School stress hits new peak as exams loom
Our children are the most tested in the world, and schools are having to hire ever more counsellors to help them, reports education correspondent Anushka Asthana Sunday May 20, 2007The Observer
Thousands of pupils are suffering from unprecedented levels of 'exam stress' according to experts dealing with the fallout from the UK's testing culture.
Unprecedented numbers of psychologists are now having to help pupils deal with the emotional strain - which can lead to sleepless nights, eating disorders and other illnesses.
Nurses at hundreds of schools in south-east England are being trained to pinpoint the symptoms of stress that build to a peak during the exam period.
The scheme, being launched as more than a million teenagers embark on their GCSEs, AS and A-levels and primary schools complete their Standard Assessment Tests, will be rolled out nationally.
'There is now a constant process of revision and examination and lots of students do not cope,' said Vivian Hill, an educational psychologist at the Institute of Education. 'These are the most tested children in the world.'
Hill, who runs training sessions on how to reduce anxiety, has seen children with 'pushy parents' and those in failing schools fall physically ill from stress.
She blamed in part the two years following GCSEs that were once free of exams as students worked towards their A-levels. Now they are crammed full of AS levels and the extra revision they bring.
Meanwhile, Place2Be - a charity offering emotional support to primary school children - has seen a massive increase in the numbers of pupils approaching counsellors about exams.
The charity runs a project called Place2Talk in 113 schools where children can post requests to see a counsellor into postboxes placed in the school buildings. So far 70 per cent of the children in the schools have asked for support.
Sheridan Whitfield, a manager for the charity in London, said children from the age of five were able to place requests for a chat into postboxes placed in the school. 'Children are accessing it more for exam worries.'
The relentless pressure means psychologists are being called into schools at an increasing rate, according to Hill: 'We are doing this in a way that we were not doing it five years ago.'
She said 10 senior colleagues now visited schools on a weekly basis working with children, teachers and parents. 'In one case we had a father who wanted to send his child to a psychologist because they were at the bottom of the A band and not the top. What makes someone behave so unreasonably?'
Earlier this month teachers claimed that children as young as nine were becoming disillusioned with school because of the pressure to pass tests. A report by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers said that league tables were pushing schools to drop interesting lessons in favour of drilling pupils for exams with a 'spoon-feeding approach'.
Ken Boston, chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, has said children are over-tested while the powerful all-party education select committee is about to launch a major inquiry into the issue.
Experts at the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) and the mental health charity Rethink are so concerned about rising levels of stress they have launched the south-east England pilot scheme to train nurses to help anxious pupils.
Starting with hundreds of schools in south London, the project is being funded by the Health Foundation.
'We ought to be thinking about stress at this time of year,' said Andre Tylee, professor of primary care mental health at the IoP. 'Constant assessment does cause stress in a significant minority and this will be a key part of what we do to help schools.'
Exam time must be treated as 'high risk' by headteachers, according to Tylee, whose work will help nurses recognise early signs of anxiety and pick up where a pupil may feel suicidal: 'They may know when someone is stressed but what about when that tips into depression or mental health problems?' he said.
The fact that psychologists are starting to take stress in schools seriously was welcomed by students. 'Exam stress always comes up as the top issue,' said Rajeeb Dey, founder of the English Secondary Students' Association. 'Schools bringing in educational psychologists is a wise move.'
Different types of sessions are running in schools up and down the country. Staff at the Institute of Education have helped set up a 'stress-busting' session at Burntwood school, a large comprehensive in south London that caters for pupils aged 11 to 19.
Mary Holden, head of learning support at the school, now runs sessions for individuals or small groups where she teaches them how to calm down through breathing techniques, among others.
'If someone becomes stressed we give them more attention,' said Holden. 'If someone is incredibly anxious and it is affecting their performance then we may put them somewhere separate [to take the exam].'
Last week Linda Blair, a clinical psychologist who focuses on stress issues, gave a talk to AS and A-level students about how to keep calm and do their best in exams.
As well as offering advice on how to manage their time she gave tips on how to eat, sleep and exercise. Students were advised to eat proteins when revising and carbohydrates when winding down. Caffeine was to be avoided.
For those suffering sleepless nights she advised power naps in the day, using an alarm clock out of reach to wake them up. 'A 15-minute power nap is worth one sleep cycle at night [or] one and a half hours,' she said. Where she was able to talk to students six weeks before exams she recommended regular aerobics.
Elsewhere headteachers have turned to alternative techniques such as massage to help pupils cope. At a school in Staffordshire holistic therapist and former teacher Frances Latham uses breathing and visualisations to help stop panic attacks.
