Kapap Training; Magic Show?; CNY Celebrations

Happy CNY to everyone! Updates:

(1) Mon - Had Kapap training in the morning and it was very interesting! Basically Kapap is a kind of fighting style which appears to be growing in popularity and the next few paragraphs are going to be the details of his lesson that I recall:

Why Kapap as opposed to other commonly learnt fighting styles like Taekwondo or simply Wushu? As the trainer mentions, the purpose of his teaching is really for self-defence and Kapap is useful because the moves are instinctive and thus simpler to learn. Also, in a real street fight, there are no holds barred, which is what Kapap is about. In fact, Kapap often involves hitting people below the belt (which Taekwondo doesn't allow) and it's also not about looking pretty, like some of the moves in Wushu.

During the short session, we learnt some very, very basic things like adopting a proper stance, palm strikes, and blocks.

(1) Why the need for a proper stance? As the trainer said, in a street fight, one of the most important thing is balance because once you get hit and get thrown back you would lose the initiative and become vulnerable to subsequent attacks.

(2) Why palm strikes instead of a punch in the face? Because you're actually very likely to injure your wrist seriously when you deliver a punch to somebody else, esp if you're hitting the head which is very hard also.

So what makes a proper stance? It's really all about simple physics actually - basic concepts of a bigger base having greater stability and the centre of gravity of an object. So to adopt a proper stance, imagine a square/rectangle and place your 2 feet at the opposite corners of the s/r, with your stronger foot in front. Your feet should be fairly spread out, prob about shoulder width apart. Then your back should be bent slightly forward so that in the event of a force knocking you backwards, you will not fall back, as compared to your back being vertical and then bending backwards when you are hit. If you need to move in any direction, take 1 step in that direction with the appropriate foot and move your other foot such that you maintain the stance at all times.

In preparation for a palm strike (or double palm strike), your hands should be raised to around your face level and above, with the stronger hand forward so that you can use it to attack. As the trainer said, this is instinctive because if the need arises you should attack with your strong hand to end the confrontation quickly. Your arms should be slightly bent to avoid the possibility of your opponent going in to attack your elbows.

To block, the basic position is head tilted slightly down to avoid the face being fully exposed. The 2 arms should be raised vertically in front of your head with just a small space in between (slightly less than a fist) so that you can block an attack to your face and also to see what your opponent is doing. In the event that he goes for a side jab, simply slide your hand back to block the side that he is attacking. Do not lean to the side for fear of being hit because you are likely to lose your balance. Have faith that your block will be effective! As for dealing with upper cuts, he didn't really mention I think except that most people can't do a proper upper cut due to the body posture (the force is due to the body twist rather than just a hand movement).

He also showed us the dangers of shaking hands with strangers because a trained person can take you down in 1-2 sec and I thought his demo was really impressive so do be careful if you're in some isolated place esp not in Singapore as it's always good to play it safe. He also talked about the concept of maintaining your centre line (an imaginary line down the centre of your body) and that you should always keep your centre line facing your potential aggressor. For example, when taking a name card from someone, avoid standing by his side when he wants to show you his name card. Instead, take it and move yourself to face him again to avoid being placed in a vulnerable position. Another thing he shared was gun disarming, which though is unlikely to be useful in Singapore, it may be good in other countries where guns are allowed, such as in the U.S. Basically you raise both your hands to the level at which he is pointing, such as your chest or your head, and as you try to calm him down, quickly grab the gun (which is easier since your hands are already near) and pull it back to your side such that you're actually aiming him from the side after you grabbed the gun and it's far away such that he can't grab back.

So that's basically what we learnt that morning. Anyway, we had this training because of our preparations for our very first REACH Day next Friday whereby as part of the Active Aging theme we will be teaching Kapap to some elderly folks. Hopefully it'll be useful to whoever has read the entire chunk of stuff! You can ask me to demo also if need be if you see me. I should still remember all these =)

(2) Tue - just wanted to try out a new dress style since it's the temp timetable and I was delivering my H1 lecture so I went to school with this purple Topman shirt and black vest that I bought last Dec with Jon, LJ and DS. Had a lot of varied comments from being overdressed, looking like a croupier/magician/entertainer, to looking cute/good/nice. Anyway I always felt a change once in a while would be interesting cos otherwise it's quite boring wearing the same old same old kind of thing everyday. Of course not everybody agrees but that's fine with me since I don't need to please everyone. But yeah, I think dark purple is not really my colour and I still look best with black, blue, pink, and white.

