In Continuum.

Here we are everybody, here we are at the end of the summer semester, 2009. We all know how it has been so far - half of it was wonderful, and half of it sucked. Every single semester, I book end it with two entries about the initial impression of the semester, and then how it was in hindsight. The truth is, though, the latter entry almost always differs greatly from the former entry in more ways than one. It is the first impression that lecturers always desperately want to polish up with the end of their shirts, always the impression that they want to retain in the minds of the students throughout the semester. Some does it very well, though most of them fail pretty miserably for the most part. They almost always change halfway throughout the semester, turning into something which they didn't start out as being. It is disappointing, and it is exactly that disappointment that makes the end result so, well, disappointing. You start out with a fairly decent impression of someone almost all the time, until halfway through when you realize that it was just a front put up by that someone to impress you somehow. That is not to say that the lecturers started out with impressive beginnings - they didn't. It's just that I didn't expect them to fall this low either.

As you guys know, the summer semester was split into two halves with two modules each. I've finished the first half with Lance and Michael, and I suppose I have given enough thoughts on them to leave them out of this entry altogether. However, I don't think that I have went in-depth on Yeap and Jenny at all, which is why I shall elaborate on some first impressions and how those came crashing to the ground through the semester. It'd probably have made the summer semester more tolerable if we had Lance for the first half of the semester and then Michael for the second half. It would have balanced out the dreadfulness of it all, instead of the giant pitfall that happened in between the two halves of the semester. It felt like skydiving from a plane without a parachute, or jumping off a cliff without a chord. It was the atmosphere to the rock bottom, and the pain was not easy on all of us. It probably felt like being smacked in the face by cactus or something, because I am pretty sure the lot of us still have thorns in our faces. Just remember how you must have blanked out when you turned over the first page of the last paper today. If you still feel a pinch in your heart and a small spark of anger in your mind, then the cactus has left its thorns in your skin.

So, I remember describing Yeap as an old lady of sorts. She started off the semester with a relatively good impression on the lot of us. Aside from all the horror stories that we have heard, she started off this semester with quite a bit of promise. No more assignments, no more presentations, and just two quizzes and two examinations. We looked at the course syllabus and breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that we'd get off easier than the last batch did in the spring. Of course, as the quizzes and the examinations came rolling in, we quickly realized that we were in the same sea of shit as the batch of students before, perhaps even worse, considering how our papers were worth more than before, since we were operating without written assignments this time. Personality wise, she started out as this kind and friendly old lady who doesn't really know when to stop talking. You know those friendly old lady you meet in the void deck, the kind that strikes up a random conversation about the weather with you for no apparent reasons. They are nice, and they are fun to talk to for about ten seconds until they start to ask the same questions over and over again. You start to want to leave, but you know that'd be rude, and the old lady looks lonely and cute. That is how Yeap is, only she doesn't have a hint of cute at all.

Yeap is an old lady with a pitchfork. She isn't the Devil, but she thinks that she could go chest to chest with him if given the chance. Her ego is probably going to crush the Devil himself, because it quite huge. In fact, she never really believes that she is wrong, and she can be wrong quite often in class. She'd say something ridiculous in class, argue her point, and then twist it to make it sound as if she has been agreeing with your point all along. Just ask Jeremy about what happened between him and her point about deviant behaviors, and you'd get my point. She doesn't accept mistakes, and she tends to put herself one step above everybody else on a different pedestal. She constantly showcases her past flames in class, always telling us how she told this person off, how she fought for what was rightfully hers, and all those little things that she said in the past deemed by herself to be particularly clever or smart. It isn't so much about the reality being the contrary, but the fact that she does the same thing all the time. Instead of calling herself a lecturer or a "facilitator" as many lecturers would like to be called, she calls herself an "academician", a word which must have been created by like-minded people such as herself.

