Raffles Institution (Year 1-4)
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Cool video, as always..
https://instagram.com/p/Bd7q1F2n4H7/
ASTERISM RAFFLES OPEN HOUSE 2018
15 Jan (Mon), 9.30am - 3.30pm
Not sure of how to come to our magnificent RI (Y5-6) campus tomorrow? Fret not, as getting to our campus is really easy!
By MRT
Nearest MRT: Marymount MRT Station (Take Exit B)
Not-so-near MRT: Bishan
.
By Bus
Along Bishan Street 21: SBS Service 410
Along Bishan Road: SBS Services 13, 56, 57, 59, 71, 88, 156
By Car
Vehicles are to enter by Gate 3 along Bishan Street 21 and turn right into the Visitors’ Car Park 2 and park there.
Please take note that the Braddell gate will not be open on the day of Open House. .
See you there tomorrow from 9am to 3:30pm (last registration @ 2:30pm)! -
It is CCA trials time for Year 5 now. We are overwhelmed by the choices
. There are many more CCAs in Year 5-6 than in Year 1-4. For the benefits of the juniors, I am listing them down below.
Sports
Badminton
Recreational Badminton
Basketball
Dragonboat
Cricket
Cross Country
Fencing
Floorball
Golf
Gymnastics
Hockey
Judo
Netball
Rugby
Touch Rugby
Sailing
Shooting
Soccer
Softball
Squash
Swimming
Table Tennis
Tennis
Tenpin Bowling
Track & Field
Volleyball
Ultimate Frisbee
Water Polo
External Sports
Performing Arts
Chamber Ensemble
Chinese Orchestra
Jazz Club
LDCS (Chinese)
LDCS (Malay)
Indian Dance Club
Indian Cultural Society
Piano Ensemble
Raffles Chorale
Raffles Guitar Ensemble
Raffles Symphonic Band
Raffles Modern Dance
Raffles Street Dance
Raffles Players
Raffles Rock
Clubs & Societies
Alchemy
Astronomy Club
Audio Visual Unit
Bridge
Chinese Chess
International Chess
Computer Science Society
Community Advocates
Club Automatica
Entrepreneur's Network
Film Society
Gavel Club
Historic & Strategic Affairs Society
Mathematics Society
Outdoor Adventure & Activities Club
Photographic Society
Raffles Debaters
Raffles One Earth
Raffles Society of Biological Sciences
Raffles Interact
Raffles Runway
Raffles Press
RECAS
Red Cross Youth Chapter
Uniform Groups
Writers' Guild
Visual Art Club
External Clubs & Societies -
I am also listing down Monday morning enrichment programmes offered at Year 5-6. There are many interesting and unique programmes :rahrah:
Governance and Civic Engagement (GCEP)
Raffles Community Leadership and Citizenry Programme (RCLC)
International Service Learning and Leadership Elective (ISLE)
Raffles Ecological Literacy Programme (Ecolit)
Raffles INVENT
Raffles Water and Environment Sustainability Programme (RWEP)
Raffles Middle East Programme (RMEP)
Raffles Bicultural Programme (China)
Business Leaders Programme (BLP)
Global Studies 2018: The Neo-Generalist
Raffles Reflects
Peer Helpers Programme
EWBIS Science Research Programme -
I hope Dr Goh would be invited to his alma mater to give a talk to the boys on the merits of community service.
http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/doc-switched-from-maserati-to-charity-after-mongolia-trip
It is 6.30pm on Wednesday and Dr Goh Wei Leong has just seen the last of his patients at Manhattan Medical Centre, the general health clinic he has been operating in Chinatown for the last three decades.
It has been a long day but the lanky 1.82m man chirpily surveys the day's Chinese New Year offerings from his patients: Mandarin oranges, tubs of homemade cookies and several boxes of kuih ambon, a honeycomb cake from Indonesia.
A nurse, one of several who have been in his employ for more than 20 years, comes in bearing two pieces of homemade carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. He helps himself to one with gusto.
\"This is also from a patient,\" he says with a grin.
He breaks into a sheepish smile, his eyes crinkling, when asked if being crowned The Straits Times Singaporean Of The Year the day before has created excitement among his patients.
\"Only four or five of them knew. Many of them are Chinese-educated and don't read the English papers,\" says the congenial doctor who beat nine other finalists to the title.
Organised by The Straits Times and sponsored by UBS Singapore, the award honours outstanding Singaporeans who have overcome great challenges, put the country on the world map or made it a better place through acts of selflessness.
