Day 08: Our correspondent, Charles, is back to report

CHARLES IS REALLY ANGRY BECAUSE THE POST HE HAS BEEN WORKING ON FOR THE LAST HALF HOUR HAS DISAPPEARED AMONGST THE INTERNET DEBRIS ALL BECAUSE HE WAS TYPING “INCOMPETENT GROUP LEADER AKA JING YUAN” AND EVERYTHING GOT DELETED SOMEHOW. THEREFORE, IT CAN BE CONCLUDED THAT IT SHOULD NOW READ AS “INCOMPETENT GROUP LEADER AKA JING YUAN” WITH NO CANCELLING OUT(:

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The trusty trio of Charles, Jia Jie and Yiwen meet up today to go down to SSVH. Oops. I missed out the fourth character of our story, Tan Jing Yuan. (Incompetent group leader) The meeting has been previously arranged during the last RE session on 230408 when Ms. Juwita was unable to meet us. Fortunately, she is free today, thus the four go down to SSVH. The interview questions and planning for the interview has taken place two RE sessions ago.

Charles will now recount the story that he has recounted just previously and lost it all because Ctrl + Z does not work. He will recount it in second-person POV and it will be as detailed as it can possibly be after his frustration.

So the story begins..

When the school bell rings at 11.25PM, Jing Yuan, Charles and Jia Jie are still stuck in class. The three valiant knights are being assaulted by the evil monstrosity known as the English essay but are soon about to overcome it. Sir Yiwen the Other Knight arrives promptly. Charles and Jing Yuan realise that they are running late and Jing Yuan issues a verdict: the four will cab down to SSVH although it is only a few bus stops away. Charles, ever the money-minded treasurer, accosts Jing Yuan and demands to know where the funding for such an expensive means of transport will come from, only to be met by some less-than-desirable remarks. Hurhur. The time is approximately 11.40PM.

The four brisk walk to the bus stop (No, were strolling.) and their faces contort in anguish and despair as they watch the fabled bus No. 156 slip away from their outstretched fingers, just seconds away, missing the chance to catch a quick ride to SSVH. That was an exaggeration. In actual fact, the four were crossing the overhead walkway and the bus was just leaving the bus stop but Charles has to spice up the story abit lest it become dreary.

The four reach the BUS STOP and as per Jing Yuan’s previous instructions, they were to wait for a TAXI. Charles notices the fallacy of waiting for a TAXI at a BUS STOP but decides not to unleash his overwhelming intelligence over the undiscerning trio. Due to the inability to acquire a TAXI at a BUS STOP, the four then decided to wait for the next bus No. 156, which was reported to be 10 minutes away. The time is approximately 11.51PM. The four are running VERY VERY LATE for their appointment.

At exactly 12.51PM, bus No. 156 arrives, much to the pleasure and pride of Charles at Singapore’s wonderful transport system and infrastructure. wow. The four reach SSVH’s nearest bus stop in 8 minutes. (All times are recorded as per Charles’ timekeeping device aka the phone.)

The four now brisk walk (really brisk walk now) to SSVH as they are running VERY VERY VERY LATE for their appointment . Along the short uphill trek to SSVH, Jing Yuan attempts to deceive Charles into jaywalking and “accidentally” intersecting with the path of an oncoming cement-mixer. (We suspect that this action was an attempt to remove the smartest and most handsome group member of the group, however, further research has to be done into this matter.) Charles easily overcomes this deception.

Soon enough, the four reach SSVH to meet Ms. Juwita. She tells the four that since she is not exactly a teacher, she will not be able to answer approximately half the interview questions that had been sent to her the night before by Jia Jie for her perusal as the questions pertain to the school’s curriculum. The four are disappointed and dejected; all appears lost. All of a sudden, Ms. Juwita offers to introduce the team to some of the teachers to interview them instead! The team is unbelieveably happy and ecstatic at this new development. Ms. Juwita does not seem to mind their lateness. (We regret to inform you that Jia Jie forgot to bring the interview questions but the day was saved by incompetent group leader Jing Yuan who actually brought it instead.)

Kudos to the team! Lol.