H1 lecture was ok, there were a few funny moments and I kinda like lecturing a smaller group of students because they seem to be more responsive perhaps cos there's fewer people and not so paiseh for them and some of them are pretty enthu. Need to up the pace though and I need to think about sacrificing certain things cos so far I've tried to make things more interesting with more real-life applications and having more thinking questions which I feel are useful but somehow I've not covered as much as I've planned so I need to relook at things. Oh, and I was so pleasantly surprised that there were some students who took the initiative to do most of the H1 tutorial already and even asked me questions after the lecture. Hope there are a lot more of them! =)

(3) Thu - Met up with my CG and hopefully we'll have a great year without discipline problems and be able to bond well. I always worry about classes with a lot of girls cos somehow I feel that they tend to develop cliques as compared to guys and it takes more effort to get everyone to come together. But I have faith that my CG Chairperson and Vice-chair can help the class to bond so looking forward to a great year ahead =)

(4) Fri - CNY celebrations and I took part in this "Don't Forget The Lyrics" game with some other JC1 teachers and each of us were paired with a student of our choice. Turned out fine and at least the kids were entertained. Just as well that I only had to sing the missing line and not the parts before that cos my throat was not feeling ok (again - irritatingly). Had lo hei session before some of us went out for some bonding session hahaha.

Ok, time for me to go visiting! Happy CNY to everyone again! Oh, and Happy V day too! =)

Odyssey 2010; Start of lessons; Family matters

Ok, just had a hectic week starting with Odyssey 2010, our JC1 orientation programme! Spent a lot of time during the first day collecting O-Pack funds, counting money and doing all the accounts but I enjoyed doing the paper work for it since I do my own personal accounting so it's my strength. I think most of the other TAs would've baulked at doing it haha. But well, we each have our own strengths and contribute in different ways to Council so that's the good thing having more people who can do a variety of things =)

Oh, the opening for orientation was really fun! Haha, since the theme was based on pirates (like Pirates of the Caribbean), the Councillors and House Comm members actually created a "ship" using a large trolley that was intricately designed and Capt Lai (aka Ms Lai) was accompanied by her crew of pirates who battled their way through another group of rival pirates. It ended up with Ms Lai smashing a glass bottle to signify the start of orientation (a bit like the christening of a ship). All in all a pretty entertaining opening!

Anyway, the rest of the day was on Pirating 101, which was a mixture of team games in school. Seemed like the kids were enjoying themselves! As for me, I was busy with my IP stuff so I didn't really go around much to look at all the games. Went off in the evening to get my hair cut and I was quite pleased with it. I think I shall be sticking to this hairstylist that my friend recommended (at Tamp St 44) cos she's quite friendly about giving tips about hair care and surprisingly she actually recognised me even though the last time I had my hair cut by her was about 4 months ago!

Tue - Had our traditional MMM and I was posted to Seng Kang with another teacher (an Aussie) and it was quite fun walking around the stations and watching the OGLs playing. We would've liked to play but sadly there weren't a lot of team games that we could compete in so we just stuck to monitoring the stations. So practically my whole day was spent on admin stuff plus MMM and by the time I got back to school it was almost 6pm and there were some serious casualties that the Council had to take care of. Thankfully they were all fine after being seen by the doctors.

After that I was helping out with orientation admin again until about 8pm and there were various people entering the GO trying to appeal for various stuff so I helped to direct them to the appropriate people. Haha, even met Hui Shan's brother, which was so coincidental.

Wed - Wet & Wild games in the morning and it was quite fun. I was very unhappy regarding my area not being cleared up by the OGLs after they were done and I had a good mind to scold them while I was cleaning up for them but somehow in the end I let them off cos I didn't want to go and track down the people responsible for it since they cleared up the rest of the mess after I told the councillor in charge to gather them.

Went out for a very quick dinner at Sakae Sushi with some of my friends and the food really sucked! I've been there a couple of times in the last few months cos I like to eat sushi and there ain't any other place that sells Jap food near our school and it wasn't too bad but this time it was horrible. Mainly it was cos of their new dish - this teriyaki ika (squid) which tasted bad and the texture was horrible also. As my friend pointed out, they prob just defrosted it put the sauce on it. It was waaaaay worse than the one I had a Ajiman with Jon and LJ last time. =(

Finale of orientation was a blast! And it was great to see so many familiar faces coming back to MJC and catching up with them. I even saw councillors from my first batch (2006), i.e. the 4th SC), such as Hwei Ting, Christopher, and Eugene. A lot of the 6's also came back, prob more than 10 I think, and we even had to ask some of them to help us be the guest judge for the event cos some of the TAs were occupied with casualties (again) and I was the only one left.

The performances by the OGs were by and large quite lame to me but then again orientation performances were never renowned to be great since they're all last minute stuff. The dances by the OGLs were quite enjoyable to watch though and some of them were pretty well synchronised and you could tell some of them had formal dance training from the moves and their form.

