Anglo-Chinese School (Independent)

[kandc]

Hi Autolycus,


Really appreciated your advice & fully agree with you. I do understand the IB is a good programme to train students to be holistic. But exactly as you pointed out, it is not suitable for every boy. So my question will be how to judge/observe as early as possible if the boy fits in IB programme or not? The judgement would be "the ability to write good humanities/lit essays"?? Therefore, as you commented in your last reply to my post, "the worst-case scenario is that the boy had a 4 for English, which pretty much indicates a limitation to your language skills". So usually poor English mastery will limit his performance in IB exam, better look for another place b4 the IBDP exams? Thanks a lot!

[autolycus]

kandc: it's not so grim as it sounds...


We have many scholars coming in at Year 3 with imperfect language skills. All of them have to write essays in English for the IB if they do the IBDP. I have a number who went on after graduation to good colleges and universities in the USA and UK. Surely our own citizenry should perform at least as well in that area...

However, I have to say that when I mentioned essay-writing skills (also including technical writing etc), I meant it prescriptively — our students MUST develop those skills no matter where they go, or else their mobility will be limited in future.

[Mvm]

Mvm:

There is a link to the parents portal on the school's webpage. However we need an ID and password to log in. Any idea when year 1 parents will start to have access?

Anyone with info?

[bromath]

Math competition team 2012 for junior category


Name \t Class\t Category
 Kumaravel Vignesh\t1.03\t Junior
Joel Toh Yi Liang\t 1.06\t Category
Ng Chun Lin\t 1.06\t
Jeyakumar Jegan\t 1.08\t
R. Saravanamani \t1.08\t
Surendra Shenoy Basti\t1.14\t
Ashraf Roshan S/O Abdul Nasser\t1.14\t
Gideon Kharistia\t1.14\t
Goh Yu Xuan\t1.14\t
Muthuramalingam Naveen Krishnan\t1.14\t
Bharath Chandra Sudheer\t1.17\t

Shum Rui Yuan\t2.03\t
Yan Xu\t2.04\t
Hughie Hwang Bing Howe\t2.11\t
Chan Jie Sheng Jensen\t2.12\t
Guan Yang Ze\t2.12\t
Leong Chee Weng, Michael\t2.13\t
Ng Ding Yi\t2.13

[clayman]

Just in case your boys forgot, which I don’t think they will.


Monday 30th January 2012 is a school holiday in view of the excellent IB results.

[number1]

Hi it’s been a month since school started , and I have not received a single email or other communication from my son’s form teacher . Is this how it works in secondary school ? I am used to getting very frequent emails previously from his primary school teachers and thus not sure if this is the new norm that I need to get used to. Can anyone share if your son’s teachers have unitiated any communications ? Thanks much .


Also thanks to Autocylus for your very helpful advice.

[autolycus]

number1:

Hi it's been a month since school started , and I have not received a single email or other communication from my son's form teacher . Is this how it works in secondary school ? I am used to getting very frequent emails previously from his primary school teachers and thus not sure if this is the new norm that I need to get used to. Can anyone share if your son's teachers have initiated any communications ? Thanks much .


Also thanks to Autolycus for your very helpful advice.

You're welcome!

Yes, life is like that in most secondary schools. Students are now expected to be responsible enough to bring letters and messages home from school, or to direct parents to the school website for the principal's quarterly newsletters. It's like primary school minus the emails and TLC. Also, students are at that age where anything like close monitoring could be seen by some as irksome or embarrassing... no matter what their parents' opinions are.

My advice is to take advantage of parents-teachers meetings. The twice-yearly PTMs, plus other occasions, are opportunities for you to come with a prepared printed list of questions and interrogate the poor officers assigned to you (normally your offspring's class and subject teachers). They will try their best to be polite, as I'm sure you will too.

Ask for details that will allow you to build up a picture of how the student is seen by teachers and peers, and look for specific clues about cognitive and social behaviour. ACS(I) has peculiar norms; its students like to be different in sometimes very unusual ways.

[South African]

There’s much to memorise in History and that’s not the way to go. Does anyone know of any good history guidebook which has the history mapped in diagrams or mindmap? For ease of remembering.

[autolycus]

South African:

There's much to memorise in History and that's not the way to go. Does anyone know of any good history guidebook which has the history mapped in diagrams or mindmap? For ease of remembering.

My personal advice is that the student should draw their own diagrams and mind-maps. The problem with digesting other people's notes or books is that one is essentially trying to stuff someone else's brain-product into their own brain, which is obviously a different neural network.

That said, I always end up recommending http://www.dk.co.uk/static/cs/uk/11/search/catalogue.html for those who are more visual learners. Some of these books can be ordered for relatively cheap prices from http://bookdepository.com, which gives free shipping.

Don't let the visual prettiness deceive you... the content is pretty solid for each age group.

[sqgator]

Looks like this year is a very strong O Level JAE incoming class for the ASCI IB program. Supposedly quite a few 10A1 kids.