Jing Yuan and Charles ask most of the questions while Jia Jie takes minutes and Yiwen interacts with the children. Charles also takes as much recording as he can of the two interviews. (As much as his phone memory allows, of course.)

The team interview two teachers, Ms. Punitha and Mrs. Chua. Ms. Punitha is a teacher in the “Helen Life Skills Class” while Mrs. Chua is a teacher of Mathematics and Science. The team learn alot from these interviews, with Jing Yuan and Charles asking more of the questions while Jia Jie takes minutes and Yiwen interacts with the students. Charles also records as much as he can of both interviews with his phone camera, unfortunately, he is unable to record the last part of Mrs. Chua’s interview due to lack of memory space in his phone. Still a good job done team!

The team find out that these less-privileged students require more intensive care and attention from the teachers because every student is unique and special; they all have their special talents and difficulties that have to be handled individually by the teachers, thus each class is small. Ms. Punitha’s class has two teachers including herself teaching 12 students. Mrs. Chua teaches 4 students. We find that the teachers are here to teach the students because they find it a challenge and that it is extremely rewarding to teach this students, and to watch them gain something from their lessons.

However, they also lament that not many people, including the examination authorities understand the predicament of the children, furthermore, the materials for teaching are hard to procure and the children have difficulty comprehending concepts either due to their lack of vision, lower intelligence of sometimes, both. The teachers have to rely very much on their ability to improvise to let the children learn to the fullest of their capability.

The Team also learn that the students are better off learning basic skills that we take for granted, for example, brushing their teeth and feeding themselves, etc. It is better to teach them the skills they need to survive than spend their time on educational purposes. Moreover these students do not have many other job opportunities besides working in vocational camps or sheltered workshops. They also need more ways for leisure as they are currently only able to do a few things during the abundance of time they have – listening to the tv, radio or music, for example.

So then that’s all for now. I’m sure that there’s more to garner from the recording the Charles had made and taken about 600MB in his memory card. Oh, what sacrifice..

Thank You to SSVH, Mr. Juwita, Ms. Punitha and Mrs. Chua for giving us such an enlightening experience today!

(YES. CHARLES STANDS TRIUMPHANT AS HE FINISHES HIS BLOG ENTRY IN NOTEPAD AND UPLOADS IT LATER. HE HAS DEFEATED THE EVIL CREATURE KNOWN AS THE INTERNET CRASH!!!!!)

Day 07

Date:16/04/2008

Member’s present: Yi Wen, Jia Jie, Jing Yuan, Charles

Venue: 4Q classroom and library

We started the RE period by going to the 4Q classroom to draft our interview questions for Ms Juwita, the visually handicapped children, and the children’s parents. The workload was given out as such: Charles and Jia jie were to do the interview questions for Ms Juwita (Do take note that the interview with Ms Juwita is an informal one while the interview with the children and their parents will be a more formal one) while Yi Wen does the interview questions for the children and Jing Yuan does the interview questions for the children’s parents. Yi Wen imagination left the maths and science part and wandered off into the world of the arts. He then came up with an interesting idea about how we could create something for the children to do art. It was a simple, magnetic board set with magnets that can be used to “create the image”. The magnets would then have a chop feature which can imprint the child’s picture onto paper. Jing Yuan commented that this idea was “COOL”. Soon we finished our work at about 1.45 and we left for lunch at 2. At 2.15, we were already done and we waited at the library for Mrs Lim who was as usual, very busy.

Soon we managed to meet her at 2.45. We then further discussed our interview questions. Mrs Lim commented that we should include “PASSION” and we should find out about what they do for leisure. We then talked about another group that previously did a project with SSVH who took the visually handicapped to the zoo. The children may be told that there was a hippo there or the sign says that there is a hippo there, but in actual fact, they will be all blur because they CANNOT SEE THE HIPPO! Yi Wen shared his research about braille printers with the rest. Mrs Lim then suggested that we find an eye doctor or specialist to for an interview to find out more about the medical aspect of blindness. Anyway, Yi Wen finally showed his idea to Mrs Lim and we discussed about how we could do it and the feasibility of it (Doing this is much more feasible than the “Embosser” that was discussed in the earlier meeting). Yi Wen said that doing something like this could be the “leisure” that Mrs Lim mentioned earlier and this also gives the children a chance to express their feelings. Mrs Lim then allocated work to everybody. Jing Yuan was in charge of research, Yi Wen was to find our more about his “Art”, Jia Jie was to finalize the interview questions and Charles was to try to get a contact from an eye specialist or doctor to ask for an interview. Mrs Lim ended the session with a few famous quotes.