Oh, and there was some segment where the various houses decorated a certain space based on the pirate theme and Atlas did an awesome job with its ship, complete with a hull, pirate on top of the wall (the long one in the assembly plaza) with a patch and telescope, cannon with confetti booming out. They even paid tribute to the various houses and to us they were the clear winners. Speaking of which, looks like I'll be in Atlas this year since my CG is under Atlas. Hopefully we'll have a good team for Colosseum this year! =)

Anyway, I spent most of the night chatting to various ex-students which was quite enjoyable and kinda strange since I don't normally talk much. But I suppose it was cos I talk to a variety of people for short periods so there are plenty of things to talk about.

The whole thing ended at about 10pm, after all the performances, dancing and cheering and by the time we cleared up everything it was almost midnight. Cabbed home and conked out soon after reaching home. What a draining event indeed! And I'm one of the ICs in charge next year so I better start preparing during the Jun holidays. Source around for possible themes, games, etc. Should be fun! =)

Thur - start of the temp timetable and there were plenty of talks in the morning as I got about taking attendence for 10S417. For the 3rd time in a row, I'm teaching a 4-series class. And for the 2nd time in a row, I'm CT for a class which takes Chem and Bio (though at H1 level) and has only 3 guys lol. Strange! Hopefully they'll be at least as nice as 08S114, which was a very sweet class and I really enjoyed seeing them everyday and talking to them about life and studies. Keeping my fingers crossed!

Fri - Showtime for H1! Lecture was ok, though I didn't cover as much as I wanted to maybe cos I spent too much time on expectations? I never liked doing this kind of thing but it's just something that has to be done.

Anyway I was thinking how to make the lecture series more interesting cos it's a long series (about 5 periods) so you need to have a bit of stuff here and there to engage the kids - maybe some stories, real-life applications, video, and stuff - and while I did incorporate some of these, I wanted more also so in the end, in the spirit of CNY, I told them that I would be the Cai Shen Ye and at appropriate junctures I would hit them with some deep thinking questions to which I would give out money for good answers. =p

Gave them a past year MCQ that was quite conceptual and I thought it was effective to get them thinking right from the start so that they know H1 Chem is not so easy. It made things more interesting I think though hopefully they will not rely on such extrinsic motivation in future hahaha. =p

Sat - Went for my cousin's wedding lunch at Park Royal hotel and it was quite interesting cos they got some magician/illusionist to perform though only for a short while, maybe about 5 min and he carried out a series of basic tricks that were fairly impressive I suppose but they're those that are commonly done.

Went home to rest before getting a ride from my friend to go to Caroline's birthday BBQ at Pasir Ris Park. Thought I'd try to surprise her cos I felt it wouldn't be so nice that I missed both her invitations so I went down though I had to rush off like about 45 min later to go for my mom's side family reunion dinner at Lor Chuan, which was very far away!

Sun - Went to the gym and it was a fairly relaxing session compared to the last few weeks. Came back to rest and sad to say I've been nua-ing for most of the day since coming back. Have a lot of things happening in the next few weeks - dinner with ZAM, Council TAs dinner, reunion dinner, Chem gathering, Reach Day + Chem CIP and dinner, Chrystal Elective on Board Games, Science Fiesta. And that's not even considering the work from IP and Council so I better make full use of the rest of the temp timetable and CNY holidays to increase my pace of work! =)

1st Cooking Lesson! Showtime soon!

As I suspected the same problem cropped up again but thankfully this time I saved my post on Notepad already so I managed to salvage the situation. Anyway, wanted to talk about my 1st cooking lesson on Fri which was a rousing success!!! Haha, my friend taught me to cook fried rice in school and it was a very fun affair. There was another friend around while I was learning and we were all laughing about me cos of my "noobness" in cooking.

The first thing they laughed at was when I couldn't distinguish between garlic and onion - I thought the onion was a smaller version of garlic with purple skin. My teacher almost vomitted blood I think. =p Then later while I was peeling the carrot skin, during the QC, my teacher said that I didn't do it properly and I said I had problems cos the carrot skin and the carrot were both orange and they laughed at me again.

During the session I learnt a lot of basic skills such as slicing and dicing stuff into cubes (e.g. the sausage and carrots), chopping stuff into very fine bits (e.g. the garlic, ginger, onion), stir-frying the sausages and vegetables, organising the ingredients and the order in which to add them (cos some take longer to cook), how much and when to add the oil, how to judge if the food is cooked, and other stuff that are more specific to the dish... It was certainly a very enlightening lesson and I'll need to do my summary to consolidate all the concepts that I've learnt! =p

Anyway quite a few people who were around in the staff room tried it and gave the thumbs up and we finished everything up quickly so now the acid test will be to reproduce the same quality without any help from my teacher. Am looking forward to that but hopefully I'll have time to cook once school starts!

