Perfect Chemistry

 

By Jason Stephens

Earlier this year, local papers were full of horrified reports of cheating in an affluent Silicon Valley high school. Stories like this are a regular occurrence. Last year cheating at the University of Virginia made headlines, and before that, it was the military academies.

Adults always seem shocked and surprised to learn of cheating, especially in high-achieving and high-socioeconomic settings. They shouldn't be so surprised. Research on cheating has shown over and over that most students do cheat, at least some of the time. Research in high schools shows that two thirds of students cheat on tests, and 90 percent cheat on homework. The figures are almost as high among college students. Furthermore, it is clear that rates of cheating have gone up over the past three decades.

Why? Do students fail to understand that cheating is wrong? Well, yes and no. In a recent study of high school students that I conducted, many students acknowledged that cheating is wrong but admitted they do it anyway, seemingly without much remorse. Jane, a tenth-grade honors student, is typical of these students:

Like people have morals, they don't always go by them. ... So I mean, even if you get that test and you're like, "Oh yeah, I cheated on this test," it doesn't lessen that grade. It says an A on the paper and you don't go, "Oh, but I cheated." You're just kind of like, "Hey, I got that A." So it doesn't really matter necessarily, if it has to do with your morals or anything, you just kind of do it.

Like Jane, other students in the study said that they cheat for simple, pragmatic reasons—to get high grades and because they don't have time to do the work carefully. Especially for college-bound students, the pressure for grades is real. According to the Higher Education Research Institute's annual survey, 47 percent of incoming college freshmen in 2003 reported having earned an A average in high school. As Jane put it:

It's not always necessary (to cheat). I guess if you already have straight A's, then why cheat? But yet, we still seem to do it. It's kind of like insurance, like you feel better, you feel safer, if you do it. ... Then I will have that 95 instead of like the 90, because that's almost like a B or something.

But despite the pressure for consistently high grades, students don't generally cheat in all of their classes. And somewhat surprisingly, it is not the difficulty of the course that predicts in which classes they are more likely to cheat. Instead, I found that high school students cheat more when they see the teacher as less fair and caring and when their motivation in the course is more focused on grades and less on learning and understanding. At least in these classes, they can justify cheating. They don't claim it is morally acceptable, but they don't seem to feel that it really matters if they cheat under these circumstances.

In most studies of cheating, the researcher decides which behaviors constitute cheating, and students are only asked to report how often they engage in those behaviors. In my survey of high school students, I asked them to report both their level of engagement in a set of 12 "academic behaviors," as well as their beliefs concerning whether or not those behaviors were "cheating." Not surprisingly, the vast majority (85 percent or more) indicated that behaviors such as "copying from another student during a test" and "using banned crib notes or cheat sheets during a test" were cheating. However, only 18 percent believed that "working on an assignment with other students when the teacher asked for individual work" was cheating. Subsequent interviews with a small sub-sample of these students revealed that students regarded this forbidden collaboration as furthering their knowledge and understanding, and therefore saw it as an act of learning rather than a form of cheating. These findings suggest that students make a distinction between behaviors that are overtly dishonest (such as copying the work of another, which effectively serves to misrepresent one's state of knowledge) and behaviors that are not inherently dishonest (such as working with others, which can serve to enrich one's interpersonal skills and academic learning). Educators, too, should be cognizant of this distinction and be judicious in prohibiting collaboration.

With this pervasiveness of acceptance by students, is it acceptable to us as a society to tacitly accept cheating as a fact of life and not be so shocked when it comes to light? I don't think so. Cutting corners and compromising principles are habit-forming. They don't stop at graduation, as we have seen in recent scandals in business and journalism. And cheating or cutting corners in one's professional or personal life can cause real damage—both to oneself and to others. We need to care about it.

And I believe we can do something about it. The best ways to reduce cheating are all about good teaching. In fact, if efforts to deal with cheating don't emerge from efforts to educate, they won't work—at least not when vigilance is reduced. These suggestions are easier said than done, but I believe they point in the right direction, both for academic integrity and for learning more generally.

