As an independent platform for commercial education services in Singapore, we have seen many discussions on various service providers.  The happy customers sing praises, the unhappy ones rage and swear, while the skeptics would raise an eyebrow now and then as they critically assess the comments and tear them down as biased or irrelevant.  Yes, critical reviews are fun to write and read.

Occasionally, we do come across some educators who stand out of the crowd, and yet remain hidden, because it is not in the nature of these truly good educators to actively promote themselves.  Education is about changing people's lives, to find ways to empower and encourage students to challenge their limits.  Each step taken by their students, no matter how small, is significant progress in the eyes of these passionate educators.

In its quest for the best way of training its agents, an insurance company once divided its new cohort into 3 groups. The first group was given 3 months of formal training before being sent to the field by themselves. The second group was assigned a mentor each and they had to make customer calls with the mentor for the next 12 months without any training. The last group had to make customer calls with the mentor for the 1st 3 months before receiving 1 month of formal training and then sent back to the field by themselves. At the end of the year when the sales output of the 3 groups were tabulated and compared, it was the 3rd group that did the best, by far.

Learning efficiency increases if we have already experienced first hand the issues that courses are attempting to teach us. In the same way, as young adults, children also need the context of why they are learning something before they can fully appreciate what they are learning.  And the best way of getting context is to experience it for themselves.

I made my mother cry on four occasions.

The first was in 1972, during the Primary One registration.  Born to a family of 9, and having spent the first 6 years of my life running around a tiny 1 room flat at Mattar Road, I was a super lazy kid who ended up last in my PAP kindy because I hated going to school.  I had been expecting to go to Mattar School where my 5th sister was studying, but somehow my mother got wind of an opportunity to register me in St. Andrew's Primary from a neighbour.

Before returning from a recent trip to Taipei, a last-ditch hunt at the Taipei airport for local culinary cuisine turned up more just than a steaming bowl of beef noodles.  I found a thematic food court with the 1960s as its theme.  But what caught my eye was not the coffee shop tables and cutlery that were a blast from the past.  It was a small, plain, wooden and metal contraption, easy to miss amongst the many antiques scattered around the area.

If you haven't already noticed, the days when people stay with a single employer for the rest of their lives have gone the way of the dinosaurs, along with artisan skills that take a lifetime to master.

I just finished watching an episode of the n-th iteration of the Condor Heroes, where physical pugilistic skills were the key barter for food, money and respect. Nowadays, such physical skills will only earn you a place in the CID's blacklist of "disturbers of public peace".

The Industrial Age has come and gone, and with 2 World Wars to show for it.  It has taught humans how they can improve their productivity (and destructive capability) through automation - how products superior to what they can make with their own hands can be churned out in minutes in the exact same dimensions and functionalities. And it is no longer about who can produce the most products, but rather who can create new products with features that make their predecessors completely obsolete and redundant.