the great divide

Before everything starts, you might want to refer to Today Online and the Electric New Paper. Finally, some mainstream controversy over the GEPers. Add in the fact that students sketchpad is going to spoof this issue like they always do, and we have a good show on our hands.

(and yes, I'm following the latest trend in GEP-blogging now. I could probably write a GP essay here but that wouldn't make for a nice post. So it's all subjective bullshit here from now on)

Gifted Education Programme. Those 3 words seperate the elite from the best. Those 3 words bring an enormous amount of prestige yada yada blah blah. Sometimes I wonder whether it was by a pure fluke that I got into it in Primary 4 in the first place or because the markers of the test were blind. Are we just placed into the GEP because we develop faster than the others? Are we placed there just because we read books like "Sophie's World" way before P4? Most likely.

The head honchos at MOE started GEP to identify the brightest or the most talented and develop their talents. However, the bitter truth in Singapore is that without good results, you are never going to get anywhere in society. So you can be as talented as you are in one area (like playing the Mario Tune blindfolded) but if you don't score 9A1s then 4As you are screwed (unless your father is rich enough to send you overseas). It is that cruel, but it is Singapore. So now we have seen the GEP degenerate into some sort of "accelerated programme" whereby we accelerate the learning pace to accomodate the increase in depth of the subjects they cover without pausing to think whether they have absorbed everything or are just purely hanging on by their coattails.

It is like a culture shock once you step into the GEP. From sitting at cute little desks, listening to the teacher drone on and on, to playing games, going places, or whatever it is that the GEP classes do in the name of making education "fun" but I somehow forgot, it is indeed a huge leap to make. So is the translation of consistently scoring 280+/300 for P1 P2 P3, then being last in class for the other 3 years.

I hated my pee school life then, but reflecting back, true, it was just one hard slog from start to end (kinda like JC life now =p). But along with a cohort of 72 who stuck together for 3 years, it was fun. There were "oddballs" who would have been "ostracised" in the mainstream, but they were fun to be around in class. And cuz i didn't know any mainstream people or talk to them much there were no problems of so-called "bad-mouthing"

In a sense GEP is educating it's denizens for JC life =p, but yet we have to ask the question whether we are plunging P3 kids into the deep end of the pool so soon. Whether they can really cope with the pressures of being so-called "gifted" by their mainstream peers. Whether they can really deal with a simplified version of PW (called IRS) being dumped on their fragile shoulders so soon. In the end they still take the same exams. They still have the same career path in front of them. So what's the point?

If you ask me I hated the fact that we were expected to deal with much more schoolwork than our peers in the mainstream. Gifted does not mean "can tahan more bullshit or whatever". In the same way, I hated how we were expected to do much much mucho better than our peers in exams and what not. I hated how we were made out to be different. But yet I love my years in the programme. Cos of all the colourful characters in my classes. Cos of all the time we stuck together. And cos I got screwed seriously and yet came out alive =p.

TNP states that:

MOE says that in the past three years, an average of about:

• 78% of GEP pupils got at least three A*s in PSLE
• 38% got four A*s
• 75% of GEP pupils got at least 8 distinctions (A1 & A2) at the O levels
• 35% got at least 8A1s

I'm in the 25 percent and 65 percent respectively. lols. Proves that GEP-ers aren't all that pro as they are made out to be (Fok and chunteck are the exception)

Which is why it was slightly embarrassing to be branded GEP-er by the class and others, especially in the 1st 3 months. Considering that I never showed any signs of being gifted, or having the A1s to match my years in the programme, I could be considered a disappointment of the system.

Which is why a return to normalcy, back to the mainstream, is particularly nice to savour.

And yet, much ado has been made about nothing much in the press recently. TODAY started it when they published a parent's letter about the flaws about GEP. Now that TNP has opened the floodgates with that article that came out on the day of the release of the PSLE results, even pitting the 2 camps against each other: "Perhaps the PSLE results, to be released today, will provide further ammunition for one camp over the other." We will see much hell in the newpapers' forums, in Singapore blogs, in Singapore forums. We will see much namecalling, much bullshit being flung about, by the defenders of the GEP and the attackers against them.

And ms michelle qiu isn't helping out here. What a sweeping generalisation that is going to ire some people. "mature"? What gives her the right to proclaim "us" "more mature" than "them"? Perhaps such scenarioes only happen in her school. Perhaps she does not have enough contact with the mainstream to see past their "so-called immaturity" and realise that, we are still the same people, just educated differently.

From an issue of usefulness of the GEP, it will mutate to become an issue of an inferiority/superiority complex, and will degenerate to a public fight. Most likely, the students aren't the ones who have caustic remarks to spit. It will be the "non-students" who have nothing better to do than to disguise their foul intentions with chim chim words.

Isn't it sad?

P.S Now that I re-read my above post, it's just rambling on and on about nothing in particular. lol

erjian came, saw, crapped for 2 hours