There are also private options for parents who are particularly worried about their children. Tim Francis, a chartered educational psychologist, works with pupils in the most extreme cases where they completely freeze during the exams.
He also offers advice over the internet that suggests students tense and relax muscles up and down their entire body. Such techniques were once shunned by schools but headteachers are increasingly turning to them.
'It is becoming more common for young people and parents to report unpleasant effects at this time because they are concerned about examinations,' said Martin Ward, deputy general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders. 'It is not just GCSEs; the Key Stage two and three SATs are impacting on younger children who are less able to cope with the pressure.'
Graham Taylor, the former vicar who is now the bestselling author of the children's book Shadowmancer, said children were terrified by the number of exams they faced.
'My daughter is eight years old,' he said. 'She is year three at a school. She has taken two days off sick this week for the stress of two weeks of exams.'
Taylor, who visited 250 schools last year to give motivational talks, blamed an obsession with testing. 'The education system is in crisis,' he added. The answer was not better exams but 'happier children'.
For some parents, the pressures are far too high. Hazel Hallows, a mother-of-three from Manchester, said that children had enough additional worries about fitting in. 'They have got enough to worry about,' she said, 'and then on top of that is whether they get the grades for college.'
But while too much stress is without doubt a bad thing, a few nerves are exactly what children need. On The Parent Organisation, a parents' support website, a poll has been asking whether children responded badly to exam pressure. Yesterday, the answer was no for 62.5 per cent of parents.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Stanford Report, May 21, 2007
Teenage obsession with 'success' bad for mind and spirit, panelists say
BY ANNIE JIA
By the time psychologist Madeline Levine met the girl with the "cutter" T-shirt four years ago, she knew the field of adolescent psychology had changed. With a chatty demeanor, healthy physique and long sleeves hiding the word "empty" the girl had carved into her wrists, the patient had become a metaphor for the adolescents that increasingly filled Levine's office.
No longer were they the traditional "problem children" from broken families and harsh upbringings; they were overwhelmingly upper-middle-class teenagers who "looked incredibly good on the outside, but, metaphorically or not, when you rolled up their sleeves, they were bleeding underneath."
Such troubled teens epitomized the problems highlighted at a public discussion May 11 that kicked off the fourth annual "SOS—Stressed-Out Students" conference. The two-day gathering, co-sponsored by the School of Education, the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health and the California Endowment, explored the problem of acute pressure on middle and high school students to succeed and the dire consequences that can accompany it.
"Kids are expected not just to be good, they're expected to be good at everything," said Levine, a practicing clinical psychologist in Marin County and author of The Price of Privilege. "This notion that children are supposed to be good at absolutely everything they do is so unbelievably wrong, and not only wrong, but damaging."
The pressure has manifested itself in a dramatic rise in teen mental health problems, increased incidences of cheating and a pervading stress that characterizes the lives of many students, said Denise Pope, a lecturer in the School of Education and director of SOS.
Twenty-two percent of girls from affluent families suffer from clinical depression, three times the national average, Levine said. And when Pope researched her book, Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic and Miseducated Students, she found that 75 percent of high school students said they had at some point cheated on a test, and 90 percent had copied homework.
In addition to causing psychological stress, the fixation on achievement is impeding the process of true education, said Maureen Powers, dean of students at Stanford. "If all you've done is filled your pail with a bunch of A's and a bunch of titles, and you haven't had a passion for genuine learning, you will have people who have very high grades but who are not up to the job," she said.
Beyond practical implications, Levine explained, is the development of life skills, character and happiness. "When our kids start to feel that they're only as good as their last performance, we set the stage for the inability to construct an internal sense of self," she said. "No matter how affluent your home may be, if your internal home is impoverished, it doesn't do you any good."
The focus on external achievements over inner growth comes largely from well-meaning parents who overprotect their children in the hopes of helping them succeed but forget the importance of learning to overcome obstacles, said Wendy Mogel, a psychologist and author of The Blessing of a B-. "Good parenting feels like neglect," she said. "We are overprotecting our children, overindulging them, expecting them to be perfect in every sphere, academically, socially, athletically. But we are neglecting to require of them integrity, respect for adults, self-respect."
Mogel, who quit her practice mid-career to study Judaism, draws much of her advice from religion. "We have to re-teach our children how to sweat," she quoted from the Babylonian Talmud. "It's really good for kids to be sad, to be frustrated, to experience heartbreak in high school. We want them to be able to deal with difficult things." Mogel believes that many of today's adolescent psychological issues are really "problems of character and problems of culture," which parents are in a much better position to fix than psychologists.
