autolycus:

laissezfaire:

No, they're not pushed into accepting anything, although chapels and services are mandatory.

Ah, this one contains an untruth. Chapel and services are not mandatory but they are the default. A parent may indeed write in and ask for exemption. It has been requested before, and the request granted. It's an odd thing for a client to do, but it is also the right thing to allow.

That's a caveat, friend, not a contradiction. As in exception to the general rule. It doesn't negate the fact that it IS mandatory in a general school attendance taking sense unless otherwise exempted, and even then only under exceptional circumstances. As in any mission school, it's called accepting the reality of your environment.

autolycus:

laissezfaire:

To be honest, the practices in the school are so hypocritical, the senior management so into playing favourites and lording it over their own personal fiefdoms, the teachers so into all talk and no action....it's enough to drive people OFF Christianity rather than to it.


It's a glib, self-indulgent, hypocritical, arrogant Christianity they practice with so many \"roll your eyes\" moments it's not funny.....not at all like the real deal.....

I know so many students who are turned off, FAR more than those pulled to it. And those turned off include a large majority of those already Christians.

That's your personal opinion, and you have a right to it. I would also say that your opinion includes many sweeping statements. I think that you are actually stating an opinion that applies to about 20% of the staff or less. That's bad enough; no need to tar the rest with your over-broad brush.

Perhaps you need to be more critically honest with yourself.

And perhaps you need to actually experience the school before talking. 20% of the staff? Try talking to the students and what they think of their teachers. You'll quickly realise that the generalisations are worth their weight. I'm not talking about the PR that any school is good at, I'm talking about actual student feedback regarding said issue. How easy it is to say \"don't generalise\" when you don't know the specifics...

prettycoolmom:

Thank u all! I appreciate all your suggestions... I will let her try your techniques

Prettycoolmom,

you need to see what types of questions your child is getting wrong.

Comprehensions are divided into several types of questions: literal, inference, definition, explanation of figures of speech etc etc...there is a specific skillset involved in each, and most teachers have no bloody clue how to go about improving because they don't know the work themselves. Their solution is to give more practice whole papers and correct them without giving proper help in targetted question types.

Figure out what type of questions your daughter is getting wrong first....generic advice will NOT help.

No, they’re not pushed into accepting anything, although chapels and services are mandatory.


To be honest, the practices in the school are so hypocritical, the senior management so into playing favourites and lording it over their own personal fiefdoms, the teachers so into all talk and no action…it’s enough to drive people OFF Christianity rather than to it.

It’s a glib, self-indulgent, hypocritical, arrogant Christianity they practice with so many "roll your eyes" moments it’s not funny…not at all like the real deal…

I know so many students who are turned off, FAR more than those pulled to it. And those turned off include a large majority of those already Christians.

PSLEmom:

:?: Can someone pls help ...my DS has scored very low for his CA exams .... ekindly recommend some good assessment books /websites for Secondary 1 (Express) subjects :


1. English : Living through Literature (Robert A Nimmo - Shinglee Publishers)
2. Maths : Discovering Mathematics (Chow Wai Keung - Star Publishing)
3.Science : In Science ( Ho Peck Leng - Star Publishing )

Thank you

PSLE Mom,

I can try and help with the Literature bit. What is your child weak in for Literature? Which school? Pure Lit or Language Arts?

Term 1 Sec 1 may not be the time to start panicking. IP programs are generally in a bloody mess with regards to curriculum with teachers getting lazier now that there's no external assessment. Most Language Arts programmes adopt a maggi mee approach: two weeks of something, quick assessment then off to something else. NO reinforcement, no spiralling of concepts or understanding. So only those ALREADY talented benefit while the majority of students need handholding but don't get it sufficiently.

Your DS may not be weak therefore, then again you'll have to see the written work or have someone assess it to see if the school or teachers know what they're doing. The majority don't...

DesertWind:

Chenonceau:

No lah... From what I know they chopped them off after PSLE results were out. Sorry if I wasn't clear. It's still terrible to lose 2 of 7 classes though. It is an indictment of your own teaching quality, especially when the kids are scions of successful families with intelligent parents.

OIC, thanks for clarifying!
Wah...ho....you are very brave to state this in bold. Because thought even our SM could not stand up to public pressure on this...

SM could not stand up to this because it was bad social science all round, as simplified as Chenonceau's conclusions.

Mentioning studies which have shown strong correlation between parent IQ and child IQ is a simplified version of the tale. These studies have been discredited because of the small sample sizes. Given that you express surprise that \"scions of successful families with intelligent parents\" cannot make it in some circumstances, it's no wonder that your reverse logic quotes the self same studies which only sample upper middle class families and above, the precise ones which have been shown to be self-serving and proved \"evidence\" for anyone ranging from psychologists to supremacists.

Your own experience contradicts your own argument. You took your child out of one environment and it worked, especially considering you probably exchanged one set of social and hereditary circumstances for another. Did you not factor environment or age or class? Giving a nod to alternative argument by saying that no theory is 100% predictive is a cheap way of dismissing factors that are just as powerful as heredity. It's bad social science, no matter which way you look at it.

jtoh:

Thanks laissezfaire.

No problem, Jtoh.

I should add that the competency of the teaching of the various component Humanities subjects varies in this particular programme at ACS I.

The History department varies from competent to having some really good teachers. You could say Economics also ranges from average to above average, but no real outstanding types.

English on the other hand, is notoriously the nastiest and most incompetent department in the whole school, especially at the IB level. Hwa Chong and RIJC have better teachers here overall by far, although many of them have been there for too long and are too comfortable.

jtoh:

Laissezfaire, is the ACSI humanities program part of their IB programme?

Jtoh, yes it is. The HP class essentially is a HL English class but they have their own texts, and do not do the same texts as HL classes. This is so to justify funding as well as the scholarships blah blah...

They sit for the same HL paper at the IB exam, but they use their own texts to answer the questions. These texts are selections from the IB prescribed text lists anyway, they are not a random selection.

There is little to choose between the Hwa Chong program and the RJC program. There is somewhat of an assumption that Hwa Chong’s is superior but the teachers in each place have different strengths and weaknesses, and I would be fine with sending a child to either one.


To the contrary of what an earlier poster mentioned, RJC’s program is not more selective. In fact, both schools have been admitting more students into their humanities program each year, and the general quality of the cohort is going down rather than up due to their lack of selectiveness. There are always a few outstanding ones each year, but there is an increasing tendency to mistake eloquence with intelligence.

Which brings me to ACS I ha ha…I wouldn’t touch their HP with a 10 foot barge pole. Let’s just say that the teachers teaching the program have poor disciplinary knowledge, sound much better than they are, and know enough to bluff their way through most students who don’t know any better. There are some students however who can see through the BS and are already complaining about the teachers whose idea of research is Wikipedia (that’s where they get most of their technical definitions from).