Teaching my daughter... on writing..

The most important part of fatherhood is having the patience to sit down and go through the school work with my young.  I admit that I am generally the less patient "teacher" than my wife.  Even so, I tried to spend a little more time with my young and teach them the technique of making story telling a little more interesting and leading, apart from being focused on being grammatically correct.

Pascal's Bad Day

A bright and sunny morning, Pascal was whistling with joy while walking down the corridor towards his classroom.  He was holding on to his painting that he took the whole of last night to draw.  While he was on his way, he met the two notorious school bullies, Jonathan and Tommy.  These bullies often get into fights and they will bully younger pupils in school.  They were scolded by the teachers so often that Pascal thought they have gotten used to it.  As he walked past them, they suddenly turned around and snatched Pascal's painting away.  They make fun of the painting and started laughing at how ugly the painting was.  To make things worse, they threw the painting on the floor and started stepping on it.  Pascal was fuming mad and wanted to hit them, but he held back as it was against the school rules and they were much stronger. When they felt that it was tattered enough, they ran back to their classroom and continue to make fun of Pascal.  Pascal picked up the tattered painting with tears in his eyes and make his way back to the classroom.

The school bell rung.  It was time to go home.  All of the pupils were so happy to go home except for Pascal.  Pascal took longer than usual to reach home.  He was hurt and upset.  As he opened the door of his home, his father saw his teary eyes.  His father brought him to the sofa and asked, "Pascal, what happened to you?" Pascal was crying as he told his father about the incident.  His father comforted him and advised him to inform his teacher the next day.  Pascal thought for a while and got better.  He wiped his tears and agreed with his father.

The next day, Pascal told his form teacher about the incident and what the bullies had done to him.  The moment the teacher heard about their names, she shook her head.  Both Jonathan and Tommy were her ex-pupils and she could understand the pain Pascal had went through.  She comforted Pascal and assured him that she will take them to task.  

"Ring!!" The assembly bell went off and all of the pupils rushed to the hall for assembly.  The teacher went onto the stage and called out the names of the two bullies on stage.  Jonathan and Tommy walked up the stage and hung their head low in fear.  On the stage, the two of them admitted to the bully they did to Pascal.  The teacher reprimanded them in front of the whole school and reminded all that their actions were wrong.  Jonathan and Tommy took the microphone and apologised to Pascal and promised that they will not bully other pupils again.

Fathering vs Mothering.. (Parenthood)

I have hesitated on many occasions to blog about my parenthood.... My little princesses have grown - they are nine and seven now. I have little parenting concerns for my elder when it comes to being independent, school work and working hard for what she wants. Even so, I have several disagreements with my queen on how we raise our princesses.  Maybe because of my military upbringing, a keen believer of late Mr Lee and a kind of lazing Father.. I simply do not believe in "doing for them".

Many a times, I noticed my Queen, MIL and even my parents showering help (concerns) and taking care of things for them. I disagree. They have to learn to be responsible for whatever they do, from young. Sadly to me, this also slowly became the crux of our constant disagreements. I learn to slowly gave in but not giving up my beliefs. I no longer interfere with their approach, but when its my turn, I will do it my way.

My second princess (yes, I just got a seven months old princess) is quite an opposite to my elder.  She always blame verbally on why sister did not guide her on her school work, waiting for food to be on the table, even waiting for my domestic helper to help her out on her normal routine such as bathing.  Yes, my queen disagree on many of my observations, but surely she is much less independent, weaker in school work and less said about her perseverance to complete her school work - timely.

Today, I was unsurprisingly taken aback by my queen. My second princess moved the dining chair to the study table, knocked the PC over and in the process crack the screen - its quite a bad knock and PC screen is gone.  Instead of educating my young, she comforted her - of course, no point screaming around to make her cry even louder. But haise.. Interestingly, she went on to blame me for insisting her to "do things in her own" and this happened.. She thereafter instructing the domestic helper to help my kid carry the chair or pass her the office chair on roller.  I was annoyed.. "the more she fall, the more she need to learn to stand on her own..." why must we take over her task so that it is accident free? It is the beginning of a silent protest.. 😳

Picture insert from anti aging research: http://www.antiagingresearch.com/fathering.shtml

New Year... looking back..

It's been a while since I last blogged.  Ironically, the vocal voice inside did not become the force in my mind to pen my thoughts in controversies and eventful 2014.  The weakening performance of our own "world class" opposition to the unfortunate disappearance of MH370 does not go down well. Ahem, cine to think of it, associating bad air days with Malaysia only seems logical. MH17 was another Malaysia air disaster.  Even the congested air space could not save them from that fate.  The latest, AirAsia, a Malaysia based airline, became the latest air victim. Life is fragile.