Dr Goh,58, was lauded for co-founding and steering HealthServe, which provides migrant workers with affordable healthcare, legal aid, social assistance, skills training as well as free meals.
Infectiously amiable and chatty, the eldest of four children of an army officer and a teacher says kindness and generosity were values treasured by the family. That's because they have experienced big-heartedness in life-changing ways.
During the Japanese Occupation, his mother, then barely in her teens, worked in a factory and was personal assistant to a Japanese officer. One day, he asked to see her father.
\"He told my grandfather: 'Tomorrow, if you're asked to go for a job, do not go no matter what,'\" says Dr Goh, adding that the family found out later that those who went were executed.
His maternal family also benefited from the generosity of a wealthy businessman who let them live for years in one of his two garages.
\"And when my mother got married, he let her live, rent-free, in one of his houses for five years so that she and my father could save up to buy a house,\" he says. \"My mother imbibed that generous spirit, she always had problem kids in our home when I was growing up.\"
After completing his primary education at Haig Boys' where he was one of its top students, he went to Raffles Institution.
Although the design-loving teen toyed with the idea of studying architecture, he settled on medicine at the National University of Singapore instead. Unlike most of his classmates, he set his sights on becoming a general practitioner.
\"When I told my classmates I wanted to be a GP, they asked me if I had failed my exams. The thinking was you became a GP only if you couldn't make it,\" he says.
\"But I know myself. I'm a generalist. I'm not into detail, I'm creative and a big picture guy,\"
Upon graduation in 1988, he joined a medical group. He didn't like the working environment so four months later, when he learnt that a Chin Swee Road clinic was available for a takeover, he bit the bullet.
\"I'd never thought of opening my own clinic; I like to work for people but ha ha, there was a push factor,\" he says with a grin.
With whatever little savings he had and help from his parents, he took over Manhattan Medical Centre. Three decades later, he is still there.
Just a stone's throw from People's Park and Chinatown and across the road from York Hill, where there are several blocks of one-room rental flats, the area is colourful and its denizens, a motley lot.
\"I love it. I got to know a whole different group of people here,\" says Dr Goh, who once made a house call to a flat nearby only to find five old men puffing away on a bed. It was an opium den.
All was well but after a difficult relationship which lasted about three years, he \"lost the plot\" for a while.
He bought himself a second-hand Maserati, got himself a membership at the Singapore Island Country Club (SICC) and lived the good life.
His life changed, however, when he joined a friend on a humanitarian trip to Mongolia in 1995.
\"It was just a couple of years after the Soviets left. It was freezing cold in spring, shelves in shops were empty, life was tough. I realised there was a different world and life out there. It was a shift for me,\" he says.
He started going to India, making up to four humanitarian trips a year and soon built up a solid network of contacts with non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
It didn't take long before he sold off his SICC membership.
\"There was a disconnect. I had found far more interesting things to do by then.\"
Things took another turn in 1999 when he went to the Indian state of Odisha (formerly known as Orissa) after a Super Cyclone, with a wind speed of 300kmh, struck in October and left nearly 20,000 people dead.
\"I saw people who were alive but whose faces were dead. I had to amputate, without anaesthetic, the broken and dangling finger of a little boy. I saw utter destruction and the images still haunt me. People who had nothing had even less,\" he says, adding that what he did in that one week was meagre in the light of the scale of destruction and misery he saw.
Dr Goh describes the experience as one of the \"building blocks in the story of my own life\".
With what he had learnt and the network he had cultivated, he helped to coordinate disaster relief trips to north-western Turkey when it was rocked by a massive earthquake a month later, and to Indonesia after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami hit, killing more than 250,000 people in 14 countries.
\"I connected Red Cross, World Vision and other agencies with personnel because I have a database of doctors and nurses,\" he says.
In 2006, he was introduced to businessman Tang Shin Yong, who was also active in NGO and voluntary work. The two hit it off and would meet regularly for coffee to talk about Singapore's changing landscape, poverty and other social issues.
\"One day, I asked him: 'Don't you think there are now many migrant workers in Singapore?' I said migration was a big issue and as a doctor, I felt there was a need to serve this community,\" he says.
It helped that he was already volunteering at a clinic in Little India run by his friend, Dr Simon Mahendran. Mr Tang agreed with him. The idea for HealthServe was born.
To test the waters, Dr Goh invited 15 of his friends for dinner and asked them what they thought of his plan. All said he should launch it.
