Basket.

Yet another Saturday night. Where do the weeks go?

My IPW file sits just behind me. Within is the physical evidence of the blood, sweat, toil and tears of five people over nine months of last year. Or so MOE says, and or so we all know is never the whole truth of the matter. Imagine, this was picked up by a nameless apparatchik somewhere, given a (somewhat random and arbitrary) grade based on only secondary sources (irony) and then returned to the school and the students in question. Nine months of hard work, in exchange for one number. Well, we had it better than many.

I am going to keep that big green thing as a monument to one of MOE's most sadly misguided policies. Perhaps I can show it to distant descendants many decades down the road and they will laugh. Bitterly, probably.

It is amazing that certain foreigners hold such idealistic views of a city-state. Local government, they argue, would be more in touch with the people, and able to govern better. Life would be more relaxed, and the government will be benevolent and unfettered by layers of red tape. Hearing them speak of it, a city-state sounds like the utopia the vast majority of humanity has long dismissed as apocryphal. Of course, Singapore is one of the world's most (in)famous city-states. "Strait-laced nanny state". CNN is funny, but for all the wrong reasons. Who else cringed at "Free Iraqi forces", first used in March-May 2003 and never thereafter? But I digress. Is Singapore any of the above? A resounding no, and I think we all agree on that.

After I leave the education system at last, I shall watch and laugh at how they continue to fuck it up.