She goes off on tangents a lot, always drifting off topic in class till the point whereby she doesn't remember what she was talking about before. She doesn't provide any slides for you to download from, which pretty much means that you are all on your own. Hints wise, she gives vague hints which are not really hints in the first place. She tells you what pages to study in a chapter, and you start circling the page numbers only to realize that it is practically the entire chapter altogether. She tests everything from the textbook, everything from the videos she show in class, and even the little things that she brings up in class that are usually drowned out amidst her tangent of irrelevant conversation topics about past conquests. She isn't a bad lecturer to be honest, but I do feel that she seems to have a very perverse and twisted way of testing the students. I dislike the way she requires us to memorize everything, though she would never ever admit to it. If you have sat through one of her papers, you'd know that most of the materials inside require you not to understand what you have learned, but to memorize what you have read. She doesn't like to know that she gives that kind of dead end questions, but that is the nature of her questions. Fill in the blanks with memory work, that's all that is.

I do admit that to some degree, it is purely because of the fact that I do not do well in her module. I mean, if I am doing well in a module, what reasons do I have to complain? Then again, I did very well in COM 300, and not for one day did I ever think that Bee Bee wasn't worth my complaining on the blog. Now that the semester has ended, I can safely say that I am not going to do well in the module at all, and I suppose that has got a little bit to contribute to the fact that I'm not a fan of Yeap at all. She is ruthless in a way, demanding too much and not exactly the best lecturer around. To tell you the truth, I think that her son, who came in to give a lecture once, is a better lecturer than her as a whole. From the two lectures, we could tell that his words were more convincing and persuasive, or at least more interesting and engaging. It becomes tiresome after some time, when you are staring at the exam paper and thinking to yourself that you have never read a certain concept before. It reminds me somewhat of the time in JC when I felt incredibly stupid about, well, everything. None of the concepts made any sense, and nothing that I wrote in the paper earned my any points. Like then, PSY 333 made me feel this way throughout the second half of the semester, but it's not like any of it matters at this point any longer.

Then we have Jenny, the lecturer whose name confused the hell out of us. One look at it on the course outline and we knew that she was from China somehow. However, with a name like that, we weren't exactly sure if her surname was "Chen" or "Ni". At any rate, I remember the way she literally skipped into class and started her own little introduction, and that little introduction was coupled by a couple of chinese words here and there - no big deal, of course. I mean, she is Chinese and she is from China, so there really isn't anything wrong with that concept at all, right? We were fine with her strange antics every once in a while, and her cheerful and enthusiastic teaching style gained a tiny bit of interest within me at the very beginning of things. That was, of course, until I took a look at the course syllabus and realized that the woman that was standing in front of me has set a goal that was virtually impossible for anybody to attain. We had 29th of June to 6th of August for that half of the semester, which pretty much translates to about five weeks of classes. She wanted to finish sixteen chapters within five weeks, something which no one has ever dared to attempt before. She seems to be living within this Communist mindset of work, work, work, work, work. She seems to believe in quantity over quality, and that is all on top of our finals, our mid-terms, and a group project presentation and written paper. Right from the beginning, I know this woman was asking for the world.

I think whining about the workload is somewhat natural, even if the lecturer is someone like, say, Julie Bowker. OK, maybe with Julie Bowker, I could make an exception just for her. And as for all the other lecturers, we have had many lecturers with a lot of workload, and yet that does not necessarily make them bad lecturers. What makes Jenny a lousy lecturer is the way she conducts her lessons. Obviously, she has never taught in a summer semester before, and she seems to believe that it should operate like an ordinary semester, and every single chapter should be taught - even the irrelevant ones. That is not to say the chapters were redundant, but it's just that we haven't got enough time to cover so much grounds within five weeks. Then again, as I mentioned, she seems to emphasize on quantity over quality, and has no quality control when it comes to her teaching styles at all. She speeds through chapters every class, sometimes taking two lessons to finish one chapter, and then sometimes taking one lesson to finish three at one goal. And, for the lessons that she does take her time, it isn't always about her teaching, but about us giving those pointless five minute speeches and those presentations. She has zero ability in time management, and I hated the way she refused to reduce the chapters.

