Domain

Explanation

Your education?

• I'm a citizen of a small Asian developed nation that is formerly a British colony
• As an Asian, focus is more on country than individual due to historical, social & political climates with emphasis on communal aspects like language, way of living & culture
• As a citizen of a former British colony & present Commonwealth nation, focus is more on English-education due to colonial history & ties
• As the citizen of young developed nation, focus is more on individual & communal rather than the country due to the already high-level of socio-economic development already achieved
• Hence,
• My education from young to present is always revolving around the following themes:

1. Personal potential development 潛能開發: basic literacy, communication, technical & survival skills & knowledge learning, training & development
2. Social awareness 人文意識: realization of communal status & personal niche within
3. National & global issues & concerns 關心時事: challenges facing nation amidst ever-changing international concerns & climates

• Taken together, the themes are formulated into education syllabus 課程表 that is minimum that all schools have to follow
• The following is a history of my education from kindergarten to tertiary:
• Pre-school 學前教育
• Kindergarten 幼稚園
• Primary school 小學
• Secondary school 中學
• Junior college 高中, 初級學院
• University under-graduate 大學學士生
• University post-graduate 大學碩士生

Pre-school (Age 0-4)

• Running & jumping
• Playing

Kindergarten (Age 5-6)

• Drawing: crayon, colour pencils
• Music: just hymn along (I don’t understand a word of English or Chinese then; I’m from the jungle, remember)
• English alphabet & listening: the teacher always point us to look at the mouth & hand gestures, but of course, I always look anywhere à children can be as easily attracted as they are distracted à interesting phenomenon: they are then at their highest learning rate & age
• Basic habits: hygiene, look after myself, my dressing, shoes & personal items, playing with other children

Primary school (Age 7-12)

• English as 1^st language: pronunciation, spelling, dictation, grammar, cloze passages, basic vocabulary – synonyms, acronyms, idioms; simple writing or composition, comprehension of passage
• Chinese as 2^nd language: known as mother tongue (how come no father tongue); Malays take Bahasa Melayu, Indians take Tamil (many have criticized this, as Indians are actually a group of many smaller races with their own distinct languages, cultures & values; & forcing all Indians to learn Tamil, a language of mostly Southern Indians, is like forcing all humans to learn only English; absurd isn’t it?); Chinese is also the same; the government has identified Chinese language as a common unifying element to gather all people of Chinese origins, but of course, this also goes against our own dialects (like Hokkiens, Cantonese, Teochew, Hakka); we learn the different distinct Chinese character strokes (horizontal line, vertical line, the left swipe, the right swipe, the dot, the lash), the punctuation, the spelling, the dictation, the grammar, the vocabulary (the syllabus has set a min. no. to be learnt)
• Maths (I’m top in my school for two years, because I have an extremely good tuition teacher, who is incidentally the father of my Law lecturer – what a coincidence): times tables, add, subtract (we call minus), multiply (times), divide; shapes, angles, fractions, HCF (highest common factor), LCM (lowest common multiple), algebra, some simple problem sums; areas, volumes, ratios
• Science: just observing, looking, touching & feeling; plants, animals, objects, matter; it was fun, but my grades do not seem to reflect that – the test questions are difficult & have to study very hard to do that – I don’t studying much about such stuff – just silently observing is the way
• Social studies: moral education, "police is our friends", "never accept anything from strangers"
• Music: children songs, national songs, folk songs
• Arts: drawing – crayon, brush, colour-pencils; clay moulding
• Sports: badminton (I’m on the school team), basketball (on the first time with the ball, it was a match & once I got the ball for the first time, I ran & shot, but unfortunately right at my own basket & got whacked by both my teammates & teachers), athletics (I did run like my childhood, but into the toilet), soft-ball (almost like base-ball, but softer of course), volleyball (I remember our teacher always likes to open the ball a long distance & challenge which of us can retrieve that ball – what a way of hitting balls & having children competing to bring them back to u), Tae Kwon Do (I’m a blue-belt, but my cousin is on the national team, black dan)
• ECAs: extra-curricular activities – badminton both inside school & outside (with those so-called gangsters because they so often walk & talk around in gangs)

Secondary school (Age 13-16)

