Saturday, 28 September 2013
Tuesday, 24 September 2013
Quotes
“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
― George Orwell
“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”
― Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays
And now here we are with a bill that would create a 200% fee increase on some students
When school gets crazy, there’s always someone who will take a shift for you
Monday, 23 September 2013
Saturday, 21 September 2013
news
I refer to article: http://therealsingapore.com/content/tuition-woe-or-tuition-blur
This is what is happening in secondary schools:
Majority of students in the Express Stream have tuition.
Minority of the students in the Normal Academic have tuition. Those who have tuition usually have better results than those who don’t.
Vast majority of students in the Normal Tech stream have no tuition. Most of them don’t possess basic skills in literacy and Math. They do well or do badly, it doesn’t matter to the schools since their results don’t influence the school’s annual ranking. All your elite schools also don’t have Normal Technical streams. They see themselves too good for such students. So, what message are you sending to the students? You decide.
Simple conclusion: Most students need tuition in order to do well in school work.
Most school teachers don’t spend quality time to prepare lessons. Why should they? They have NO incentives to do so. Schools want their teachers to spend the bulk of their time on their CCA and committee work and community project work. I have ex-colleagues who swim against the tide and focus on teaching well. They are usually given poor annual work reviews, because MOE expects teachers to do more than teach. So, the natural thing is to cut quality on teaching and focus on non-teaching aspects of the job.
Most teachers have little time for remedial or consultation. They have a lot more time when it comes to doing CCA or committee work or admin work or rehearsals, because these add value to their portfolio and annual work review. Giving extra remedials adds little or close to no value for their annual performance review.
Tutors, on the other hand, have lots of incentives to teach well. So naturally, the quality of teaching goes down in schools while it goes up for tuition.
Most good schools aren’t really good. They focus on recruiting good students with high T-scores, who will most likely do well in national exams years later. The basic teaching is done in school, and the real teaching is left to the tutors, who have far greater incentives than your average, tired out school teacher to teach well.
Your tutors focus on teaching well, while your school teacher focus on lots other things, especially on CCA and non-teaching areas, since the performance review pays them well to behave in such a way.
Naturally, majority of students will need tuition in order to do well.
Friday, 20 September 2013
Tuesday, 17 September 2013
Saturday, 14 September 2013
“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is to not stop questioning.”
― Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory
“Nothing happens until something moves.”
― Albert Einstein
“No, this trick won't work... How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? ”
― Albert Einstein
“Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?”
― Richard P. Feynman
Ernst Zermelo (1871-1953)
No mathematical error can be demonstrated in my [earlier] proof.
...self-evidence ... must not be confused with ... provability.
Kurt Godel (1906-1978)
Nothing new had been done in Logic since Aristotle!
Either mathematics is too big for the human mind or the human mind is more than a machine.
I don't believe in natural science.
The development of mathematics towards greater precision has led, as is well known, to the formalization of large tracts of it, so that one can prove any theorem using nothing but a few mechanical rules.
...a consistency proof for [any] system ... can be carried out only by means of modes of inference that are not formalized in the system ... itself.
Aristotle (384-322 B. C. E)
Now what is characteristic of any nature is that which is best for it and gives most joy. Such a man is the life according to reason, since it is that which makes him man.
There is nothing strange in the circle being the origin of any and every marvel.
The so-called Pythagoreans, who were the first to take up mathematics, not only advanced this subject, but saturated with it, they fancied that the principles of mathematics were the principles of all things.
To Thales the primary question was not what do we know, but how do we know it.
If this is a straight line [showing his audience a straight line drawn by a ruler], then it necessarily ensues that the sum of the angles of the triangle is equal to two right angles, and conversely, if the sum is not equal to two right angles, then neither is the triangle rectilinear.
It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.
But Nature flies from the infinite, for the infinite is unending or imperfect, and Nature ever seeks an end.
We cannot ... prove geometrical truths by arithmetic.
The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree.
