www.Go To The Mountain - Musings of a Potential Guru

Uruguay, Cambodia and Bhutan became the 90th, 91st and 92nd countries to reach my blog. Welcome! Besides her other interests, my daughter, like my son is pretty good with Power Point, the stuffs you do on facebook and what nots and she has helped me to refresh my blog like changing the background, settings, organisation and yet retaining the tag board, hits count and flags. It is now easier for readers to read with a white background and black words. It is now also much easier to search the archives as I can now sort them by topics. You can now search by month or topics. The hit counter is still there at the top right side and flags collection counter at the bottom. Things will only get better. I cannot thank my children enough. Long, long time ago during the auspicious second day of Chinese Lunar New Year, a rebel was born. I used the word "rebel" because who would turned out like that during a new year? As I was the first grandson of the big family, I was told that I ...

Save Our Children The last time I said that when tuition centres are flourishing, something is wrong. I saw that there were many who could not read nor write when they started primary school during my time but now all children can do that well before theirs. Once when I went to get primary six school text books for my child they were sold out even when they have printed surplus. Why? Because parents of primary five students bought them up and I presume to get their children to be smarter doing next year's work this year. I wonder if these parents would bury themselves with next year's work so they can get smarter and get ahead of others? Save our children please. Next I have seen or heard of parents who were unhappy when their children drop a little from say 95 to 90 marks even though they are still within band one and later when you see teenagers crying because they had seven distinctions out of nine, something is not quite right. Then there are some who make their chi...

I love children. They are God's gift to mankind. How many of you know that looking at things and the world through children's eyes can actually make you a different and better person? They do not see colours in people. They laugh often and they are sincere because when they don't like you what do they say? They tell you "they don't like you". Then they forget and they are friends again. When you look at a new born, you are seeing a miracle. How many of you have witnessed childbirth? You will feel the fragility of life. I love to smell baby's heads. Yes, I do and I am not suffering form some kind of weird desires. Baby Heads A baby's head smells like a durian that is perfectly ripe and just fallen from a durian tree or a freshly baked loaf of bread that has just come off an oven. The baby's head therefore, smells of a new, fresh and precious life that is why we celebrate and rejoice. However, please do not go around sniffing other people'...

Teaching & Education Less teaching and more learning. In the western world, children ask plenty of questions and teachers engaged them as an interaction. Here, teachers ask you to shut up and don't ask so many questions. In our time, many students got slapped on their faces and knocked on their heads and even pinched at the waist umpteen times so much so that we may have lost our original look and mind and if you go home and tell your parents, you get another dosage of the same.  Many could still not recite A-Z in primary one compared to today's children who are literate way before P1. There is no doubt that we have an excellent education system, result-wise churning out students who could ace their exams. But is education just about grades? Or is an overall development into a more than decent human being capable of independent thinking instead of through rote learning? we certainly have the IQ but how about our level of EQ?  Sad to say we score poorly in this ar...