sending an email Emails have replaced the handwritten letter

The most dramatic feature of electronic communication is surely its propensity to tempt us into dashing off a message in haste that we repent at leisure. As the emails ping into our inbox we answer them helter-skelter, breathlessly, without pausing to reflect on nuance or tone. As a consequence, misunderstandings often arise - "I'm sorry to have upset you," a colleague will reply to an email I intended as a matter-of-fact response to a bit of university business.

No doubt I am sentimentalising the orderliness of written letters by comparison with emails. When feelings run high, an ill-judged letter can cause as much emotional damage as any dashed-off online posting. Here's another example from Virginia Woolf's prolific correspondence.

In 1938, she wrote to Vita Sackville-West - with whom she had had a passionate affair in the late 1920s - refusing to read a poem Vita had sent her via Woolf's husband Leonard. Woolf was annoyed at hurtful remarks Vita had made about her:

"Leonard says you have sent a poem and would like to know what I think of it. Now I would like to read it and normally would fire off an opinion with my usual audacity. But I feel I can't read your poem impartially while your charges against me, as expressed in a letter I have somewhere but won't quote, remain unsubstantiated."
Vita Sackville-West Vita Sackville-West was 'horrified' by one of Woolf's letters

Vita was appalled. Her response was a frantic telegram: "Horrified by your letter." This in its turn elicited a further letter from Woolf the same day:

"What on earth can I have said in my letter to call forth your telegram? God knows. I scribbled it off in five minutes, never read it through, and can only remember that it was written in a vein of obvious humorous extravagance and in a tearing hurry."

Woolf explained that she had been annoyed by a letter Vita had sent shortly after publication of her last book. She had written back asking Vita to explain a comment she had made that "one moment you enchant with your lovely prose and the next moment exasperate one with your misleading arguments". What were the misleading arguments? Woolf had asked. Vita had not replied.

"It's a lesson not to write letters," Woolf now continued contritely. "For I suppose you'll say, when you read what I've quoted from your own letter, that there's nothing to cause even a momentary irritation. And I daresay you're right. So let us leave it: and I apologise and will never write a letter so carelessly again."

Virginia Woolf called letter-writing "the humane art, which owes its origins to the love of friends", and devoted a good deal of emotional energy to using it to maintain her friendships.

Today's electronic forms of communication may lack that emotional depth but they do enable us to connect more speedily and efficiently than I at least could manage with pen and ink. Still, when we take advantage of them, we ought always to heed Woolf's warning, never to write carelessly. And, if we can, at least count to 10, and read over what we have written, before we press "send".

Young U.S. Citizens in Mexico Brave Risks for American Schools

TIJUANA, Mexico — Weekday mornings at 5, when the lights on distant hillsides across the border still twinkle in the blackness, Martha, a high school senior, begins her arduous three-hour commute to school. She groggily unlocks the security gate guarded by the family Doberman and waits in the glare of the Pemex filling station for the bus to the border. Her fellow passengers, grown men with their arms folded, jostle her in their sleep.

Martha’s destination, along with dozens of young friends — United States citizens all living in “TJ,” as they affectionately call their city — is a public high school eight miles away in Chula Vista, Calif., where they were born and where they still claim to live.

California teenagers start their mornings with crossing guards and school buses. Martha and her friends stand for hours in a human chain of 16,000 at the world’s busiest international land border. Cellphones in one hand and notebooks in the other, they wait again to cross on foot, fearing delays that could force them to miss a social studies final, oblivious to hawkers selling breakfast burritos or weary parents holding toddlers in pajamas.

In San Ysidro, the port of entry, they board a red trolley to another bus that takes them to school. They are sweating the clock — the bell rings at 8 a.m. sharp.
“Most of the time I am really, really tired,” said Martha, whose parents moved back to Tijuana because the cost of living was cheaper here than in southern California.
“I try to do my best,” she added. “But sometimes, I just can’t.”
In the raging debate over immigration, almost all sides have come to agree on tougher enforcement at the border. But nearly unnoticed, frustration is focusing locally on border-crossers who are not illegal immigrants but young American citizens, whose families have returned to Mexico yet want their children to attend American schools.

Called “transfronterizos,” these students migrate between two cultures, two languages and two nations every day, straining the resources of public school districts and sparking debate among educators and sociologists over whether it is in American interests that they be taught in the United States. Although some Mexican families pay the steep tuition required of out-of-district students, most do not, and many that pay taxes out of their paychecks do not pay the property taxes that support public services.

Some of the students’ parents are American citizens and some are Mexican.
Students like Martha fly under the radar in some school districts, while other districts assign truancy officers to find who they are. They live with the anxiety of potentially having to lie about their residency and the very real possibility that the prize they are after — a decent education — will be taken from them. Though their exact numbers are unknown, their presence reflects the daily complexities of border life — among them, economic and educational disparities between the United States and Mexico and families splintered by deportation and unemployment.