Despite this, Levine said, many parents operate under the mistaken belief that getting into a top college will afford their children a better chance of achieving happiness and wealth. "I think our definitions of success are miserable," she said. "There's this tremendous preoccupation with getting into a particular school, based on nothing." Studies show no correlation between academic success and happiness or income later in life, she said.
Zev Karlin-Neumann, a Palo Alto High School senior and incoming Stanford freshman who was one of three teenagers who spoke at the conference, presented an alternative picture of success. He chose to take only one Advanced Placement class this year, and he emphasized the importance of "keeping things in perspective."
"Building your life around a desire to get into college is wholly unfulfilling," he said. "The important thing is to have time to do a few things you love well."
Karlin-Neumann, Audrey Baker from Woodside High School and Hanna Malak from Junipero Serra High School suggested ways that teachers could help reduce the stress on students, such as instituting a master school schedule so that exams could be spaced apart, and assigning creative projects to enhance student interest and discourage cheating. Most important, Baker said in a remark that echoed the other students' sentiments, "I just want to eliminate the constant pressure and talk about getting into a good college and future success."
The following day, 25 middle and high school teams composed of students, teachers, parents and administrators from around the country participated in a full day of workshops to create plans to reduce stress and increase academic engagement at their schools. For the next six months, a Stanford-trained coach will guide them in implementing the plans, and the teams will reconvene next fall to examine their progress.
"Reforming schools is very hard and painfully slow, that I know," Pope said. "But we also know that if you get enough people around a table and let the school come up with a specific action plan that's just right for their school, we might get to nudge forward a bit of a change."
Annie Jia is an intern at the Stanford News Service.
Teenage obsession with 'success' bad for mind and spirit, panelists say
BY ANNIE JIA
By the time psychologist Madeline Levine met the girl with the "cutter" T-shirt four years ago, she knew the field of adolescent psychology had changed. With a chatty demeanor, healthy physique and long sleeves hiding the word "empty" the girl had carved into her wrists, the patient had become a metaphor for the adolescents that increasingly filled Levine's office.
No longer were they the traditional "problem children" from broken families and harsh upbringings; they were overwhelmingly upper-middle-class teenagers who "looked incredibly good on the outside, but, metaphorically or not, when you rolled up their sleeves, they were bleeding underneath."
Such troubled teens epitomized the problems highlighted at a public discussion May 11 that kicked off the fourth annual "SOS—Stressed-Out Students" conference. The two-day gathering, co-sponsored by the School of Education, the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health and the California Endowment, explored the problem of acute pressure on middle and high school students to succeed and the dire consequences that can accompany it.
"Kids are expected not just to be good, they're expected to be good at everything," said Levine, a practicing clinical psychologist in Marin County and author of The Price of Privilege. "This notion that children are supposed to be good at absolutely everything they do is so unbelievably wrong, and not only wrong, but damaging."
The pressure has manifested itself in a dramatic rise in teen mental health problems, increased incidences of cheating and a pervading stress that characterizes the lives of many students, said Denise Pope, a lecturer in the School of Education and director of SOS.
Twenty-two percent of girls from affluent families suffer from clinical depression, three times the national average, Levine said. And when Pope researched her book, Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic and Miseducated Students, she found that 75 percent of high school students said they had at some point cheated on a test, and 90 percent had copied homework.
In addition to causing psychological stress, the fixation on achievement is impeding the process of true education, said Maureen Powers, dean of students at Stanford. "If all you've done is filled your pail with a bunch of A's and a bunch of titles, and you haven't had a passion for genuine learning, you will have people who have very high grades but who are not up to the job," she said.
Beyond practical implications, Levine explained, is the development of life skills, character and happiness. "When our kids start to feel that they're only as good as their last performance, we set the stage for the inability to construct an internal sense of self," she said. "No matter how affluent your home may be, if your internal home is impoverished, it doesn't do you any good."
The focus on external achievements over inner growth comes largely from well-meaning parents who overprotect their children in the hopes of helping them succeed but forget the importance of learning to overcome obstacles, said Wendy Mogel, a psychologist and author of The Blessing of a B-. "Good parenting feels like neglect," she said. "We are overprotecting our children, overindulging them, expecting them to be perfect in every sphere, academically, socially, athletically. But we are neglecting to require of them integrity, respect for adults, self-respect."
