Friday, April 23, 2004

A Whole Lot of Broccoli

To Dan's great horror, I accidentally bought $9 worth of broccoli. I really didn't mean to. I was just buying enough broccoli for dinner tonight and to make vege pasta sauce tomorrow. Unbeknownst to the tired me, I piled up 1.35kg worth of the fake veg at the cashiers. Sigh...

Today was another leave at 6 pm day. It wouldn't feel so bad if I didn't get in at 7.30 am every morning and to top that off, I didn't even teach today.

My debaters are prepping for an International Human Law- International Criminial Court debate tomorrow and they really don't know their stuff. Well, off the cuff, I wouldn't either but I'm not the one who has to stand out there and speak for 8 minutes about it. I do sympathise deeply with it.

You know they're in trouble when they ask if Qumar and Kundu are examples of where IHL couldn't work because the morality of the law does not supersede the law of the land even if the law of the land says it's right to execute an adulterous woman. So yes, that's the dire state of the team and I worry for them as they debate tomorrow.

Five kids, four of whom hardly know what a Point of Information is, going to get eaten alive by teams coached by ex World Schools Debaters. Don't even think of pointing a finger at me and saying "but you've gone to World Schools..." It's akin to the Wong Li Lin story although I know where fact ends and fiction begins.

For those who don't know, Wong Li Lin is a local celebrity. When she first became famous and did the usual rounds in magazines and the press, she kept reiterating that she was a trained ballerina who had just returned from the Royal Ballet School, so balletomanes who knew a little, but not alot thought the world of her seeing that no one native dancer from Singapore has ever been to the Royal Ballet School. Not for a moment did they stop to think, if she had gone to such a prestigious school, why wasn't she in any sort of dance company? Why was she acting in these B grade local dramas? You don't get your toes bashed in and your ego pummelled for 3 years to do drama serials. The secret is that she didn't go to London to study ballet as a professional course, she went and did it as a teaching course. Anyone with an elementary certificate could do the latter.

So, the moral of the story is, it doesn't matter where you've gone, it's what you went there to do. I didn't go to Stuttgart to debate, I went there to judge- with much difficulty, so I'm not going to even claim to konw how to help these kids. All I can do is make it a little easier for them by having them know that it's ok if they screw up as long as they learn something and perhaps buy them McDonalds for breakfast. :)

Ondine tossed this thought in at 20:04

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