This led me to think further, think harder to see if I had missed anything or had conveniently took things for granted for past year or years.  With Chinese New Year around the corner, it just occurred to me that I had only visited my grandmother once a year, and that's CNY.  Reduced to a mere one day from spending weeks during childhood.  Things had changed... after marriage.  I had spent more of my CNY in Malaysia than ever before. Comparatively, I just had to, I visited my partner's grandmother far more often than I do for my own. Sadly, I think she doesn't agree with this. 

In me, I treasure kinship deeply.  And it is because of this emotional attachment that I get very sensitive over reactions with regards to this.  After so many years of marriage, I still do not get the feeling that my partner understands this.  I can totally appreciate that she do not get overly sensitive on this since she could totally forget her parents' birthdays or even belittling the celebrations process, although this is something I do not agree.  Regardless, I guess, I tried to talk.  But nope. She is not listening and jumps to conclusions before I can broach the matter further.  I chose to believe that taking a step back would create the space for harmony. But, this remains as a potential trigger for divorce.

End of the Second Trimester of my Masters in Management

 

Today marks the last day of Trimester 2 of my Masters programme in management.  I guess it is timely to mark my learning and reflect what I had gained in this short 3 1/2 months. 

 

First, finance.  I guess that it is part of corporate world that a senior executive would at least need to be aware of the various finance tools used in the industry.  Such as the various capital structure, their modus operandi and the various type of finance leverage such as debts (loans and bonds) to increase the value of the firm.  Well, this is probably not the most interesting module. There are too many financial tools, coupled with the complexity of managing risks at both the firm risk appetite and market risk.  Although said, I am glad to be wiser in finance and hopefully it will come handy when the day I call quits in the force. 

Second, marketing.  Before this, my perception of marketing is just about the four Ps – Product, price, promotion and place.  There is more to it here.  This module gave a broader impression from understanding the business landscape to “marketing” the product and finally using a scorecard to check the progress and possibly re-evaluate the options.  Furthermore, dissecting marketing to examine the consumers sentiments, culture and competitions made it very applicable to practical every stage of life too.  Given that we are a conscript military, I find their model so applicable to the force.  That is to understand the change in social-cultural landscape and match it to our organisational capabilities, so that we can more effectively match the needs and wants of the the clients (Citizen soldiers).  It just need a little bit more time to examine with survey, studies and analysis.

Third, strategy implementation: organisational design.  This focuses on the idea of holistic planning of the processes in implementing strategy.  Strategy is about moving the force ahead in the most practical way so that we maintain relevance and keep our lead. The more pressing issue that I had experienced in the force is the friction during implementation.  What this module had shown what we had lacked during transformation is the communication.  There are various levels of “managers” such as higher management of the HQ to the PCs on the ground.  To reduce the level of friction is communication and this is emphasised by the theories.  The communication must be a deliberately planned to reach out to every “parts” that is affected by the change.  Next is the planning for the people.  People is the key to success or failure of implementation.  Other than create “buy-in’, setting the condition right for them to succeed is also very important.  To smoothen the challenge, they must be properly or sufficiently equipped to do their job.  This can be done through training courses and seminar for cross-sharing.  Through these, the force must focus to change the behaviour of the people. This will in turn shape the culture that the strategy set out to achieve in the long run.

Fourth is about crisis management. I guess the corporate world is not as in tune as us.  Crisis management module is more of a replica of what I had been doing in the force, organising large scale events such as Army Half-Marathon (AHM) and National Day Parade (NDP).  We would start by planning possible scenarios that could happen and running through table top exercise (rehearsal in theories) to ensure that every key stakeholders knows what to do during crisis and contingency planning if things happened.  And well, this is one module I breeze through with ease.

Lastly, time.  Studies gave me more personal and family time than work.  It also gave me more time to reflect what I really want in life.  Maybe it is not exactly a good offer by the force as it gave us more time to reflect and reconsider our options.  In fact, most of us are tinkering with ideas of leaving at the end of the bond.  Well, three years is a reasonably long time to reshape our thinking and priorities in life.

Connecting the young

I have been contemplating whether I should write this note for quite a while, not until I read these Facebook posts.

I had read this interesting read from my friend's wall post, 90 reasons why you secretly fancy Mr Lee Kuan Yew,  (http://mothership.sg/2013/09/90-reasons-fancy-lee-kuan-yew/).  While there are a few insignificant snapshots about the man, there are important historical timeline that most of the younger Singaporeans would not know.  At the same time, there is this post surfaced on "The Real Singapore", I have lost my respect for Lee Kuan Yew (http://therealsingapore.com/content/i-have-lost-my-respect-lee-kuan-yew).  This lady premises her “anger” on his draconian style and argues that his policies had left people behind as the nation progresses.