Mogel, who quit her practice mid-career to study Judaism, draws much of her advice from religion. "We have to re-teach our children how to sweat," she quoted from the Babylonian Talmud. "It's really good for kids to be sad, to be frustrated, to experience heartbreak in high school. We want them to be able to deal with difficult things." Mogel believes that many of today's adolescent psychological issues are really "problems of character and problems of culture," which parents are in a much better position to fix than psychologists.
Despite this, Levine said, many parents operate under the mistaken belief that getting into a top college will afford their children a better chance of achieving happiness and wealth. "I think our definitions of success are miserable," she said. "There's this tremendous preoccupation with getting into a particular school, based on nothing." Studies show no correlation between academic success and happiness or income later in life, she said.
Zev Karlin-Neumann, a Palo Alto High School senior and incoming Stanford freshman who was one of three teenagers who spoke at the conference, presented an alternative picture of success. He chose to take only one Advanced Placement class this year, and he emphasized the importance of "keeping things in perspective."
"Building your life around a desire to get into college is wholly unfulfilling," he said. "The important thing is to have time to do a few things you love well."
Karlin-Neumann, Audrey Baker from Woodside High School and Hanna Malak from Junipero Serra High School suggested ways that teachers could help reduce the stress on students, such as instituting a master school schedule so that exams could be spaced apart, and assigning creative projects to enhance student interest and discourage cheating. Most important, Baker said in a remark that echoed the other students' sentiments, "I just want to eliminate the constant pressure and talk about getting into a good college and future success."
The following day, 25 middle and high school teams composed of students, teachers, parents and administrators from around the country participated in a full day of workshops to create plans to reduce stress and increase academic engagement at their schools. For the next six months, a Stanford-trained coach will guide them in implementing the plans, and the teams will reconvene next fall to examine their progress.
"Reforming schools is very hard and painfully slow, that I know," Pope said. "But we also know that if you get enough people around a table and let the school come up with a specific action plan that's just right for their school, we might get to nudge forward a bit of a change."
Annie Jia is an intern at the Stanford News Service.
'Tis the season for exam stress - or does it have to be?
By Raeanne Nightingale
Both teenagers and parents are feely edgy at the moment due to the fearsome annual exam season.
As desperate cramming sessions begin mums and dads start tearing their hair out but what everyone should know is that help is out there in the form of advice service Connexions and, strangely enough, a healthy diet.
A new survey by Haliborange Omega-3 questioned 486 mums with teenage children and found one in four worry their teenager's concentration levels aren't good enough to absorb the amount of information needed in the time available in the run up to exams.
Plus mums find it difficult to think of ways they can actually help their children's revision habits.
However UK mums are now making the link between diet and concentration, with nearly one in three (29%) understanding and strongly believing that what they eat has the greatest effect on their children's concentration.
Dr Ray Rice, Omega-3 expert and author of Clinical Guide to Omega-3 for Children's Brain Development, said: "Teenagers' brain health is significantly affected by the level of Omega-3 intake and it has to be taken through dietary sources.
"Supplements like Haliborange Omega-3 TeenSense are good for teenagers because they deliver a guaranteed dose of Omega-3, they appeal to children more than oily fish tends to and deliver a daily intake."
The Haliborange survey shows teenagers are trying their hardest. While many parents worry that children are more occupied by television, relationships and spots, the teenagers rank further education/career (48%) and finding time to revise for their exams (32%) as two of their top three worries.
But if f you're facing exams in the coming weeks, help is at hand as Connexions Direct, the online youth advice and support service, has some useful tips on how to cope.
Connexions Direct has helpful advice on revision, and how to plan your work. There's advice on how to prepare for exams as well as links to useful revision sites.
"Young people who feel stressed or overwhelmed by exams or revision shouldn't try to bottle it up or keep it to themselves," said Connexions personal adviser Mike Miles.
"They should talk to a parent, carer or teacher, or to their Connexions Personal Adviser at school or college, about how they can plan their revision better and try to reduce their feelings of anxiety.
"Exam time is a very stressful time for young people but there are strategies that can help you cope."
Connexions top tips include:
· Get started! You might think your exams are miles away but it'simportant to plan revision time in advance. Leaving it to the last minute will only make it more stressful.
· Plan your revision carefully and draw up a plan for all your subjects.
· Think about what's the best way of revising for you. Are you better revising by yourself or with a friend? Do you prefer doing lots of short revision sessions or longer sessions?
· Never leave your revision to the last minute and try testing yourself and your friends by looking at old exam papers.
· Try to find a quiet place to work, with no distractions.