• Help students understand the value of what they're being asked to learn by creating learning experiences that connect with their interests and have real-world relevance.
• Consider whether some of the rules that are frequently broken are arbitrary or unnecessarily constraining. For example, is individual effort on homework always so important? Given the evidence that collaboration in doing homework supports learning, it doesn't seem so.
• As much as possible, connect assessment integrally with learning. Create assessments that are fair and meaningful representations of what students should have learned. Make sure assessments provide informative feedback and thus contribute to improved performance. When possible, individualize evaluations of students' progress and offer them privately. Avoid practices that invite social comparisons of performance.
• Give students images of people who don't cut corners: scientists who discover things they don't expect because they approach their work with an impeccable respect for truth and a genuinely open mind; business people who exemplify integrity even when it seems like it might cost them something. But don't preach. Take seriously the fact that, in some contexts, being consistently honest can be hard.

Finally, as educators, we must do our best to exemplify intellectual integrity ourselves—in everything from how we treat students and each other to how we approach the subject matter, to how we approach mandatory high stakes testing to how we think and talk about politics. We need to look for ways to make deep and searching honesty both palpable and attractive. 

Excellence: An Immodest Proposal Lee S. Shulman Recently, I participated in a site visit to the teaching hospital of a major American medical school. These visits are an integral part of the Carnegie Foundation's ten-year program of research on how lawyers, engineers, clergy, school teachers, nurses, and physicians are taught and how they learn. On this visit, I joined a team of students and faculty in the daily ritual of clinical rounds. I use the term "ritual" quite precisely: the clinical-rounds team follows the same pedagogical pattern daily as it moves from patient to patient and reviews the status of each. The team I observed included a chief resident, a third-year resident, two first-year residents, two third-year medical students beginning their internal medicine rotation, and a pharmacy student on internship. Each of seven patients comprised a "lesson" within a unit of instruction. We stopped outside every room. The resident or medical student responsible for that patient gave a report that followed a strict outline. We talked about what had changed from the previous day. Patients ranged from someone who had been in the intensive care unit for less than twenty-four hours to one who had been in a coma for thirty days. After thirty days of clinical investigation, the causes of this patient's condition were still unknown. Next, the chief resident discussed what had occurred during the rounds with the third-year resident in a preceptor interaction, essentially like a supervising teacher with a student teacher. They reviewed how rounds had gone pedagogically and talked about what other questions one might have asked, what other aspects of patients' conditions one might have noted, and how well patients were managed and whether to do something different. We then moved to teaching rounds, in which the chief resident presented a didactic seminar on pulmonary function tests. The day ended with “M&M” (Morbidity and Mortality), otherwise known as, "Where Did We Screw Up and What Can We Learn from It?" Pretty much the same group from morning rounds reconvened, joined by other faculty. Their goal was quality assurance. They reviewed at an institutional level one of their most persistent failures, namely the unacceptably high infection rate in the intensive care unit, primarily associated with running central lines into arteries (a procedure some readers will know in detail from Atul Gawande's wonderful book about the training of surgeons, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science.) Data indicated that the infection rate is higher under certain circumstances, lower under others. Everyone in the system was learning. In fact, an assistant professor ran the session, with full professors learning alongside third-year clerks. This kind of communal questioning and learning is compelling. Where in higher education more generally do we find an institutional pressure to come together and ask why students are not learning mathematics or economics well, and what to do institutionally about that? What I watched at this teaching hospital was an institution actively investigating the quality of its work, knowing, caring, and operating corporately to improve and learn from its collective experience. This is an important model for the rest of higher education. But it was a model not only of a powerful pedagogical process but of something else—something we see far too seldom in education. During the last part of this Morbidity and Mortality conference, the facilitator noted that every major hospital has a problem with high infection rates in ICU's associated with running central lines, especially in the femoral artery. Unfortunately, it's easiest for medical practitioners to run a line in the femoral artery. (Perhaps running femoral lines is analogous to running lecture courses; they're not necessarily the most effective, but they deliver the goods to the largest number at the lowest cost.) In any case, the facilitator mentioned that Johns Hopkins had decided that the high infection rates were unacceptable. The medical school dean and the university president met with the teaching hospital staff and decided they knew enough to approach a zero percent rate of infection. The problem was not absence of knowledge of best practice, but absence of discipline and commitment to apply that knowledge. Therefore, they developed a rigorous protocol for running central lines. The protocol involves things such as how carefully and frequently hands are washed, and not making things easier on oneself by using the same line to draw blood and to deliver medication because the odds for an infection zoom up every time that happens. Nurses enforce the protocol and oversee each procedure, and nurses are empowered to abort a procedure as soon as they see protocol being violated, whether by an intern or by the department chair. Early on in this new routine, every nurse was handed two phone numbers—the home phones of the medical school dean and the university president—and told that if a physician didn't follow protocol and refused to abort the procedure, they were to phone one of these numbers, even at 3 a.m. That only happened once. The infection rate at Johns Hopkins for that procedure is now approaching zero. Like infection rates, the failures of education are often procedural. In the M&M conference, the discussion of acceptable levels of infection sounded like arguments about acceptable levels of student failure. If one-third of students drop out in the first year, some may be ready to claim that those students simply shouldn't have entered college. What if a hospital said that if it lost a third of its patients, those patients never should have been admitted because they were too sick? Faculty and teaching institutions face many impediments, just like physicians; the conditions and capabilities of our students are often unknown. But what if at some universities the president was called every time a student failed? This proposal sounds crazy, I know, but that's just the point. We're too comfortable with our failures; we take them for granted. The good news is that we can do much better. We know a great deal today about how to organize our institutions and classrooms so that students not only stay but achieve at high levels, and research in the cognitive sciences and other fields provides grist for further improvements. I know we lack the resources. I know we lack the administrative and policy support. I know that some students we inherit are already deeply wounded. Nevertheless, we need to ask much more of ourselves. Education is no place for modest ambitions.

