Sabaticals: Day 1

Rule 1: Posts must maintain a level of neutrality, displaying no panic and/or personal feelings unless required or in brackets (yay)

Rule 2: I haven't really thought about rule 2, but it would probably go somewhere along the lines of not breaking rule 1

Rule 3: A joke in every post? The only reason I add rule 3 is because rules always come in 3s (or more).

Anyway, I will try to conduct my blogs like this because, it's more um... politically correct to not comment (racistly or prejudicedly. Wow. That's really bad English) on public platforms like blogs. So, back to the point, (one more thing to notice is how I tend to talk about something completely unrelated to the topic before actually starting. It's a way to decrease boringness and increase word count. muhahaha. PS: Go and read the "so back to the point" part again, if not the sentence will make no sense) this week is sabbatical week, good and bad in its own ways.

The most obvious point, would be that there is no need to continue with formal lesson (good), the next point is that we can learn something new (also good. By the way, sabbaticals are activities organized by the school to "supplement" learning. You get to choose what you want to learn for the next week, but you must bid for what you want with points so that one sabbatical isn't empty while the other is brimming with students). You also get the chance to earn extra credit points if you choose a specific sabbatical (definitely good). On the other hand, lost lesson time means lost study time and therefore lost preparation time for exams (Woe to the students in the elitist society of Singapore). Then there's also the question of efficiency, and whether a week is sufficient. Of course there's also the fact that I bid 299 points too many for my sabbatical (so wasted). My choice, was debate, and now to tell the story of my first day.

My problems started early in the day, when I lost my way and completely confused the venue of my sabbatical. I arrived 5 minutes late, which wasn't so bad because the instructors (sec 4s) started 10 minutes early. I was issued a "debate file" which was not really a file but a huge stack of papers. The first question was "what is debate?" to which I replied "It's dething you use to catch defish with", eliciting smiles from my peers and a "i'll give you 5 points for humor" from my senior. We then went on to explaining more and more about debating, its applications and usages (did i mention the air-con was broken, and that I fanned myself with the debate file?). Before long it was break time, and I took pride in the fact that I had actually learnt something.

During break, I learnt that one of my instructors was a peer-pressure immune, perfect English-speaking perfectionist, and the other also spoke Queen's English and was a Pokemon addict as well. I was shocked to see that they were watching debates on youtube, instead of funny videos and Japanese gameshows. They were something else...

Afterwards we were transferred over to an air-conditioned room *contented sigh* but soon realized that it was too cold to concentrate *brr...*. We were then subjected to a series of presentations (which normally would not be an issue, but I didn't sleep early the night before and almost dozed of in class on multiple occasions). Unfortunately the lights were turned off (i have difficulty concentrating in the dark) though my group still managed to come first in a mini-debate. We learned about logical arguments and invalid arguments (such as: God is Love;Love is blind = God is blind?) and how anything can be argued against (math argument:

a = b

a^2 = ba

a^2 - b^2 = ba - b^2

(a + b)(a - b) = b(a - b)

a+b = b

2 = 1? (if a = b = 1) 

try and figure this out

Then we were briefed on a topic to present on on Thursday, mine being "Do you support GM food?". I didn't think that debating would be fun, but in the end...it wasn't. But hey, today's only the first day ;-p