· It's good to write yourself reminders, make notes and highlight important facts when you are revising. Try putting fact notes and dates somewhere you can see them. Good places are on the fridge, in your bedroom or even in the bathroom. The more you look at them, the more you should be able to remember the information.
· Summarise different subjects on to cards or an A4 sheet of paper which you can use as a revision guide.
· Record information and play it back - listen when you are in bed just before you go to sleep or while you are travelling.
· Take regular breaks. Make sure that you eat and sleep well and don't spend all your time revising. Exercising is a great way to clear your mind and will make you feel a lot better and more refreshed.
· When you go into an exam, stay calm, breath slowly and try not to worry. Read all the instructions carefully and keep an eye on the time. Remember that you can only do your best.
By Raeanne Nightingale
Both teenagers and parents are feely edgy at the moment due to the fearsome annual exam season.
As desperate cramming sessions begin mums and dads start tearing their hair out but what everyone should know is that help is out there in the form of advice service Connexions and, strangely enough, a healthy diet.
A new survey by Haliborange Omega-3 questioned 486 mums with teenage children and found one in four worry their teenager's concentration levels aren't good enough to absorb the amount of information needed in the time available in the run up to exams.
Plus mums find it difficult to think of ways they can actually help their children's revision habits.
However UK mums are now making the link between diet and concentration, with nearly one in three (29%) understanding and strongly believing that what they eat has the greatest effect on their children's concentration.
Dr Ray Rice, Omega-3 expert and author of Clinical Guide to Omega-3 for Children's Brain Development, said: "Teenagers' brain health is significantly affected by the level of Omega-3 intake and it has to be taken through dietary sources.
"Supplements like Haliborange Omega-3 TeenSense are good for teenagers because they deliver a guaranteed dose of Omega-3, they appeal to children more than oily fish tends to and deliver a daily intake."
The Haliborange survey shows teenagers are trying their hardest. While many parents worry that children are more occupied by television, relationships and spots, the teenagers rank further education/career (48%) and finding time to revise for their exams (32%) as two of their top three worries.
But if f you're facing exams in the coming weeks, help is at hand as Connexions Direct, the online youth advice and support service, has some useful tips on how to cope.
Connexions Direct has helpful advice on revision, and how to plan your work. There's advice on how to prepare for exams as well as links to useful revision sites.
"Young people who feel stressed or overwhelmed by exams or revision shouldn't try to bottle it up or keep it to themselves," said Connexions personal adviser Mike Miles.
"They should talk to a parent, carer or teacher, or to their Connexions Personal Adviser at school or college, about how they can plan their revision better and try to reduce their feelings of anxiety.
"Exam time is a very stressful time for young people but there are strategies that can help you cope."
Connexions top tips include:
· Get started! You might think your exams are miles away but it'simportant to plan revision time in advance. Leaving it to the last minute will only make it more stressful.
· Plan your revision carefully and draw up a plan for all your subjects.
· Think about what's the best way of revising for you. Are you better revising by yourself or with a friend? Do you prefer doing lots of short revision sessions or longer sessions?
· Never leave your revision to the last minute and try testing yourself and your friends by looking at old exam papers.
· Try to find a quiet place to work, with no distractions.
· It's good to write yourself reminders, make notes and highlight important facts when you are revising. Try putting fact notes and dates somewhere you can see them. Good places are on the fridge, in your bedroom or even in the bathroom. The more you look at them, the more you should be able to remember the information.
· Summarise different subjects on to cards or an A4 sheet of paper which you can use as a revision guide.
· Record information and play it back - listen when you are in bed just before you go to sleep or while you are travelling.
· Take regular breaks. Make sure that you eat and sleep well and don't spend all your time revising. Exercising is a great way to clear your mind and will make you feel a lot better and more refreshed.
· When you go into an exam, stay calm, breath slowly and try not to worry. Read all the instructions carefully and keep an eye on the time. Remember that you can only do your best.
Canteen bump leads to stabbing.
By Elena Chong.
481 words
25 January 2002
Straits Times
English
(c) 2002 Singapore Press Holdings Limited
Angry teenager calls in 'outside fighters' after ordinary school incident; one boy lands in hospital, four culprits face judge.
IT WAS a fairly innocuous incident: Two schoolboys banging into each other during recess in school.
But it ended up in a fight with one schoolboy being stabbed and another boy facing the prospect of being packed off to the Reformative Training Centre (RTC) for young offenders.
Mohamed Sofian Mohamed Mokhtar, 15, suffered a 2.5-cm-long cut in his liver and spent four days at Tan Tock Seng Hospital.