Together with Mr Tang and a few friends, he opened a bank account, found a place for a clinic in Geylang Lorong 23 and opened it on Saturday afternoons, charging just $5 per consultation. Finding volunteer doctors did not prove difficult.
To their dismay, however, the patient traffic that they expected did not materialise.
They regrouped and decided to cross the street to the even-numbered lanes in Geylang where sex workers ply their trade and many migrant workers live above brothels.
\"By crossing the street, we crossed over to the side of the vulnerable and oppressed,\" he says.
He made the acquaintance of a pimp, who introduced him to many of the migrant workers.
\"We spent many evenings talking to them, telling them about the clinic. And after that, they started coming. It was a major lesson for us; we had to move into the community,\" he says.
To keep things going, he initially relied on the generosity of friends.
\"There was a standing joke among my friends. They'd say: 'Don't go out for lunch with Wei Leong. He will ask you for money,'\" he says with a laugh.
But as word of their good work spread, organisations like the Lee Foundation stepped in with grants and donations.
In 2010, he threw a big party to celebrate his 50th birthday. Instead of gifts, guests were asked to pledge money - $140,000 was raised - to seven charities he was associated with, including HealthServe.
Dr Goh and his friends soon realised that many of their patients had more than just medical problems. Many were depressed and lumbered with problems brought on by unscrupulous agents and employers; some even had no money to eat.
A couple of years after its inception, HealthServe started to offer social support and legal advice.
\"A full-time counsellor joined us. Then we got in lawyers, and also started offering free meals and MRT top-ups,\" says Dr Goh, adding that he learnt a lot from other migrant worker organisations, including Home and TWC2.
Today, the organisation has three medical centres, 10 full-time staff, 70 active volunteer doctors, 20 dentists, and 300 volunteers who are nurses, pharmacists, housewives, students, counsellors and administrative officers.
HealthServe's achievements are nothing short of inspiring. Last year, it provided 8,000 consultations, helped 445 workers with work injury and salary-related cases, served up 20,200 free meals and housed 30 workers in two emergency shelters.
Many migrant workers it has helped have become volunteers. Some grateful ones have even donated part of their workmen's compensation to the organisation so that it could continue doing what it does.
Meanwhile, co-founder Mr Tang left the organisation three years ago. \"He said he'd been a volunteer executive director for seven years and that if he didn't leave, HealthServe would not grow. He and I spent a year looking for a paid executive director,\" says Dr Goh, adding that he, too, plans to exit the organisation one day so that it can scale even greater heights.
\"I hope to go into more mentoring and coaching. I want to create more inclusive spaces.\"
The self-described \"fulfilled single\" is currently brainstorming with his volunteers and interns how best to use the $20,000 prize money he won as Singaporean Of The Year.
Asked how he feels about the win, he says: \"The goodness and greatness is not in me or in HealthServe. We are just the conduit. The goodness and greatness comes through HealthServe.\" -
RI welcomes parents who wish to drop by the school tomorrow to show their support for their DCs who are receiving their A Level results.
Students will gather in the Main Hall to collect their results while parents gather at ISH (Indoor Sports Hall). All that is happening in the Main Hall (speeches / statistics) will be projected LIVE for the parents in ISH. University Reps will set up tables in ISH too.
A few parents (whose DCs have graduated from RIJC) have shared with me that many parents did turn up when their DCs were receiving their A Level results in previous years. They said the students kept adding chairs, as more and more parents turned up to support their children, all the way to the back of the ISH.
All The Best to Class of 2017 for their A Level results. May the cohort continue to keep the Rafflesian colors flying !! :rahrah: -
:rahrah: Best wishes to ifirefly and slmkhoo on your kids' results this Friday. And to all other Rafflesians too.
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iRabbit:
Thanks for sharing. Quite true less diversity in social-economic class among the RI boys nowadays.https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/elite-ri-students-must-be-inclusive-retiring-principal-says-their-responsibility
SINGAPORE — The principal of Raffles Institution (RI) caused a stir back in 2015 when he made a speech about elitism, but his candid remarks must have rang true to those who heard it or read about it, because they were surprisingly well-received.
On July 25 that year, while marking the school’s 192nd Founder’s Day, Mr Chan Poh Meng admitted that RI had become “insular”, was not “truly representative of Singapore”, and catered to students from the upper class of society. The school had become “middle class” and the student population had become less diverse in terms of their socio-economic backgrounds, which was unlike what it used to be.