Anyway, my showtime starts this Fri with my lecture on H1 Mole Concept. Need to make things more interesting about a topic that teachers traditionally tend to find it boring to teach cos it seems so simple at times but students just don't get it, often I feel due to poor foundation at secondary school level. I feel it's one of the most important topics though cos often I find students who are unable to do mole concept questions suffer big-time since it usually means their thinking ability about chemical concepts are very limited and they will struggle in the physical chem topics. It'll be a challenge but I've done my fair bit of research and hopefully I can inject sufficient humour into the lectures while still maintaining a good pace of teaching. Looking forward to getting a good start to the year! =)

Preparation for Friendship Week

I actually posted last night but bizarrely enough after I clicked submit there was a bad error request and the worst thing was that the "back" button didn't work and there wasn't even a draft copy when I logged in again, which is strange cos usually Blogger saves the drafts as you blog. So it's super xianzzz! Wasted my 1.5 hours of life T_T

And I dunno why my old com can't access the Internet which is extremely irritating cos almost all of my files are still in there and I've not even installed MS Office and other programmes on my new com yet. The strange thing is that I can actually go onto MSN and download Windows updates and even play DOTA via the Internet but the IE just doesn't seem to work suddenly. Looks like a DNS error or something and I noticed the packets of data transferred is very small (like in 10's as compared to usually 10's of thousands or even 100's of thousands). Anybody has a possible solution that's simple to implement? =s

Anyway as one might tell I'm not in the happiest of moods so this post is gonna be a trimmed version (which may still be long cos by my standards my recent posts tend to be v long) cos I don't have the feeling to go and elaborate on everything as I did...

Ytd I went to visit a fellow Council TA at CGH with some of the other TAs cos she was admitted for appendicitis (ouch!). Thankfully she looked to be in good spirits though in obvious pain and some of them tried to cheer her up by joking about her but it was difficult for her cos she wanted to laugh but it was painful to laugh. =s

After that we went down to MJC to check out the preparations for orientation. The councillors were preparing the O-Packs and I learnt about dealing with vendors and handling certain issues that cropped up during my time there, which is good cos next year I'm one of the ICs for orientation and there are so many things to learn and prepare for - all the paper work and liasing will be just crazy!

Have been busy with organisation of Friendship Week and there are actually a lot of things to look into, contrary to what one might think. Of course the work pales in comparison to Orientation and some of the other major events like Prom but it also involves a fair bit of coordination and the whole Council's help - a good way to get initiated into the Council I suppose haha.

Anyway so this week I was a lot more involved in Friendship Week (previously we just liaised with the 2 ICs) and on Wed I sat down to speak with all the 4 sub-committees (Angel-Mortal Game, Publicity, Sales, Finale) and it was an enjoyable experience to listen to all their plans and giving feedback. I guess it's something I expected Council work to be - interacting with the students and getting involved in a variety of tasks that also requires me to think critically about their plans and also sometimes requiring a bit of my creativity. As I thought before, I would be of better use in Council than in IGC, though I enjoyed my time there. =)

The most enjoyable thing was conceptualising the photo shoot for the postcards we intend to sell for Friendship Week. I went to find quotes on friendship on the Internet and from there I got some inspiration on taking certain photos in the school to represent those quotes which I thought was cool cos my fellow TA had mentioned before that her school sold special postcards with pictures of the school and it was very popular even though they were expensive cos they carried sentimental value.

I managed to get my chem bro to help us do the photo shoot on Thu and it was a very fun session as we walked around the school to take pictures at the spiral staircase, classrooms, garden, rock wall and soccer field. After that we did some photo editing where I learnt some skills from him and we had a reshoot cos there were some things we weren't satisfied with and also cos I had another brainwave so we went to take pictures at the running track and chin-up bars.

We then got some other teachers and councillors to give feedback on the edited pictures and it was interesting to hear their comments - like certain pictures look scary, very artistic, unnatural, etc. - and I learnt more stuff about how various people have different sense of aesthetics and how some things look good to everyone so that I have a better idea of what appeals to people. I also learnt about the importance of different fonts and how it ties in with the photos so after a while I developed a sense of what fonts would match certain photos and it became a really interesting affair trying to match a suitable font and even arranging how the words of the quotes should be placed in the picture was a very fun thing!

Can't say that the edited photos are perfect because I have a thing for perfection but given the time constraints and my amateurish skills I think it's already very, very good (thanks to the great shots my chem bro took) and many people have said that they liked the photos. But the most important thing is the final product so hopefully everything will turn out fine after they're printed. Btw, proceeds of our sales will go to SCAS so please do your bit for charity and support our Students' Council too by buying the postcards! =) [price tbc later though the initial plan was $1 per card with a special price of $5 for a set of 6 cards]
Contact me if you're interested (I will probably mass email soon to the ex-MJC students anyway, esp those in my last batch) =)

Ok, shall stop for now and carry on in another post cos Blogger looks scary - got problems saving the draft. It better not screw up again!