Another entry by me, or I, who wrote this entry which was written by me, Yi Wen.

A short reflection

Even though we may be behind several RE S-L groups in terms of work and progress since we don’t even have a defined goal yet, I believe that we are still on track. After all, I believe that S-L is not about meeting deadlines and rushing to complete stuff. We should be thinking to see what is the best thing that we as students can do for our VWOs. So, if we feel that we are not doing enough, we should voice that out and not keep quiet so that we can just meet the deadline. So, thats what we did and now we are looking at new goals and bringing in new ideas for SSVH. Even though that brings us back to square one, I think that it is still best as we do not want to end our last year of RE by saying we did nothing but embossing stuff at SSVH.

Yi Wen

Day 06

Date: 09/04/2008

Members present: Yi Wen, Charles, Jing Yuan, Jie Jie

Today, we decided not to go to SSVH again as we felt that we should continue the discussion from last week about our future plans. Mrs Lim was very busy and was unable to see us until a while later, so in the mean time, we passed time by playing handphone games, and Jie Jie was doing his “gong han”. Of course, before that we had came up with a list of primary school mathematics topics that we feel we could help the visually handicapped students in (even though we could have just used the internet and go to the MOE website to check the PSLE syllabus, we did not as we were unable to get a laptop.)

Soon Mrs Lim arrived and we started our discussion. We talked about how else we could extend our research. Yi Wen (Me) pointed out that diagrams and graphs not only applies to mathematics, but it also applies to science as well, so when doing this project, we can focus on both maths and science. Jing Yuan got emo as he felt that our project was going nowhere, he hopes that through this project, we would be able to come up with some kind of product or result that we can showcase. However, Charles pointed out that S-L is not only about coming up with something, but we should also try to “gan chu” (understand, feel for) the visually handicapped. Mrs Lim strongly agreed with Charles point. Yi Wen, then gave the idea of an embosser, a tool which can make the embossing of pictures very easily. However, we soon discovered that there were many difficulties in coming up with something like that as we did not have the proper tools, resources, and equipment to do so. We also talked about getting a grant if we needed funding for creating our tools.

So thats all for today.

Adding on, i went back and did a bit of research and: http://www.ulva.com/Online-Store/Braille-Embossers/emprint.htm

I have managed to find out the existence of Braille picture printers. These printers can print out the embossed form of pictures and words. But the question now is: Is the braille printer in SSVH able to print pictures? But as you can see, the price of these braille printers soar up to a few thousand dollars, from our little meeting with the principal of SSVH, we know that they are quite poor, and should not be able to buy themselves a new braille printer like that. So, our “embosser” hasn’t been kicked out from our ideas list. Speaking of embossing, I have also managed to find something about it. http://www.papercraftz.com/techniqu.shtml

This methods (dry embossing and heat embossing) are used in arts and crafts, so I’m not sure if it applies to braille embossing.

So that all from me.

Yi Wen

day 05

Date: 19/03/2008

Members present: Yi Wen, Jia JIe, Charles, (Jing Yuan had to attend hockey)

Venue: library

Today, instead of going to SSVH, we decided to meet up with our teacher mentor, Mrs Lim as we had only been doing small embossing projects so far and we wanted to discuss on how we could improve on our RE-SL project.

After playing handphone games at the library while waiting, Mrs Lim arrived and we commenced the discussion on how we could improve on our project. We talked about how we were only given small projects and we did not feel the essence of service learning. So, we mapped out a plan about what we should do next which included things like doing more research on the visually handicapped, and talking to Ms Juwita for more information about our project. The plan has been posted on this blog by Mrs Lim.

Sorry, this should have come before my “Term 1 Reflection”.

Yi Wen