Speaking to some 2,000 students, teachers, parents and alumni then, Mr Chan said: “A long period of conditioning means that we often fail to see elitism even when it is staring at us in the face.”
His words struck a chord. Some members of the public praised his candour after that. During parent-teacher meetings and gatherings with alumni, the feedback from these groups was that they were “happy” he made that stand, he said.
Commenting for the first time on why he made that speech, Mr Chan, 60, who is retiring from the education service this month, said that it was meant to be a “reflective piece”.
“As a school principal, I wanted to acknowledge it with my own people, let them know this was how I felt, and to ask them, ‘What do you think?’,” he told reporters on the sidelines of the Ministry of Education’s annual appointment and appreciation ceremony on Thursday (Dec 28), where he was among 16 retiring principals honoured for their service.
The objective was to reinforce to students that although it was through their academic achievements that they were admitted to RI — which is widely considered to be the best school here — it was a “privilege” to be a part of the school community.
“At the end of the day, there must be some giving back to the larger community… It is a responsibility for us to fulfil,” Mr Chan, who was a former RI student, said. He was appointed the school’s principal in December 2013.
While it is fine to be recognised as part of an elite group of students who excel in studies or are endowed with other talents, it does not give one the licence to be elitist, he explained. “You don’t be exclusive. You must be inclusive,” he said.
“It would be terrible if you deny there is such a thing (as being) elite... it’s what you do with that as a responsibility,” he added.
On how he ended up with a “reflective” speech, Mr Chan disclosed that it was possibly due to his own illness. He was diagnosed with stage three colon cancer in 2014 and took a six-month leave of absence to undergo chemotherapy.
“It could be that... I had so much time at home, thinking about life,” he said with a laugh. “It could be one of those moments when I was reflecting about what was the meaning (of life and) what I was going to bring to my job.”
When he returned to work, Mr Chan set out to ensure that the school’s programmes encouraged students to be more inclusive.
Since 2016, for instance, he has been welcoming students from other secondary schools to join RI’s boarding programme for 10 weeks. The programme was started in 2008 to develop students’ leadership and character.
There was also a student-led initiative called The Golden Page, which was started in 2014 to allow them to help improve the living conditions of seniors by installing equipment such as ramps and handle-bars in their homes.
INSPIRED BY TEACHERS
Mr Chan himself first wanted to be a teacher when he was a student at the then Park Road Primary School, which was located behind People’s Park Complex in Chinatown. He was inspired by two of his primary school teachers, who helped him develop his self-esteem.
His father — who died 15 years ago at the age of 60 — was against the idea because he thought that the profession would not take his son far in his career.
His parents worked as hawkers selling noodles, and Mr Chan is the oldest of three children.
Pursuing his childhood dream anyway, Mr Chan became a teacher in 1982.
Over the years, he took up various leadership positions, including being a superintendent at the Education Ministry’s headquarters. He was also the principal of Victoria Junior College for seven years before he was posted to RI.
If there is any regret, Mr Chan said that being in leadership positions took him away from the classroom, so he had less time to spend giving individual guidance to students. “That’s what I miss a great deal,” he revealed. “I like to be known as a teacher more than a school principal or leader. That was where I found the greatest satisfaction.”
On his retirement, he refused to see it as a sad moment, because he is grateful to have served in the education sector for more than 30 years. He is looking forward to taking a break, to travel to Japan, and to see the Northern Lights, for example.
There is a sense of completion as he leaves RI as principal, since he not only studied there but started out as a trainee teacher in the school.
“I would say it’s a rare privilege. I don’t think anyone who joined the teaching service and was later found suitable to be a school principal would end up in his or her alma mater to lead the school,” he said. “So, this full circle is especially meaningful for me.” -
iFirefly:
RI welcomes parents who wish to drop by the school tomorrow to show their support for their DCs who are receiving their A Level results.
The school may welcome parents, but the students may not! I'm not going to go - my daughter has told me firmly that she would prefer me not to be there. Not so much because she doesn't like me around, but because she will want to focus on her friends (after the obligatory message to me!). -
jtoh:
:rahrah: Best wishes to ifirefly and slmkhoo on your kids' results this Friday. And to all other Rafflesians too.
Thanks! I'm trying to think about it too much! Will try to find things to keep busy until then. -
All the best to everyone receiving result today! :rahrah:
Any input will be appreciated as curious to know how this batch performed, with the new syllabus.
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