The continuum is that which is divisible into indivisibles that are infinitely divisible. Physics.
anyone looking for tutors ? we have well qualified tutors , reasonable rates. Get that A out of school ! contact no. 98458642 , welcome students of all levels and ages. We only hand picked professional tutors that can coach the students , get the results u always wanted ! for more info , pls contact me directly !
Common sense
Meaning
Good practical sense. The natural intelligence that is believed to be available to all rational people.
Origin
Common sense - Tom PaineThomas Paine published a pamphlet entitled Common Sense in January 1776. It called for America to become independent of Britain and a copy of the original is considered a treasure of the US Library of Congress, being one of the wellsprings of the thinking that founded the country. Common sense, that is, a plain practical 'get on with the job' philosophy is part of the American psyche.
Paine is sometimes thought to be American but in fact emigrated to the USA after living the majority of his life in the archetypally English country town of Thetford, Norfolk. Despite his radical views he considered himself English and the pamphlet's author was simply identified as "An Englishman". Nor, as is also sometimes believed, did he invent the term 'common sense', which had been in use in his native land long before Paine's day.
In the original 14th century meaning of the term, 'common sense' was a sense like our other senses. It was an internal feeling that was regarded as the common bond that united all the other human senses, the 'five wits' as they were known, and was something akin to what we now call 'heart'.
By the 16th century, the meaning had changed to be more like our present day meaning, that is, 'the plain wisdom that everyone possesses'. George Joye used the expression in Apology for William Tindale, 1535:
I am suer T[indale] is not so farre besydis his comon sencis as to saye the dead bodye hereth Cristis voyce.
[Note: 'apology' then meant 'defence against attack'/'justification of one's views', and was commonly used in the titles of scholarly disputes.]
The one thing that is usually said about common sense is that it isn't as common as it ought to be. This little gag was made as early as 1726, by the political writer Nicholas Amhurst in the satirical text The Secret History of the University of Oxford:
There is not (said a shrewd wag) a more uncommon thing in the world than common sense.
Thomas Paine - Common SenseBy the time that Paine began writing in the 1770s, the term 'common sense' had migrated a little more and was widely used to mean 'primary truth', that is, the unquestionable beliefs that all people receive from their experience of being alive. Richard Price defined the term in Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, 1758:
Common sense, the faculty of self-evident truths.
Paine's work influenced many political and moral thinkers at the beginning of the American Revolution and he was personally acquainted with most of them; in England, these included the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the artist William Blake and in America, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
When the authors of the US Declaration of Independence began with the words "We hold these truths to be self-evident...", their meaning was 'we believe this declaration to be common sense'.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? The Wicked Queen in Disney’s animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937. The actual line is " Magic Mirror on the Wall, who is the fairest one of all?
".
Browse phrases beginning with:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T UV W XYZ - Full List
In a nutshell
Meaning
In a few words; concisely stated.
Origin
In a nutshellThe meaning of the phrase 'in a nutshell' is fairly easy to deduce. Anything that could be written in so few words that it would fit into a nutshell would have to be brief and to the point.
The first text that was supposed to be enclosed in a nutshell was far from small. Pliny the Elder recorded an event, which he apparently believed to be genuine, in Natural History, the original of which was written in AD 77 and was translated into English in 1601 by Philemon Holland, who included explanatory notes, like this:
We find in Histories almost incredible examples of sharpness of the eyes. Cicero hath recorded, that the poem of Homer called the Iliad, written on parchment, was enclosed within a nutshell. The same writer maketh mention of one who could see to the distance of 135 Miles.
Almost incredible? The Iliad is about 700 pages of A4 text and in Homer's day would have been written on clay tablets. This story seems to be an early example of Chinese whispers, long before that term was invented. Holland was translating a piece by the Roman author Pliny the Elder, who had been told by someone that Cicero had seen a minutely written version of a text by the Greek author Homer.