I mean, one lesson before the finals, she still had two full chapters left to teach. Every single lesson, the students would try to ask if she could somehow cut down the number of chapters covered. Again, allow me to emphasize this: she wanted to teach sixteen chapters in five weeks. Anyway, it was clearly impossible for everybody to absorb every single detail in the textbook, but that was exactly what she required in her exams - details. Here's the thing, you should never expect a large quantity of materials thrown at the students within a compressed bit of a time and expect them to be able to ace everything, at least not the average students such as myself. It is even more frustrating how she response to our pleas to decrease the amount of chapters. We discussed it in class this one time, and someone from the back of the class suggested that maybe she could take away the chapters that aren't so important, like the history of Public Relations and the Research chapter, since we have done similar topics over a dozen times. She didn't want to, and continued to explain that she couldn't differentiate the importance of one chapter from the other - really? Then someone suggested that perhaps she should just test less chapters, and then she argued that she has already been very flexible with us.

Wait, let me get this straight. Her form of flexibility is this. When we saw in her course outline that the two examinations were going to stand for a whooping 70% of the entire grade, we asked her if she could decrease the weight of them. She considered, and eventually decreased just five percent from the mid-terms. Yeah, just five. Since then, she has been telling us how flexible she has been with us, when all she has done was to change the weight of the examinations. When asked what format we'd like the exams to be in, of course the lot of us demanded MCQs instead of anything else. It's not like she budged on that either, an insisted on a little bit of everything, which makes me wonder why she wanted our opinion on that in the first place. Then the mid-terms came, and then she reflected to the class that she was taking some time to mark the essay questions because there were too many of us, and our answers were too long. Even in the face of a wall of essay questions from us, she still didn't want to scrape that idea from the finals. She did give less of those questions, but she also set them so hard that the questions themselves could have shattered rocks. All the "as we have discussed" in class questions made me want to pull my hair out.

One more thing about Jenny - I think she is somewhat cunning. I think she is a nice person if she isn't a lecturer, because you can tell when you are talking to her candidly. She is nice, and her big laughs are rather interesting, though intimidating at times as she threatens to swallow you whole like an anaconda. Other than that, I think she is fine - until she starts speaking in class again. Jenny has a problem of sticking to English when she teaches in class, because she'd start speaking mandarin to us halfway through the class for some reason, supposedly to better explain a concept because she is better at mandarin instead. I understand if your second language isn't nearly as good as your first, and then sometimes you need to rely on your first language to help you out a little bit. However, let's be honest here: your English actually is pretty good. Other than your pronunciation problems like, pronouncing "McDonald" as "Madonna", you are pretty OK in every other field.

And there is a point whereby speaking too much mandarin in class becomes tiresome, especially in front of many minority students in the class, it becomes extremely rude. And, I also think that it is unforgivable to do such a thing as a lecturer no matter how many times you decide to apologize. I mean, as a lecturer, I always believe that the ability to communicate to your students is the most important. If you do not have the ability to translate your doctorate knowledge into discernible words, then you fail as a lecturer altogether. Dr. Hong came and went with indecipherable words, and then you come along with a completely different language and dialect for the minority students, that is RUDE. It pissed off a lot of minority students, but it's not like she stopped doing it either. She even incorporate chinese into her presentation slides, with a paragraph of English alongside a paragraph of Chinese - what's up with that? The truth is, Singapore isn't exactly a country with a lot of decent Chinese speaking people, even if the majority of the students here are Chinese. Let's be honest my friends, most Singaporean's mandarin probably goes as far as ordering food at a hawker center. Anything academic in nature and written in Chinese, even I have no idea what is going on.

So, that is my overall thought about the summer semester. The first half was wonderful, with Lance and Michael at the helms for the most part. Then the first half ended and the second half started, and you start to feel disappointed at the quality of lecturers brought in by the school. The truth is, and this is not in any effort to be racist, it just seems that Asian lecturers tend to be more uptight and, well, just plain average or bad. It's not that I haven't loved any Asian lecturers though, because my favorite lecturer of all time is still Nina from India. Yet, even the worst lecturer from across the Pacific (Sachs) still kicked quite a lot of ass. I have no idea why that is the case for Asian lecturers, and the way that the conduct their classes in general. Perhaps it is the culture, or the way that our own education brought us up to be this way. It is difficult to find out the real reason I suppose, and I am just somewhat glad that I know that next semester, I am going to get all American lecturers. I'm not saying that all of them are going to be awesome like Julie Bowker, but at least I know the worst is still going to be pretty OK in my own standards.