Wong Han Wah will be sentenced next month, pending probation and reformative-training reports.
Three other people were given jail sentences ranging from six months to four years.
The sorry episode started when Mohamed Sofian bumped into a schoolmate in the canteen at Yishun Town Secondary School on Sept 28 last year.
The boy told another student, Han Wah, then 15, about it. Han Wah confronted Mohamed Sofian and told him to meet him after school that day.
He also called a friend, Rodney Yeow Kim Hwee, 19, to meet him. Two other friends, Foo Chee Meng, 25, an odd-job renovation contractor, and Khong Kok Chee, 24, also learnt about the meeting.
When school ended at about 12.45 pm, Han Wah, Mohamed Sofian and a few others left the school and met Yeow. They followed him to the void deck of Block 204 in Yishun Street 21, where Foo turned up.
The man pulled Mohamed Sofian's collar and asked him about the incident. Yeow and Khong joined in to kick and punch the boy.
Foo then stabbed the boy with a knife. All four fled, leaving the boy on the floor, bleeding from the abdomen.
Foo, who has a previous conviction, was given four years' jail and six strokes of the cane after pleading guilty. Yeow and Khong were given six months jail each.
Turning to Han Wah, District Judge F.G. Remedios said that while the boy did not intend for Mohamad Sofian to get hurt, it was his call for outside help that led to the stabbing.
In view of Han Wah's age 'more than anything else', he would call for a probation and RTC report before sentencing on Feb 21.
The school principal, Mr Tan Teck Hock, described the incident as an isolated case and said the school is willing to take Han Wah back.
'We should not have this idea that anybody with a blemished past should be banned from school. I wish Han Wah will learn from this incident and move on in life.'
He said Han Wah, whose father is a renovation contractor and mother, a clerk, is in the Normal (Academic) stream. Mr Tan also said Mohamad Sofian has recovered from his injuries and will be taking his N-levels this year.
By Elena Chong.
481 words
25 January 2002
Straits Times
English
(c) 2002 Singapore Press Holdings Limited
Angry teenager calls in 'outside fighters' after ordinary school incident; one boy lands in hospital, four culprits face judge.
IT WAS a fairly innocuous incident: Two schoolboys banging into each other during recess in school.
But it ended up in a fight with one schoolboy being stabbed and another boy facing the prospect of being packed off to the Reformative Training Centre (RTC) for young offenders.
Mohamed Sofian Mohamed Mokhtar, 15, suffered a 2.5-cm-long cut in his liver and spent four days at Tan Tock Seng Hospital.
Wong Han Wah will be sentenced next month, pending probation and reformative-training reports.
Three other people were given jail sentences ranging from six months to four years.
The sorry episode started when Mohamed Sofian bumped into a schoolmate in the canteen at Yishun Town Secondary School on Sept 28 last year.
The boy told another student, Han Wah, then 15, about it. Han Wah confronted Mohamed Sofian and told him to meet him after school that day.
He also called a friend, Rodney Yeow Kim Hwee, 19, to meet him. Two other friends, Foo Chee Meng, 25, an odd-job renovation contractor, and Khong Kok Chee, 24, also learnt about the meeting.
When school ended at about 12.45 pm, Han Wah, Mohamed Sofian and a few others left the school and met Yeow. They followed him to the void deck of Block 204 in Yishun Street 21, where Foo turned up.
The man pulled Mohamed Sofian's collar and asked him about the incident. Yeow and Khong joined in to kick and punch the boy.
Foo then stabbed the boy with a knife. All four fled, leaving the boy on the floor, bleeding from the abdomen.
Foo, who has a previous conviction, was given four years' jail and six strokes of the cane after pleading guilty. Yeow and Khong were given six months jail each.
Turning to Han Wah, District Judge F.G. Remedios said that while the boy did not intend for Mohamad Sofian to get hurt, it was his call for outside help that led to the stabbing.
In view of Han Wah's age 'more than anything else', he would call for a probation and RTC report before sentencing on Feb 21.
The school principal, Mr Tan Teck Hock, described the incident as an isolated case and said the school is willing to take Han Wah back.
'We should not have this idea that anybody with a blemished past should be banned from school. I wish Han Wah will learn from this incident and move on in life.'
He said Han Wah, whose father is a renovation contractor and mother, a clerk, is in the Normal (Academic) stream. Mr Tan also said Mohamad Sofian has recovered from his injuries and will be taking his N-levels this year.
THE WORD
May I do your homework?
