PSLE Week 42 Update

Posted on by
Reply

PSLE Marking Week plus Holiday Week!

This week was a holiday for Primary schools which send teachers for PSLE marking (not all schools send teachers, only those who have students giving the exams and new schools with atleast students in Primary 4). Taking advantage of this break, we decided to make a short holiday to Penang (Penang posts coming up soon).

This was mostly to get our attention off the marking (more me than the kids I think!). Well, the marking is all done and their fates sealed…..Now we play the waiting game to see what scores they get.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the schools to choose when we fill up the secondary forms and have decided that we will go with schools where the cut off points fall in the median of their eventual scores. I am going to finalise 10 schools each, with a variety of scores so that when the scores are released, we can choose from these schools and if the COP is lower than their score, then they will definitely get the first choice. It’s better to be in the top classes in a lesser known school than be scrapping the barrel and trying to keep up in a more well-known school. This way, they can be at the top of the class, with access to leadership roles in the school, instead of always trying to keep up with their peers.

Friday was a Learning Journey Day where the whole Primary 6 cohort in their school visited the Science Centre. Initially BB & GG were very reluctant to go there again, as they’ve been there multiple times. But this time, they saw a couple of documentaries which they said were fantastic!

We ended the week with a baby shower for one of S’ colleague and friend. I realise these days there’s a trend of having baby showers after the baby is born – the baby shower we went to is around a month plus old….

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie

In The Moor’s Last Sigh Salman Rushdie revisits some of the same ground he covered in his greatest novel, Midnight’s Children. This book is narrated by Moraes Zogoiby, aka Moor, who speaks to us from a grave in Spain. Like Moor, Rushdie knows about a life spent in banishment from normal society–Rushdie because of the death sentence that followed The Satanic Verses, Moor because he ages at twice the rate of normal humans. Yet Moor’s story of travail is bigger than Rushdie’s; it encompasses a grand struggle between good and evil while Moor himself stands as allegory for Rushdie’s home country of India. Filled with wordplay and ripe with humor, it is an epic work.

Instagram Interludes 

Posted on by
Reply

I’m just back from a short holiday to the Pearl of the Orient, Penang. While the holiday definitely needs a couple of posts, here are some teasers from the trip. So here is Instagram Interludes – Penang edition!

Street Art at Armenian Street

Penang Street Art

Penang Street Art – most are around a cluster of streets around Armenian Street

Penang Street Art – found this on the side of a building

Tiles at the Penang Peranakan Museum

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 – William Dalrymple

On a hazy November afternoon in Rangoon, 1862, a shrouded corpse was escorted by a small group of British soldiers to an anonymous grave in a prison enclosure. As the British Commissioner in charge insisted, “No vestige will remain to distinguish where the last of the Great Moghuls rests.”

Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last Mughal Emperor, was a mystic, an accomplished poet and a skilled calligrapher. But while his Mughal ancestors had controlled most of India, the aged Zafar was king in name only. Deprived of real political power by the East India Company, he nevertheless succeeded in creating a court of great brilliance, and presided over one of the great cultural renaissances of Indian history.

Then, in 1857, Zafar gave his blessing to a rebellion among the Company’s own Indian troops, thereby transforming an army mutiny into the largest uprising any empire had to face in the entire course of the nineteenth century. The Siege of Delhi was the Raj’s Stalingrad: one of the most horrific events in the history of Empire, in which thousands on both sides died. And when the British took the city—securing their hold on the subcontinent for the next ninety years—tens of thousands more Indians were executed, including all but two of Zafar’s sixteen sons. By the end of the four-month siege, Delhi was reduced to a battered, empty ruin, and Zafar was sentenced to exile in Burma. There he died, the last Mughal ruler in a line that stretched back to the sixteenth century.

Award-winning historian and travel writer William Dalrymple shapes his powerful retelling of this fateful course of events from groundbreaking material: previously unexamined Urdu and Persian manuscripts that include Indian eyewitness accounts and records of the Delhi courts, police and administration during the siege. The Last Mughal is a revelatory work—the first to present the Indian perspective on the fall of Delhi—and has as its heart both the dazzling capital personified by Zafar and the stories of the individuals tragically caught up in one of the bloodiest upheavals in history.

Travel: The only thing you buy which makes you richer!

Posted on by
2

“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” – Saint Augustine

We’re leaving Penang in a few hours now and I am already having ‘Holiday Blues’. I love taking holidays and love the whole process – right from researching locations and hotels to tracking airfares, planning the itineraries and looking for great places to eat…. I am a planner by nature and so this job automatically falls to me. I can even spend time reading on the best way to pack!

I want to see the whole world and experience not onluy different cultures, but also unique experiences in each of the places we visit. We’ve not done a lot of travel till now, preferring to visit places in the region, rather than travelling afar, but now that BB & GG are all grown up, it’ll be fun to visit newer and more adventurous places without having anxious thoughts on nap and meal times!

One place I really want to visit is Europe. I love reading historical fiction and loads of these are set in Europe. I want to experience the Pantheon, the Tower of London, the castles of England, Scotland and Ireland, the Louvre and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Oh and the art in all the galleries!! All those places I have only read about, I want to see and breathe in the air.

I have always believed that travel gives you that edge of sophistication that nothing else does and it is for this reason that I want GG & BB to see as much of the world as we can afford before they are thrust upon the world. Travel is an education that no school can provide you, it teaches you to go out of your comfort zone and learn to get along with people from diverse cultures. Children grow up to be well rounded individuals with a global perspective which will stand them in good stead through their lives and in anything they choose to do in life. How better to learn about the beauty of this planet we call home than by travelling….

Gosh! All this talk of travel is making me itchy to go somewhere else. We do have our trip to India to look forward to in December, but now I really need to save up and go somewhere else….

I need to get going now or we’ll miss our flight back home, but once I am back home and have sorted the hundreds of photos we took, I’ll do a couple of posts on Penang.