http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/perspectives/sub.asp?key=245&subkey=2483

Imagine a patient wheeled into an emergency room after a massive coronary. The attending physician examines him and declares that the heart attack, while serious, is appropriate for treatment. "Our policy is to allocate four days for the treatment of such conditions," she states. "What if that isn't enough time for the required treatment to have an effect?" "We'll just have to give your infarct a C- and move you out."

Is that as crazy as it sounds? Of course it is. But it's also the way we design and manage much of our educational system—It's all about time!

As a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the early 1960s, I worked closely with Benjamin Bloom, who is best known for the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. We were re-analyzing longitudinal data sets that tracked the physical, intellectual and educational development of youngsters from early childhood to young adulthood. We were eager to understand what kinds of interventions, at what points in a child's life, would be most effective in improving growth and development, both physically and cognitively. Bloom's work was one of the major influences on the development of the federal Head Start program (and on me, a grateful and impressionable graduate student). He remained interested in the timing and quality of educational interventions until the end of his career.

After earning my doctorate and becoming a faculty member myself, I scheduled visits with Bloom at least once a year just to touch base. I recall a visit sometime around 1968; I was eager to tell him about my own work at the time, a study of how physicians make difficult diagnoses. And what I remember very clearly is that I got about three minutes into my story when Bloom jumped to his feet (was it something I said?), and exclaimed, "Lee! There's something else we must talk about." He had been reading the work of the psychologist of language John Carroll and his model of school learning. He agreed with Carroll's conclusion that the greatest barrier to student learning is the insane way in which we use time. Bloom proclaimed, "It's all about time!"

The reason students fail, Bloom proceeded to explain, is not that they're not smart. It's that they need more time to succeed, and time is precisely what educators fail to give them. What had become increasingly clear to him is that nearly anybody can learn nearly anything given enough time. He noted that what we've done instead, is create a system of schooling that guarantees that only a tiny fraction of our students ever achieve the highest levels of success. Our fundamental error, according to Bloom (and John Carroll before him), is that we treat time as a constant and permit achievement to vary. Bloom argued that we must begin to treat achievement as a constant while we design time to be variable.

This idea struck Bloom like a lightning bolt. He proposed a veritable Copernican revolution in our conception of the relationship between time and learning. Time must be permitted to vary in the interests of maximizing learning. Education cannot be treated like a football game with only 60 minutes of playing time.

The Carnegie Foundation is currently involved in a project with California community colleges committed to improving the success of students who are underprepared to succeed in college-level courses. We're working with faculty to identify the most powerful interventions. The failure rate in these "developmental" courses is stunningly high. Far too many students enter the revolving door of developmental education and never succeed in moving on to credit-bearing courses. The project is both inspiring and daunting, and it's got me thinking about Bloom's point as a different way to think about student success. Rather than treating time as fixed and success as variable—the usual formula in our educational system—I believe we need to initiate a reform that begins by reversing the two. Otherwise, we are destined to guarantee that student success rates look just like a normal curve or worse, like a skewed distribution in which only a small number actually achieve sufficiently to succeed.

Bloom's point, and mine, is that the normal curve ought to be emblazoned on the hearts of every teacher as a symbol of failure rather than as a representation of natural law. Learning should never result in a normal curve. It should result in a kind of "J curve" in which most students end up clustered at the successful end of the continuum. And the only way that can happen is if we permit time to vary.