By The Word May 6, 2007
Over a few days last fall, I got three similar e-mails from three high-school students in a town outside Boston.
Their AP English class had read my Word column about the history and uses of tart (both pastry and prostitute) and its various connotations, they said. And now they were supposed to research and write something similar, on a different subject: a short paper comparing two words with overlapping senses, like art and craft, club and gang, labor and work.
Perhaps not surprisingly, they thought I might help. Could I supply, they politely asked, "any information about my two words' origins, social timelines, denotations, etc."? Or "websites good for research on the origins, uses, and meanings of the words"? Or "anything at all on these two words"?
I was, of course, pleased to be held up as a model for what sounded like a fun assignment. But I couldn't and wouldn't do their research, I replied. They would have to make do with dictionaries, libraries, online resources, and their own bright young minds. I suggested a couple of approaches -- they might collect examples of current usage from Google News, say, and tally and compare various senses -- and wished them luck.
I couldn't decide, though, what to make of their appeal. Did they really imagine that I had all the information they needed in my head? That my secret decoder ring could transfer that knowledge into a convenient e-mail attachment, ready to send?
And if they did think that, did they also think it was an acceptable way to do research, and would their teacher agree? In other words: Were they clueless and lazy, or gutsy and enterprising
?
There was no consensus among my friends and colleagues. Some thought it was only natural that the students would ask me how to do it, since I'd been offered as the model. Maybe they meant to credit me in their papers, and hoped to win points for going to what they thought of as the source. To the typical high-schooler, several suggested, a newspaper writer is probably just another online source like Wikipedia (for better or worse).
Others weren't so generous. "It would be different if they had done some legwork and wanted you to suggest further avenues for research, but that is so completely not what is on their minds," said one friend, speaking as a writer and the parent of a teenager.
She may be right. (I even asked the students, promising confidentiality, what their teacher would think of their query to me, but they weren't telling.) But even if their motives were shady, I would feel more sorrow than anger at their waste of opportunity.
When I was in high school, long ago and far away, a topic like theirs would have been a treat; what we got were exercises in paraphrasing and footnoting. Even at 17, I knew I would learn little -- and contribute nothing -- by summarizing a few encyclopedia entries on the battle of Fort Sumter; my little "research paper" was grammatically correct, impeccably punctuated, and of no earthly interest to anyone.
There's no need for that sort of rote dullness nowadays, when any teenager can call up thousands of original texts and documents on the Web. The glory of real research, however modest its range, is being face to face with the evidence, not someone else's version of it -- and that's true whether you're digging through fading letters in a library basement or combing Google hits for evidence of usage change.
Not to mention the joys of serendipity. If an assistant had researched gone missing for me, I wouldn't have spotted the fulsome that caught my eye in an 1893 New York Times story, used in a way many now consider wrong: "A young man who, on one Yuletide, had fulsome reason for considering himself blessed." Or an 1881 reference to "a stumpy wisp-broom"; ancestor of whisk-broom, or merely a cousin?
Recreational reading, too, is full of language discoveries: Jane Austen's characters using "hey-day" as a greeting, or Angela Thirkell's, a century and a half later, grumbling about the changing pronunciation of controversy.
So how do you beat down a teenager's resistance to delight? Just a good assignment obviously isn't enough, if they're so estranged from their own intelligence that they picture knowledge as a bottle of capsules, preferably swallowed whole. Whatever my student petitioners' intent, they obviously didn't see what struck me hardest: They were asking me to do the fun part of their assignment.
I'm not sure where the blame belongs, given the abundance of potholes along the road to joyful learning: MCAS tests, SATs, the winner-take-all economy, our focus on credentials rather than content. Then, of course, there's the laziness, orneriness, and resistance to authority with which the human race is naturally endowed. That we probably can't change; for the rest, we've got to do better.
May I do your homework?
By The Word May 6, 2007
Over a few days last fall, I got three similar e-mails from three high-school students in a town outside Boston.
Their AP English class had read my Word column about the history and uses of tart (both pastry and prostitute) and its various connotations, they said. And now they were supposed to research and write something similar, on a different subject: a short paper comparing two words with overlapping senses, like art and craft, club and gang, labor and work.
Perhaps not surprisingly, they thought I might help. Could I supply, they politely asked, "any information about my two words' origins, social timelines, denotations, etc."? Or "websites good for research on the origins, uses, and meanings of the words"? Or "anything at all on these two words"?