Shakespeare, who often took themes from the classics, alluded to the 'something compact' idea of 'nutshell' when he gave Hamlet the line:
I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
The figurative use of 'in a nutshell' to mean specifically 'in few concise words' didn't emerge until the 19th century. Thackeray used it in print in The Second Funeral of Napoleon, 1841:
Here, then, in a nutshell, you have the whole matter.
Bible in a nutshellSqueezing books as long as the Iliad into a nutshell was beyond the capability of an ancient Greek with a stylus, but modern nanotechnology has made it straightforward. The Bible seems to be the book that people favour these days for microminiaturization. Many versions exist that would fit inside a walnut shell, and some readable (with a microscope) texts can fit on a pinhead.

Elvis Presley was one of the major figures in 20th century popular music. He sold more records than any other individual artist.
His parting words as he left his last press conference were:
I hope I haven't bored you.
Browse phrases beginning with:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T UV W XYZ - Full List
Heavy metal
Meaning
Hard rock music, usually electric guitar-based and always loud.
Origin
'Heavy metal' seems at first a strange label to apply to a form of music. However, a little investigation into the symbolism behind the name reveals it to be a rather obvious choice.
'Heavy' was coined in the beatnik era of the 1950s to mean serious or profound and the term 'heavy music' was then and later applied to music in that vein. It's clear to see this meaning of heavy is derived from the usual meaning, that is, weighty or massive.
Okay, that's 'heavy' explained but why should a form of music be called metal? Well, most metals are heavy, especially the metals favoured by the bands who played that genre and used metals in their names, for example Led Zeppelin, Iron Butterfly, Iron Maiden and Metallica. Also, the term 'heavy metals' in the chemical sense includes mercury, lead and cadmium, which have just the right image of toxicity to suit the musical style. So, both 'heavy' and 'metal' are suitable candidate words for this genre. Add to that the fact that heavy metal had already been widely used as a military term for heavily fortified tanks/guns etc. and it starts to look like an ideal choice as a label.
The first heavy metal bands, notably Black Sabbath/Ozzy Osbourne, Led Zeppelin and Judas Priest, hailed from Birmingham, which was then (sadly no longer) a principal centre of metal goods manufacturing in the UK. With the decline of that manufacturing tradition, most of the 'metal bashing', as it was known, is now done by these bands rather than by men with big hammers.
Heavy metalBirmingham was the first industrialised city in the world and this industry was centred around the factories and furnaces of the aptly named Black Country, described by the US Consul to the city in 1868 as "Black by day, red by night". Many of the members of the above groups worked in factories by day (Ozzy Osbourne was, for example, a horn tester in a car factory) and played in hard rock bands by night. It's hardly surprising that the music reflected the sights and sounds that the band members were surrounded by. Black Sabbath are generally accepted to be the first heavy metal band. They were originally called Earth after J. R. R Tolkien's mythical Middle Earth. Tolkien was a local boy and is thought to have based the region of Mordor on the Black Country. All in all, it's clear where the musical form heavy metal originated.
Although Ozzy and friends were playing heavy metal in the late 1960's/early 1970s, they didn't use that expression to describe it - for that we need to cross to the USA. The term 'heavy metal' first appears in print in William Burroughs' 1962 novel The Soft Machine. His character Uranian Willy is described as "the Heavy Metal Kid". Burroughs later re-used the term in his 1964 novel Nova Express:
"With their diseases and orgasm drugs and their sexless parasite life forms - Heavy Metal People of Uranus wrapped in cool blue mist of vaporized bank notes - And the Insect People of Minraud with metal music."
The term 'heavy metal' was used in a musical context in the title of a 1967 album by the British avant-garde outfit Hapshash and the Coloured Coat - Featuring The Human Host And The Heavy Metal Kids. The title wasn't applied to a particular musical style and appears to have been a reference to the 'kids' in Burroughs' novel.