Bloom's answer to this realization was to spend the next 15 years developing an approach called "mastery learning." Learning for mastery was Bloom's attempt to take these ideas and work with educators all across the country to design programs of instruction where success was fixed, where time was variable, where the quality of instruction was modified, adapted and redesigned to insure that students experienced enough success to persist in their efforts.

I'm not suggesting we revive the somewhat dormant methods of mastery learning. (Its rise and fall is another story altogether.) The notion that a single predetermined level of mastery for all students in all courses is problematic. We can't increase time without limits for all students and all subjects. And time alone cannot succeed without also improving the quality of instruction and student persistence. But I am suggesting that the most powerful approaches to learning, especially to the learning of students who have not been well served by the educational system and who therefore find themselves in "developmental" courses, means being willing to think differently about the relationship between time and achievement. And once you break the shackles of time, you will find yourself imagining ways to improve teaching, learning, student motivation and course design that can make a real difference. I'll talk a bit about those differences in next month's Perspectives.

this hols can be said to be a very busy one as i am involved in various school trips... after a year of running overseas comm service projects, i will move on to running outdoor stuff... my tour agency service has really expanded.

10-21 nov
zaozhuang, shandong, china
think for this china project, i am really grateful for the wonderful partnering organisation. they are really concern about our welfare and safety.. providing us with gloves and face mask and bringing us to see the doc when needed... Peter also specially asked the teachers in the school to cook dishes with no chilli and no MSG for us... He is also one who is aware of the need for learning and has specially arranged many learning moments for the students. one of the student decided to ask her cc to carry out a project with them next year... China is a rapidly growing country and their desire for progress and changes is pushing them towards rapid improvement. one cannot fault them for their brash behaviour as competition is really intense back home...

this trip can be seen as the most physically taxing and one where the most number of kids fell ill due to the cold weather... i think too many such trips can be draining. if you are always leading or organising it... i think it will come to a point of becoming a been there done that kind of feeling.... to rekindle my enthusiasm and learn some new stuff, i decide to sign up for a programme to india in dec. the feeling of been a participant and to plan for all the nitty gritty can be fun and refreshing :) many times when i see the students plan for their stuff, i feel like joining too... but i need to hold back as this is their project. it could be their only chance of experiencing something like this and i do not one to deprive them of the chance to go through the whole process of planning for the project... so now that i have joined a project to india, i can participate in the planning process and enjoy the fun once again :)


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24-30 nov
mount kinabalu in sabah, malaysia
for this project, i am only the second IC and so can take a back seat in the planning too :) as the second ic, i can be more involved with the kids and not be so involved in the admin stuff... As the last man in the team, i can also take my time and talk to the pple at the back and learn more about them... see the scenery and also hear some of their randomn jokes and nonsense..

we are rather unlucky as we faced bad weather gg up to pendant hut. there is a passing typhoon some where in philipines and we could not go according to the planned itinerary. so we stayed behind for a day on the hut and learnt how to do via ferrata and also rest... as i only had 2 days in between my china and mt k trip, i am super unprepared for it... i did not bring enough warm clothes and ended up chattering half the time in the hut... it does not help that my jacket is not waterproof and my clothes got wet... but the consolation lies in good company and good food cooked by us :) i think it is in extreme weather that allows the warmth of humanity to shine through... the team bonded well together and i think the learning will not have been as significant if not for the weather. up in the sayat sayat hut, we had to write a letter to ourselves and have some solo time. it was a good time to reflect upon my life too and take stock of what have been done :)

i tried exploring the plateau using via ferrata.. something like rock climbing but it has all the ropes and rungs to help you. with wind speed blowing at 10 knots, most of the time we are hanging for dear life and trying to inch forward when the wind die down. miraculously we managed to go up and survived. blame it on my lack of experience. but i feel proud of the students for climbing up to the peak. i was really worried that some of them will experience bad AMS. but the group managed to reach low's peak TOGETHER. Lot's of good leadership and personal development was seen in this trip.

Despite the success of the trip, it has actually made me more cautious. especially when i came back to learn that a student had died climbing kota tinggi and the unfortunate dragonboat incident... i know that i am the careful kind, even though my colleagues who is much more experienced than me is keen on bringing students to try more challenging stuff, i still feel that in many ways they are still young and inexperienced. This trip is usually the first trekking expedition for many of them and as seen from the trip, many are inexperienced in terms of packing as well as taking care of themselves. After the trip, i have also realised the importance of pre trip planning and preparation in terms of fitness and gear check. I think like one of the experienced outdoor teacher in my school, the more experiences you obtain, the more careful one become...