I was, of course, pleased to be held up as a model for what sounded like a fun assignment. But I couldn't and wouldn't do their research, I replied. They would have to make do with dictionaries, libraries, online resources, and their own bright young minds. I suggested a couple of approaches -- they might collect examples of current usage from Google News, say, and tally and compare various senses -- and wished them luck.
I couldn't decide, though, what to make of their appeal. Did they really imagine that I had all the information they needed in my head? That my secret decoder ring could transfer that knowledge into a convenient e-mail attachment, ready to send?
And if they did think that, did they also think it was an acceptable way to do research, and would their teacher agree? In other words: Were they clueless and lazy, or gutsy and enterprising
?
There was no consensus among my friends and colleagues. Some thought it was only natural that the students would ask me how to do it, since I'd been offered as the model. Maybe they meant to credit me in their papers, and hoped to win points for going to what they thought of as the source. To the typical high-schooler, several suggested, a newspaper writer is probably just another online source like Wikipedia (for better or worse).
Others weren't so generous. "It would be different if they had done some legwork and wanted you to suggest further avenues for research, but that is so completely not what is on their minds," said one friend, speaking as a writer and the parent of a teenager.
She may be right. (I even asked the students, promising confidentiality, what their teacher would think of their query to me, but they weren't telling.) But even if their motives were shady, I would feel more sorrow than anger at their waste of opportunity.
When I was in high school, long ago and far away, a topic like theirs would have been a treat; what we got were exercises in paraphrasing and footnoting. Even at 17, I knew I would learn little -- and contribute nothing -- by summarizing a few encyclopedia entries on the battle of Fort Sumter; my little "research paper" was grammatically correct, impeccably punctuated, and of no earthly interest to anyone.
There's no need for that sort of rote dullness nowadays, when any teenager can call up thousands of original texts and documents on the Web. The glory of real research, however modest its range, is being face to face with the evidence, not someone else's version of it -- and that's true whether you're digging through fading letters in a library basement or combing Google hits for evidence of usage change.
Not to mention the joys of serendipity. If an assistant had researched gone missing for me, I wouldn't have spotted the fulsome that caught my eye in an 1893 New York Times story, used in a way many now consider wrong: "A young man who, on one Yuletide, had fulsome reason for considering himself blessed." Or an 1881 reference to "a stumpy wisp-broom"; ancestor of whisk-broom, or merely a cousin?
Recreational reading, too, is full of language discoveries: Jane Austen's characters using "hey-day" as a greeting, or Angela Thirkell's, a century and a half later, grumbling about the changing pronunciation of controversy.
So how do you beat down a teenager's resistance to delight? Just a good assignment obviously isn't enough, if they're so estranged from their own intelligence that they picture knowledge as a bottle of capsules, preferably swallowed whole. Whatever my student petitioners' intent, they obviously didn't see what struck me hardest: They were asking me to do the fun part of their assignment.
I'm not sure where the blame belongs, given the abundance of potholes along the road to joyful learning: MCAS tests, SATs, the winner-take-all economy, our focus on credentials rather than content. Then, of course, there's the laziness, orneriness, and resistance to authority with which the human race is naturally endowed. That we probably can't change; for the rest, we've got to do better.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
I will tackle problems faced by young people in the 21st century. Youths do have problems that are uniquely their own. One of the unfortunate challenges they face is survival in an increasingly competitive academic world. In the past, it was enough to merely have an education up to secondary or college level. Today, nothing short of a university degree will do. And it would have to be a good degree too! As a result, young people face endless pressure in having to constantly perform above the par or face the being relegated to the rubbish heap of failures. The society they live in has little tolerance for failures.
Youth go through some emotional adjustments as they learn to cope in the world. They need to modify expectations, cope with rejection as they get involved in the relationships as well as understand the attendant changes in their bodies. These are terrible times when youths try to deal with such problems, of which no adults can seem to understand. The latter, having gone through them, certainly feel little need to cajole or mollycoddle them. This ultimately causes the young people to feel alone and frustrated in their troubles.
Youth go through some emotional adjustments as they learn to cope in the world. They need to modify expectations, cope with rejection as they get involved in the relationships as well as understand the attendant changes in their bodies. These are terrible times when youths try to deal with such problems, of which no adults can seem to understand. The latter, having gone through them, certainly feel little need to cajole or mollycoddle them. This ultimately causes the young people to feel alone and frustrated in their troubles.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
test
Post number 1:
This blog is working........
someone please inform me group 4's blog address. I do not seemed to get it right from the list
[edit]okie, found it[/edit]
This blog is working........
someone please inform me group 4's blog address. I do not seemed to get it right from the list
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