Emeritus MM Lee celebrated his big 90th birthday on 16 Sep 2013.  The two stories above are definitely one of the many mixed responses you can read from the internet, especially from Facebook; ranging from sending him well wishes to taking pot shots at unpopular policies he had made during his time as premier.  More importantly, from these “trolls”, are people still connected to reality? After spending more than half of this year reading more on geo-political issues, our nation’s vulnerability and dependency on global success became more pronounced to me. I observed. There is a growing trend of young people, typically under age 20, make nasty remarks about our political leaders, criticising policies and appears less sensitive and aware of our vulnerabilities. One example: I came across a post sometime back on one young lady remarking that our low fertility was a result of senior Lee’s policy mis-calculation in the 1960s; stop at two. I asked myself if this is indeed valid. Going back in time, Singapore was undergoing a turbulent period after independence; facing tremendous pressure to feed her people, get her people jobs through industrialisation. We have no water, no food, no natural resources and not even a hinterland we could lean on. Could we be sure that an empty Singapore be an attractive place for companies to base in? Can we cope with rapid population growth with economic uncertainty? Are we prepared to cope with high unemployment? Stop at two policy sounds absolute reasonable at that snapshot.

The disconnection amongst the young is an issue and an important one. More importantly, the deeper question is how we arrived to such state. It may be a random snapshot from social media that represent the minority, for many would argue that the unhappy group are most vocal. But, to be connected, one needs to be informed. Thus, the vocal noise has the potential to sway the uninformed. Propaganda one may call, educating the next generation from young is important. I applaud the move to remove entrance fees for local museums for us as parents and seniors to educate the young through feel and touch. Our Singapore Conversation (OSC) serving as a viable avenue to reach out to the people, although only to the willing ones. Whether through educational institutions or public engagement, our people especially the young would need to be more aware and sensitive to our vulnerabilities. For sure, they must not grow up thinking that water is a given, job is a given and peace is a given. It is therefore onus on us, ordinary citizens, to do our part to understand the challenges, keeping abreast with the global threats and opportunities, share truthful perspectives to counter falsified trolls, and keeping our young aware and informed.

 

 

Picture from Straits Times, Jimmy Chan

Our Singapore Conversation… Is it??

Picture from www.oursgconversation.sg

 

Re: PSLE tweaks among impending policy changes as OSC ends

The government had recently concluded the year-long Our Singapore Conversation (OSC).   The 5 main ‘distilled’ concerns from OSC are

(1) “Opportunities” in a competitive economy

(2) “Assurance” that housing and affordable healthcare will always be within reach

(3) “Purpose” in lives that celebrate achievements beyond the economic, and that value shared memories and heritage spaces

(4) “Spirit” in communities that organise ground-up initiatives and take care of their most disadvantaged; and

(5) “Trust” between the Government and the people, as well as among Singaporeans.

 

The more intriguing question is that was these not in the mind of the government prior to 2011 elections?  How inclusive is this conversation actually? And many disgruntled commoners voice their tone?

 

While it is easy for armchair critics to question the fundamentals behind this, at least the government had done post-election mortem and has taken active steps to “hear” us.  Ain’t this what democracy is all about?  Unfortunately, armchair critics does not seemed satisfied with this effort and continue their trolls on social media platforms.  I have heard “this is just a show”, “they aint listening even with OSC”, “Why would I need to spend time participating in OS when they are paid millions?”.  I wonder..  On one hand, people are disgruntled with the government for not listening to us, going for economic growth at all cost, rising costs and not paying enough attention to the less fortunate families. On the other hand, they refused participate in OSC to voice their alternate opinions and trashed OSC as a PR effort.  So what is good?  Free roofs, free meal vouchers at luxurious restaurants, executive jobs with no specific skill set required may be the only solution to keep these trolls quiet. 

 

It is disturbing to read posts on FB, especially therealsingapore (Sometimes I really question if they are indeed the real Singapore), rudely abusing politicians.  I am no big fan of any political party, but pragmatically, this is our country, our nation. And, it does not serve any good to nation building with trolls tearing the harmony that we had painstakingly built apart.

48 years of miracle

We depends on others for food. We depends on other for water. We depends on others for sand. But yet, even as we depends on others on more simple but yet important resources, we have made our nation vibrant, relevant and successful for the past 48 miracle years.

We could have been maids. We could have been construction workers. We could have been factory line workers. We could have been depending on the success of other countries to feed our family and find simple happiness in life. But yet, we find ourselves earning more than a lot more countries who are far richer in resources for the past 48 miracle years.

We could have been fighting among races. We could have been growing ourselves in a single race society. We could have adopted the old British model of one race superiority. But yet, we chose to give all equal opportunity regardless of race, language or religion for the past 48 miracle years.

Today, we must not forget how we as a nation arrive to what we are today; how we grew from immigrants to a multi-racial society; how our visionary leaders brought us from a third world country to first within one generation; how we prospered to a model that many other countries wished to learn from.

So today, let us come together to celebrate our success, our happiness, our prosperity and our 48 years of miracle. Happy 48th National Day!!'