I wonder what trips will take place next year... but i know that the experience of this trip will constantly remind me of the points i need to keep in mind when planning...

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1-2 dec
batu pahat

took a bus up to JB to attend sueing's wedding with joan and fy! this is my personal trip and it felt good to go travelling without bringing students along w u :) just after the checkpoint, the bus broke down. =( my instinct was to call and check out what has happened. but as i am on a holiday, i decided to take it easy and let them take their time to repair and wait for further instructions... in the end a bus came and pick us up to ayer hitam and after waiting we finally got another bus to BP.

we had dinner buffet at sueing's place and after that planned how we are gg to bully the groom :) early the next day, we arrived at sueing's place to bully the groom. there were many rounds, such as he had to go to ask a stranger for a wedding gift early in the morning, fill a large heart shape with kisses, sing and dance, and also declare his love for her :)

after the busy morning ended, we had a short break and went to a shopping centre near our hotel for some shopping. the wedding lunch is really special too and there was man tou and curry which is really nice. the relatives also took turn to go on stage to sing! Finally, it was time to go home. we went to the bus station to change our ticket to an earlier time and we managed to get back must earlier than planned! Yup, although we did not get off to a good start, we had a good end to the wedding celebration :)

my graduating class on our last day together... having gone through graduation night and seen how youthful they had looked in jc1, i think many of them have matured over these 2 years and have grown in many aspects of their lives... i think it is the last time i will see many of them... until they come back next year to collect their results... all the best to all of them :)



from his look, i think most can guess what kind of student he is ;)


sun rise from my home...these few days, at about 6.50 am, you can see the sun break out of the horizon and arise to brighten the sky...


changing landscape...


two uncles that i met when i went trekking at bukit timah...btw he wrote the poem on kitchen towel!

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i think many times i try to be ignorant of things that are happening around me so that my life will be much simpler ... very Ah Q of me

Chek Jawa

went with some frens to chek jawa again but it was high tide again :(


jelly fish


caterpillar





outside the little environmentally friendly house on ubin

yellow ribbon art project
i think some of the paintings were very well done and in a way was able to reflect the feelings of the artist...

this is the last term for the kids and they are now busy preparing for their examination...

most of them have started to work hard for their final examination and sometimes i feel like telling them... zao zhi ru chi he bi dang chu... some of them tells me that they want to create a miracle and i am heartened by their positive thinking.... however, having gone through one batch of students, i am more of a realist .... i really do hope that such miracles can occur.

"the ability to learn is a skill,
the willingness to learn is a choice"

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i think in the process i have also learnt to take the initiative in things... things do not just happen. I can't take it for granted that others will do what they are required to do and learn what is necessary...
Conscious efforts need to be put in for the transfer of knowledge and learning points to take place...

last time i used to dislike reflection activities but i think that is because i am one who is self reflective .... but there are those out there who are not introspective individuals and maybe, they will benefit from reflection sessions where the objectives are made explicit and they are guided as to how they can reflect and be sensitive to the events around them...

why do i like to carry out overseas community projects for students? maybe i see that some of them do benefit from such experiences... be it becoming more sensitive, resilient or confident individuals... such projects are a good platform for students to develop their character and team working dynamics...

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the other time i attended a short meeting and they shared about character education. Performance and moral character. I think in a way this have helped me to analyse student problems in a different light... there are those who are really driven to achieve performance in their academic but neglect their moral character developments...
:(

i hope this information will allow me to be a better CT next year :)

We celebrated teachers day and this was the cake given to us by council :) It is kind of cute. Teachers' day was fun and i think it is the third time i am celebrating this already ... glad to see my ex students come back to see me and of the gifts that i have received... i treasure that cards most.




my lion wearing the college tee shirt :) i kind of like this lion :)




MAF! I really liked the backdrop and set up this year. The backdrop looked like a feng shui hua. The performances were quite well done too. And the whole ambience is really heartwarming and relaxing :) Oh and the highlight is always to see my ex students come back and have fun together :) Felt that it is quite apt that the theme is "yuan"- origin. No matter where we go from here, we will alway remember where we came from.




the maf lights is pretty too. last year's event was hindered by the haze. But this year we got to enjoy the good weather :)



we also had a chance to go and visit the hay dairies farm with some old residents... had a fun time learning about the goat related facts... apparently a mother goat can produce 3-4 l of milk a day for 8 months!!!!

