Category: life

Meranti Project 2018

My Group Endeavours in Service Learning (GESL) group and I had to attend this 2-day course/module titled The Meranti Project. According to the National Institute of Education (NIE) website:

The Meranti Project is a MOE-funded personal and professional development programme specially tailored for student teachers. Held over two days in groups of 20, it has the following objectives:

a. helping student teachers to develop better self-awareness (better tuning into self);

b. providing a clearer idea of what Character and Citizenship Education (CCE) is all about and one’s role in nurturing CCE in innovative ways in the classroom;

c. better ideas of working with diversity in the classroom;

d. strategies for coping with being a teacher;

e. affirmation of choosing teaching as a career.

With the aid of informal dialogue sessions with veteran teachers, it gives student teachers the opportunity to listen to firsthand experiences of teachers and the perspectives of student learners. The programme also makes use of open sharing sessions and ingenious games to help the student teachers experience the core competencies of social emotional learning, to share their personal aspirations with their peers and to express their opinions in an open and creative environment.

At the end of the programme, student teachers will have a better grasp of the innovative approaches to Character and Citizenship Education and be better equipped when they begin their teaching journey upon graduation.

It was certainly an interesting 2-days. I will not blog about what happened as I respect the confidentiality agreement made before the course started but what I can say is that I had a very good facilitator.

I have heard horror stories from friends and seniors and I am really glad that my experience is rather positive. It is definitely due to the facilitator as well as my GESL group mates. After the end of the course, I guess I have learnt more about my GESL mates. Would I say it has brought us closer? Maybe. It has made me respect them more after hearing about their reasons and struggles about becoming an Education Officer (EO) and for a few of them, their journey has paralleled my own.

All in all, I guess this has taught me one thing. Keep an open mind. Always. Even if those who tells you one thing are someone close to you, someone whose advice really matters, keep an open mind. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Experiences are always personal and what may be a waste of time for someone may actually strike a chord in someone else.

Bali Day 2

So, yesterday was Day 1 in Ubud, Bali.

We landed at about 12.30pm in Denpasar International Airport yesterday afternoon. From the airport to our hotel in Ubud, it took us roughly about an hour’s taxi ride. The taxi ride costs us about IDR350,000 one way. That’s roughly S$35. Considering it is about an hour’s ride, I guess it is reasonably cheap compared to the taxi fares back home.

Our hotel is called Yulia Village Inn and it is about IDR4,000,000 for 4 nights’ stay. It’s okay. I am not going to compare it to places like Royal Scott Plaza or Marina Mandarin or even Banyan Tree Bangkok. I mean, size-wise, Yulia Village Inn is definitely bigger than Studio M or Bay Hotel. The wi-fi is so-so. No bath tub in my room but then again, the fiancée and I don’t really use the bath tub in the other hotels anyway.

Bali is on the same timezone as Singapore so that kind of make things convenient. I don’t need to mentally add or subtract hours if I want to call home. The fiancée thinks otherwise though. She said:”dear, you know what this means? it means that we don’t get extra time in Bali!”

Yesterday was a pretty chilled day. We went to visit the Monkey Forest as well as the Dirty Duck Diner. I will post some pics taken in Monkey Forest later. The Dirty Duck Diner is huge! It has several dining halls and we took the one way out to the back, overlooking a paddy field. On their menu was their signature crispy duck. We shared a half duck (IDR125,000) as well as snails on mushrooms (IDR65,000). The fiancée felt that the sauce on the mushrooms was too sweet for her. The duck was very crispy (well, it wasn’t called ‘crispy duck’ without reason) and very very juicy. I thought it was really good. Just when I was musing to the fiancée that the duck must have been very fresh or something, we saw a flock of ducks walking in a straight line up and down the paddy field. So that’s where the crispy duck came from… yum!

The itinerary for today would be just to wander along the main street and sight see. Tomorrow, we will be having a full day tour where we would be visiting Goa Gajah (Elephant Cave Temple), Tampaksiring (Holy Spring Water), Penelokan (Mount Batur and Lake Batur), Besakih (the largest temple in Bali), Bukit Jambul (Rice Terrace) and finally Klungkung (Old Court Justice of Klungkung Kingdom). Will update with pictures tomorrow.