100 years

2017 marks Nanyang's 100 years' anniversary and hence, a few of us decided to go back to visit the new campus that we didn't have chance to study in , and also to watch the movie premiere. It was surprisingly professional , from the cinematography to the children's acting and good spoken Mandarin. I hope it will be screened publicly for many more people to see. 

In the movie, there's quite a few interviews with past students, teachers and principals and most of them echoed the same sentiments that character and grit building were important aspects of education there, including the need to contribute to society & be a useful person. They have already emphasised all these since the start of time , way before all these concepts of Grit & Growth Mindset become hot topics in recent parenting/educational culture. And it was quite touching to see how girls didn't always have the chance for education in early Singapore and I think we should be grateful for the opportunities we have today. 

During my time in Nanyang, I was mostly thankful for the friendships that I have formed , which has remained till today - our lovely Shuz and the basketball team. What molded much of my grit and tenacity had to be those tough basketball trainings as we were short and had so much to make up for. We were taught to work hard on a normal day and to work doubly hard after losing the national championships and not to give up when the odds were not in our favour. We were taught to sit around to reflect on our own shortcomings and share honest feedback about our teammates' ones too, and that in hindsight was to be the training for self awareness and some form of emotional intelligence. And many years thereafter, we also realise the global advantage that speaking and reading Chinese bring to us . My relative ease of working in a regional role & dealing with China, Taiwan and Hong Kong must be directly attributable to my training in Nanyang. Hence, in hindsight, I'm thankful for the exposure to Chinese culture , values,  literature , dance , music and arts. 

After the movie, we had the good fortune of bumping into our Physics teacher. She didn't age a bit. I concluded that spending lots of time with young ones makes one young too, as one has to keep up with all the new trends and their energy levels. (Though I think the exceedingly young like Cayen and Cayson have exactly the opposite effect... haha). In our chitchat, I couldn't help but ask the question I had in my head - the PSLE cutoff scores are so high nowadays for Nanyang, are the students a lot smarter than us?

Well, the interesting answer I got was that from her perspective, any results advantage some students get initially most likely even out once they join the workforce. Eventually, it's those who are likeable, reasonably capable and have EQ who may end up the most successful though their results may be average in school, compared to those who spent all their spare time studying . Parents can make a big difference as they are the ones influencing what the children prioritises. It's not uncommon to have parents questioning the kid who scores 97 points as to where the missing points went to. But to me, I guess the question is , do we really need perfection and what's the emotional wellbeing costs and opportunity costs involved to score 100 points? 

Another interesting thing that surfaced was that the kids nowadays have very short attention span and not so great listening skills. I'm hardly surprised. After ten years of smartphone and computers, this is the first generation that has emerged , and we are now seeing the effects of a rewired brain, one which demands instant gratification and lots of action all the time. Her advice to us is to delay the use of devices for our kids as long as possible . I cannot agree more as it's consistent with the literature I have seen and the behaviours in Cayen with and without devices when he's younger. 

Anyway, after an interesting catch-up, we bumped into yet another teacher whom we haven't seen in years. Again, he looked so young and I kind of concluded that teachers somehow have the magical power to stay forever young , and likely due to the fact that they are amidst all the young blood. 

In conclusion, it was an interesting night of catching up and reflections. Overall, I think it's quite remarkable to have a school that survives 100 years of history, including a world war 2. And for the record, I'm proud to be part of this amazing heritage and I look forward to many good years to come.