It isn't clear who first appropriated the term to refer to loud rock music, although several lay claim to it. The widely quoted description of Jimi Hendrix's music as 'like listening to heavy metal falling from the sky', while being a fairly accurate assessment, isn't the earliest use of the phrase.
creemSome claim that the US rock music critic Lester Bangs, while working for Creem magazine, used the expression in 1968 to describe a performance of the band MC5 (Motor City Five), but I've been unable to find documentary evidence of that. Creem magazine themselves attribute the term to Mike Saunders, in an article about the 'Kingdom Come' album, by Sir Lord Baltimore, in the May 1971 edition of the magazine:
"This album is a far cry from the currently prevalent Grand Funk sludge, because Sir Lord Baltimore seems to have down pat most all the best heavy metal tricks in the book."
This has the benefit of being a traceable citation, as copies of the edition are still extant. So, until other hard evidence is found, that has to be the current strongest claim. It would be surprising if the term had never been used in the musical context before 1971 though - after all Steppenwolf used it in the lyric of their 1968 song Born to be Wild:
"I like smoke and lightning
Heavy metal thunder
Racin' with the wind
And the feelin' that I'm under"
The phrase may be American but the music was born, like my good self, in the 'jewel of the English Midlands' - the Black Country.
Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration
more like this...
...other phrases about:
Numbers
Meaning
Genius is largely the result of hard work, rather than an inspired flash of insight.
Origin
Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspirationFew proverbial sayings can be attributed to a named individual. In this case, we can name the coiner of the expression - the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison.
Edison is first reported as saying "Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration" sometime around 1902, in the September 1932 edition of Harper's Monthly Magazine.
It is impossible to know at this remove whether the Harper's journalists were accurate in their attribution, although no one else appears to have uttered the words before they reported them in 1932.
Edison may have come up with the neatest line but several others had expressed very similar thoughts before 1902. The Comte de Buffon (a.k.a. George-Louis Leclerc), 1707–88, was attributed with this line in Hérault de Séchelles' Voyage à Montbar, in 1803:
Genius is only a greater aptitude for patience.
Thomas Carlyle is widely reported to have coined the term "Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains". What he actually said, in the History of Frederick the Great, written 1858–65, was:
'Genius' (which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all).
Not to be outdone, that disciple of earnest endeavour John Ruskin wasn't to be left out. In Notes by Mr Ruskin on His Collection of Drawings by the late J. M. W. Turner, 1878, he made the observation that:
I know of no genius but the genius of hard work.
A cat may look at a king
Meaning
An inferior isn't completely restricted in what they may do in the presence of a superior.
Origin
The origin of this proverb is unknown. What is known is that it is found first in print in a famous early collection of English proverbs, The Proverbs And Epigrams Of John Heywood, 1562:
Some hear and see him whom he heareth nor seeth not
But fields have eyes and woods have ears, ye wot
And also on my maids he is ever tooting.
Can ye judge a man, (quoth I), by his looking?
What, a cat may look on a king, ye know!
My cat's leering look, (quoth she), at first show,
Showeth me that my cat goeth a caterwauling;
And specially by his manner of drawing
To Madge, my fair maid.
In 1713, Oswald Dykes published English proverbs with moral reflexions. This used various well-known proverbs as a starting point for Dykes' to pronounce his political and social values. In this extract it isn't clear which king he was protecting, as Queen Anne was the British monarch at the time:
Tis very true, Kings do not use to call Cats to an Account for their looks, or their undistinguishing Boldness: But there are many Cats of this Kind, which are too much made of, indulg'd, and encourag'd, 'till they fly at last in the Face of sacred Majesty. In this Sense, it is a true-blue Protestant-Proverb. I do not know whether it was calculated for the Rabble or not; to pur and mew like Cats about a Throne, 'till at length they scratch the Hand that strokes them, and mob their Protector. However, there has been ill use made on't; and it has often been extravagantly misapply'd to Outrage and Violence upon a King's Person, as well in Print, as in some Peoples Mouths.

ABC tuition agency
anyone looking for tutors ? we have well qualified tutors , reasonable rates. Get that A out of school ! contact no. 98458642 , welcome students of all levels and ages. We only hand picked professional tutors that can coach the students , get the results u always wanted ! for more info , pls contact me directly !
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)