• Cambridge GCSE ‘O’-levels
• Arts: clay moulding & furnace; abstract drawing & their interpretations
• Music: singing, tones, musical symbols
• History: basic South-East Asian history, Modern Singapore (1819 onwards, founded by Sir Stamford Raffles, an explorer with the then-powerful British East India Company), but they never say much before 1819; ancient civilization (which I like very much; & my history project was prize-winning) – e.g. Babylonians, Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Chinese à history proves the most fundamental, especially realized in literature review
• Moral education: Confucius, Chinese civilization, literature & values
• Sports: basketball, athletics, volleyball, soccer, a bit of swimming (I’m still a drought duck)
• ECAs: St John’s Ambulance Brigade (SJAB), in which I’m the public duty officer; won a regional first-aid competition with three other teammates; it was tough training – regimental drills, stretcher drills (carry the first-aid stretcher through & over the most incredible obstacles that anyone can imagine), first-aid (cuts, burns, shock, fractures, injuries of all sorts)
• Science stream: technical-emphasis
• English as 1^st language: grammar, vocabulary, analogies, writing - descriptive, argumentative, technical; comprehension - summary
• Chinese as 1^st & 2^nd language 第一語文: my school – The Chinese High School is the first pure Chinese secondary-level school 第一所華文中學 in South-East Asia in 1919, i.e. all teaching media are in Chinese by Chinese teachers for Chinese male students; boys from well-to-do families, but the founder of the school, Mr Tan Kah Kee , insisted on funding promising boys from poor families, hence equilibrating the student population (not some upper-class sanctuary); it was reported that my school accepted some female students during 1950s, but later converted permanently back into a pure-male school; till this day, I still don't understand the rationale of a single-sex school, other than it segregates the adolescent youngsters (boys from girls) at their puberty; does this help in studies & character-building? – for my case, I don't think so; but coming back to Chinese; my school was forced to become a English-medium by statutory regulations (especially that time was communist era & Chinese radicals are running wild everywhere – my school was the perfect training, breeding & rallying ground for them; in fact, The Chinese High School was on strike a few times by Chinese radicals who block other students from entering exam halls; imagine that happening to us now; those were in the 1950’s & 60’s when Chinese communism & racial riots were common as the rain; my school was placed under government supervision & closed for some time; but eventually all went back to studies); having changed to the English medium, the emphasis is still placed on Chinese, hence the government gave some allowance by forming the independent schools 特選中學 concept à formerly Chinese-medium schools are now changed into English-medium, but the schools are allowed to teach Chinese as 1^st language, i.e. Chinese is taught as a subject on the same importance & level as English anywhere else in the land (Singapore); the Chinese education is the same; grammar, vocabulary (more in the syllabus), punctuations, comprehension passages – summary, writing: descriptive, argumentative, technical; letter-writing: recommendation, suggestion, complaint, application; there are others like Chinese plays (we wrote, acted & be the audience at places like the Victoria Concert Hall), talk-shows, lion-dances, drums (you always those from my school doing that on TV nowadays)
• Maths D: trigonometry, linear programming, arithmetic, simultaneous alegraic equations, expressions, areas, perimeters, volumes, ratio, percentage, interests, maps & scales, factorization, quadratic equations, congruency & similarity, Pythagoras theorem, sets, matrices, vector geometry & transformations, simple probability, circles, tangents & alternate segment theorem, coordinate geometry, graphical solutions, statistics, central measures (averages of all sorts), frequency distributions, 3-D problems, loci & construction
• Additional Maths (A Maths): set theory, differentiation, integration
• Physics: SI units, light, mechanics – kinematics, kinetics, electro-magnetism, matter, heat, pressure, gas laws, waves
• Chemistry: periodic table, chemical elements, compounds & reactions (bonding: ionic, covalent); molecular structure & moles (Avogadro constant); applications; (pH) acids & alkalis; monomers & polymers
• Geography: the natural sciences, human influence, environmental interactions
• English Literature: Shakespeare (the guy who wrote Romeo & Juliet, hope I don’t end up like Romeo), Singapore Short Stories, To Kill a Mockingbird (a critique of prejudice in deep South of America)

Junior college (Age 17-18)

