Comments | sirius_luva: Toodles, Singapore

sirius_luva

Toodles, Singapore

Mar 18, 2014 19:07

Warning: strong language in gif captions.

[this entire conversation took place in Tamil] I was helping my grandmother make muruku last week and, when talking about something funny I'd done as a child, she said, "You had good brains and you knew how to use them when you were a kid." I teasingly responded, "When I was a kid? So I don't have good ( Read more... )

uwa, friends and family, pictures

Comments 4

blamebrampton February 18 2014, 12:06:21 UTC

I have so much love for you and this post :-)

Give your family all the love and respect you can, but live your own life, and never let them convince you that their opinions outweigh yours, because you'll still be living your life long after they've moved on.

And YES to going where your passions lie!

sirius_luva February 20 2014, 15:24:00 UTC

Thank you! <3

And yeah, that's what I'm doing; I love them, but I can't let them control my life decisions. I mean, it worked out pretty badly for my siblings. :/

Following my passions is working out so far. *crosses fingers*

vnfan February 19 2014, 07:40:16 UTC

This is one of those areas where I see such a distinct East/West difference. In the West, we're still deeply entrenched in the idea of spending your uni years studying what interests you. We often do it at the expense of studying for something we can actually make economic gains from. Now, if we just realised that and enjoyed the hell out of our uni degrees before heading off to 'real life' then that would be fine. But somehow, we've gone from looking at enjoyable uni degrees as nice additions to our mental arsenal to looking at them as what we expect from grown up life. Yes, many people find ways to make their 'useless' uni degrees somewhat applicable. I guess that's why we're still doing it, but overall, we're so enamoured with this idea that our humanities studies will make us highly employable that we're in utter shock when we graduate and have no 'real' marketplace skills. (Of course we do, actually, but we have to constantly translate those skills into marketable language for potential employers.) Worse is to realise that we ( ... )

sirius_luva February 19 2014, 18:52:01 UTC

I guess both extremes have their downfalls, and I think dreaming big and being forced to accept a mundane reality is in a way worse than never expecting anything more than that mundane reality (as Singaporeans so often do). :(

You're right about education being for utilitarian purposes in Asia; I'm not sure about Macau, but in Singapore, the education system itself is less about learning for knowledge's sake and more about rote learning of answers in order to get good marks on exams in order to get into the top schools in order to get into a good solid respectable course in a good uni in the house that Jack built, you see how it goes. That's been my personal experience (and that of my friends), it's what I've heard family members and family friends (most of my family and their friends are teachers) bemoan, and it's actually a fairly common criticism, not that much has been done to change it ( ... )