Okay this is the closest I will get to "student activism". I'm going to write an article and submit it to
Campus Observer about the stupidity of seminar-style classes in NUS. Seminar style classes last for three hours and was initiated as a move to increase student participation and for students to facilitate their own learning. It was a move, I think, away from the traditional system of lectures and tutorials (British style) to something that is supposedly modelled on the American university system which is supposed to be less rigid. I don't know how classs are conducted in the US, so I can't verify this.
See, I think that the reason cited, of having "student-led learning" (or whatever it is in official speak) is bullshit. Students still attend three hours of classes a week for one module, but academics are freed up because they don't have to conduct tutorial classes anymore. This leaves them more time to do research.
What "student-led learning" effectively means is that two out of three hours of the class are spent on student presentations, which are invariably boring and mediocre. This isn't so much a fault of the students as it is of the system. Given our heavy workload, we can only afford to start preparation for presentations a week in advance. If the article to be presented on for that week is particularly dense (i.e. Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?"), the hapless student usually just ends up summarising the contents of the article. If the presentation is on a particular novel or poem, that presentation is ALWAYS predictable, and the points are never novel or thought-provoking.
Point is, I don't see the point of attending three-hour long classes of which two hours are taken up for student presentations. I find the lecture and tutorial method a lot more effective way of learning. I'd rather the lecturer provide a framework of the text or article that we're supposed to read during lectures, so that it provokes us to think deeper about it and come prepared to discuss it during tutorials, rather than have the student grapple with just trying to understand the texts (especially if they are particularly dense or opaque), such that their presentations either become summaries of the text or article or are very superficial readings and predictable readings of it.
So like NUS to start initiatives that look good on paper but are fucked in practice. I'm not criticising the American system. I'm aware that the Singapore Management University (SMU) models itself on the American system, and from what I hear, it is implemented very effectively; the students are active participants in class and are apparently very deeply engaged in their learning. Clearly, this is not happening in NUS despite the bureaucracy trumpeting the merits of the American system. Which just goes to show that somewhere along the way, we really haven't worked out how to implement the system at all.
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Put it another way, I don't pay close to 4k a semester to attend a damn reading group lor.