Transfronterizos can be found from Calexico, Calif., to El Paso, where violence in neighboring Cuidad Juárez, Mexico, has led to the creation of a designated lane for 800 to 1,400 students daily, including American citizens who attend El Paso schools.

In Tijuana, Martha and a half-dozen high school seniors let a reporter accompany them on their daily commute and discussed their identity conflicts and criticisms by their American counterparts. Students, their parents and some teachers spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize their enrollment.
Martha’s mother, a seamstress, never got beyond ninth grade. Several days a week, she rises at 2 a.m. to claim a place for her daughter in line — a border mom, instead of a soccer or a tiger mom. Martha’s family pitches in on the mortgage for a Chula Vista house, where members of the extended family live, and pays utilities to establish residency.

Other Tijuana families rent apartments, “borrow” fake addresses from friends or create a post office box. Sometimes a relative in the district is appointed their child’s legal guardian.

“It’s stressful,” Martha says of the house that is not really her home. “ You can get found out and kicked out of school. Sometimes I feel bad for lying. But I’m just going to school.”

In so many ways, they are simply teenagers, wearing sneakers and the ubiquitous white buds in their ears. In the border line, the chit-chat about hangovers and how strict their parents are could be that of young people anywhere waiting to get into a movie.

Except for the narcotic detector dogs, the Customs and Border Patrol officers and the sign that says, “Welcome to the United States.”

Luis, a wiry high school senior with gleaming braces, was born in Los Angeles and lived there as a freshman, spending the week in his uncle’s home and weekends visiting his family in Tijuana. Homesick, he finally moved to Mexico.
“I felt bad alone,” he said. “It’s tiring, but this way I can see my family all the days.”

Now he and his 16-year-old sister get up at 3 a.m. to drive to the border with their father, a landscaper who has a green card. The teens touch down for a shower at a studio apartment the family rents in the Chula Vista school district, and they walk two and a half miles to school. Luis’s younger sister cannot join them — she was born in Mexico. So were most of Luis’s friends.
“They say, ‘Oh man, it’s too hard to wake up at 3 in the morning,’ ” Luis said, sitting in his bedroom in Tijuana, which is decorated with posters of Piccadilly Circus, a place he has yet to visit. “On the other hand,” he said, “they are jealous that I can cross and they can’t.”

Martha and her friends view classmates who live in the district as coddled couch potatoes. They don’t have to deal with jeering workers at the border cursing them for cutting in line. Or say “wake me up” to the Tijuana taxi driver who drives them home after dark.

Jesús travels 20 miles from Tijuana, on a twisting road known for robberies. He plans to study gastronomy. “I am just trying to get ahead and become someone important in life,” he says. “It’s a big responsibility making sure you get to school.” Five tardys can mean four hours of Saturday school and an F in citizenship.

“You can kill their future,” says one of Jesús’s teachers, who does not mark him late when he knocks shyly on the classroom door 10 minutes into first period.
Martha has crossed the border on and off since she was 5. Her life has its own ebb and flow, as well as the occasional undertow. In Tijuana, “sometimes people think we’re higher than them,” she says, because she attends an American high school. But as a Mexican in San Diego, “they look you up and down.” Divulging the particulars of their lives can be tricky business. “You can’t really rely on most people,” Martha says.
 
Rising at 3 a.m., Luis will sometimes fall asleep in his sixth-period world history class. “The teacher gets super-angry,” he said. ‘”You don’t tell those kind of teachers you cross.”

He shares his story sparingly with a few trusted Latino teachers. “Some of them crossed, like you. They want things to be better for you. But,” he allows, “that is not true of everyone. Some think we’re wasting tax.”
One teacher in Chula Vista, whose name was withheld to protect students in his class, including Martha, said, “I can’t draw all I want from her. Her intelligence is hidden away by her tiredness.”


Yet teachers and guidance counselors say that despite the academic challenges, students who get up at 4 a.m. to be at school show signs of becoming resilient leaders. “They know who are they are and what they want,” the teacher observed. “They’re not going to be working at Jack in the Box. They’re go-getters.”

 
Rising at 3 a.m., Luis will sometimes fall asleep in his sixth-period world history class. “The teacher gets super-angry,” he said. ‘”You don’t tell those kind of teachers you cross.”
He shares his story sparingly with a few trusted Latino teachers. “Some of them crossed, like you. They want things to be better for you. But,” he allows, “that is not true of everyone. Some think we’re wasting tax.”
One teacher in Chula Vista, whose name was withheld to protect students in his class, including Martha, said, “I can’t draw all I want from her. Her intelligence is hidden away by her tiredness.”
Yet teachers and guidance counselors say that despite the academic challenges, students who get up at 4 a.m. to be at school show signs of becoming resilient leaders. “They know who are they are and what they want,” the teacher observed. “They’re not going to be working at Jack in the Box. They’re go-getters.”

The New York Times, January 2012