My Personality

Neuroticism	28
Extraversion	67
Openness To Experience	49
Agreeableness	50
Conscientiousness	87

You are neither a subdued loner nor a jovial chatterbox. You enjoy time with others but also time alone. You are generally calm and composed, reacting moderately well to situations that most people would describe as stressful. A desire for tradition does not prevent you from trying new things. Your thinking is neither simple nor complex. To others you appear to be a well-educated person but not an intellectual. You have some concern with others' needs, and are generally pleasant, sympathetic, and cooperative. You set clear goals and pursue them with determination. People regard you as reliable and hard-working.

Test Yourself Compare Yourself View Full Report Factory Direct Ugg Boots.

Neuroticism
You are generally calm, although some situations can make you feel anxious or tense. You rarely get angry and it takes a lot to make you angry. You very rarely feel depressed and are usually in a good frame of mind. You are not generally self conscious about yourself. You do not experience strong, irresistible cravings and consequently do not find yourself tempted to overindulge. High levels of stress can lead to you feeling panic or confusion, but usually you cope with day to day pressures.

Extraversion
You generally make friends easily enough although you mostly don't go out of your way to demonstrate positive feelings toward others. You like crowds but sometimes feel overwhelmed by them. Sometimes you feel like you need some privacy and time for yourself. You are an active group participant but usually prefer to let someone else be the group leader. You lead a fast-paced and busy life. You move about quickly, energetically, and vigorously and are involved in many activities. You love bright lights and hustle and bustle. You are likely to take risks and seek thrills. You have a generally cheerful disposition.

Openness To Experience
You are a moderately imaginative person who enjoys a good balance between the real world and fantasy. You are reasonably interested in the arts but are not totally absorbed by them. You tend not to express your emotions openly and are sometimes not even aware of your own feelings. You are eager to try new activities, travel to foreign lands, and experience different things. You find familiarity and routine boring, and will take a new route home just because it is different. You enjoy a certain amount of debate or intellectual thought, but sometimes get bored with too much. You like the security of tradition, but sometimes have a desire to bend the rules and challenge conventional thinking.

Agreeableness
You naturally assume that most people are fair, honest, and have good intentions. You believe that a certain amount of deception in social relationships is necessary. You are guarded in new relationships and less willing to openly reveal the whole truth about yourself. You will help others if they are in need. If people ask for too much of your time you feel that they are imposing on you. You dislike confrontations and are perfectly willing to compromise or to deny your own needs in order to get along with others. You feel superior to those around you and sometimes tend to be seen as arrogant by other people. You are tenderhearted and compassionate, feeling the pain of others vicariously and are easily moved to pity.

Conscientiousness
You believe that you have the intelligence, common sense, drive, and self-control necessary for achieving success. You are well-organized and like to live according to routines and schedules. Often you will keep lists and make plans. You have a strong sense of duty and obligation, and feel a moral obligation to do the right thing. You strive hard to achieve excellence. Your drive to be recognized as successful keeps you on track toward your lofty goals. You often have a strong sense of direction in life, but may sometimes be too single-minded and obsessed with your work. You have strong will-power and are able to overcome your reluctance to begin tasks. You are able to stay on track despite distractions. You take your time when making decisions and will deliberate on all the possible consequences and alternatives.

have not updated for a long time le...

will just post some pics which were taken when i was out having fun :D

SUNGEI BULOH



Really big (bigger than my small hand) moth




Nope that's not a snake i saw... but an intact snake skin ... including the head




calming water at sungei buloh... ideal for bird watching

CHEK JAWA



Chek Jawa has reopened and we went to the old English house to see their exhibits. The exhibits are very interactive and fun :)



Too bad it is high tide or else we will have seen more wildlife...

SINGAPORE RIVER



we saw a work man statue facing Sir Stamford Raffles and was curious to know what is gg on...

On closer look, the plaque on their statues have this to say





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went to watch tan pin pin's film "invisible city" and i enjoyed it :) it showed us sights and history of our homeland which i have neva known... the history kinda of reminded me of cambodia and the sights is like our neighbouring country... it set me wondering... will cambodia be like singapore now 40 years down the road and will singapore be like US now?