• Cambridge GCSE ‘A’-levels
• ECA: health-&-fitness club, librarian, badminton club
• Science stream: technical-emphasis
• English General Paper (GP): essay-writing – descriptive, argumentative, technical; comprehension – summary, comments, extrapolation & interpolation
• Maths C: algebraic/partial fractions; arithmetic & geometric progression; Cartesian, polar & cylindrical coordinates; sine & cosine formulae; particle mechanics; probability & statistics; pure maths: curve-sketching; DE solutions; vectors
• Further Maths
• Physics
• Economics: central problems of economic societies; types of production units; theory of demand & supply; price & output determination; theory of income determination & distribution; money & prices; role of government; national income accounting; economic of development

University under-graduate (Age 21-25)

• Engineering: technical-emphasis, quantitative focus (lacks qualitative aspect: can live, but don’t what for)
• Student choices based mainly on personal problem-solving competency, but with blatant disregard of the type of problems (current & future) that would be faced
• Hence, learn techniques, disregard problem issues & challenges
• Common 1^st semester:
• Electrical engineering: DC (Kirchhoff, Thevenin, Norton) & AC circuit analysis; periodics (Fourier), frequency response; transient circuit analysis (damping); magnetic circuit (flux, law); instrumentation
• Engineering mechanics
• Thermodynamics: processes (solid conduction, fluid convection, radiation), gas laws, laws of thermodynamics
• Graphics: surfaces & solids, isometric views, drafting
• Computing: Fortran 90/95, simple Java
• Maths I: proofs, vector algebra; matrices; complex numbers; functions: limits & continuity (Sandwich theorem); differentiation; applications of derivative; sequences & series;
• Civil Engineering:
• Maths:

1. Maths II
2. D.E.
3. Numerical methods
4. Probability & Statistics

• Structures:

1. Engineering mechanics: fundamentals
2. Mechanics of materials: fundamentals assumptions, loads, sections, capacities, deformations, stress & strain transformation, energy methods
3. Structural analysis I: member, global, loads, deformations
4. Structural analysis II: simplified methods, Stiffness method, deflections, influence lines
5. Structural stability & dynamics: equilibrium stability formulation & determination; perturbation analysis, equivalent energy or stiffness criterion; linear discrete lumped-mass dynamics by exact methods & mode superposition methods
6. FEM: variational weak-form linear & non-linear problem formulations, Gaussian quadrature solution, interpretations & applications

• Materials:

1. Civil engineering materials: resources, manufacture, properties, attributes, characterization, tests, impacts of designs & applications
2. Concrete
3. Steel
4. Repair & retrofitting

• Analysis:

1. Exact, continuous: theoretical, assumptions
2. Variational, discrete: FEA
3. Steel
4. Concrete

• Planning:

1. Transportation engineering
2. Transportation planning
3. Construction planning
4. Operations & management of infrastructure systems

• Geotechnical Engineering:

1. Engineering Geology
2. Soil mechanics: Craig
3. Effective stress, shear strength, pore pressure, earth pressure, Mohr’s circle
4. Deep foundations, slope stability
5. Geotechnical investigation, monitoring, lateral piles, wave analysis, FEA

• Water Engineering:

1. Basic environmental science & engineering: chemistry & biology basics
2. Water engineering: water treatment
3. Wastewater engineering: filtration, sedimentation, microbial sludge
4. Hydraulics: small-scale fluid mechanics, phenomena, properties

• Hydrology: large-scale catchment, transportation & collection
• Extra-curricular:

1. Human resource management
2. Law
3. Management
4. Sociology
5. Financial accounting

• ECA: Red-Cross

University post-graduate (Age 26-27)

• Foundations:

1. Numerical methods: decomposition, solution methods – stability, convergence, consistency; FDM, FEM

• Dynamics:

1. Dynamics of tall buildings
2. Shock & vibration control
3. Nonlinear FEA

• Materials:

1. Concrete: material, structure, design, analysis
2. Steel: material, structure, design, analysis
3. Others: masonry, wood, carbon & non-carbon-based polymers

• Control:

1. Linear systems
2. Computer control systems
3. Optimal control systems
4. Multivariable control systems
5. Adaptive control systems

• Optimisation:

1. Operations & management of infrastructure systems
2. Transportation planning

Beyond

• Graduate training
• Lifelong learning