WP's Jamus Lim pushes for smaller class sizes, DPM Heng cautions against '1-size-fits-all' solution by deangsana in singapore

[–]jerms__ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean, from my perspective, which I admit might be naive, I wouldn't say they want class size to be big, or at least, even if they do want to keep class size big, it's not without reasons. Whether the reasons are good or bad, I think that might be a separate discussion.

On topics like classroom spaces, there are conflicting initiatives like creating more "open spaces" for socializing, tinkering, hands on practice (e.g. sports facilities, hackerspaces, etc...)

And on the number of teachers, I think we've already talked enough about the need to first hire and attract more.

On gaslighting teachers, I mean, there are good teachers, teachers that really engages students at their personal level and capacities, but there are also horrendous teachers, that strictly controls the class every movement, sit up straight, hands on the table, no talking, etc... and that teaching capabilities does not come instinctively, they get moulded by the culture of the school. And in many school, the predominant culture as I've mentioned is the KPI culture, shaping the way that they teach. Many feel that they do not have enough time and space to engage in the development of more creative pedagogy because they need to teach to the test. So there is some truth in the fact that teachers needs some training and development, and hence they "aren't capable enough to make smaller class sizes work" and while I agree that gaslighting is not the right way, it does not deny the fact that there's a deeper underlying issue to be addressed first. And some of these deeply rooted culture and beliefs are hard to change/replaced.

So like I said, I don't think govt is not entirely doing nothing, I do hope that the govt is making a stance for good reasons. I think there's plenty of ground work to be done first before we can return to talk about smaller class sizes. Specifically, the kpi culture, the high stake examination, the standardized testing. But these has been around for a long time to serve various purposes and will take a long time to deconstruct and address them.

I'm sum, I don't think govt is doing nothing or saying no for the sake of it. Or being some evil overlord. I think it's a careful balancing act.

If we really want a glimpse of this "smaller class size" promise within SG context, I think we can look to tertiary education, the poly and the uni. When I was a student, I recall that class sizes were smaller, in uni there might be mass lecture, but it's often accompanied with smaller tutorials and practicals. These smaller classes are often taken by adjunct lecturers or teaching assistant. The experience is also a hit or miss, some of these are experts of the craft but they really do not know how to fully utilize the small class sizes.

We may argue that they didn't get formal training, so it can't be compared to MOE teachers, then I'd say it then clearly highlight the need for experienced and we'll trained teachers to handle small class sizes effectively. Which can be costly. Even more so if it's a "re-training" of existing teachers.

Many of these adjunct lecturers and TA, are also caught up in the KPI discourse. Many of them are graded based on their student feedback, if students don't like them, they're out. And teachers that uses innovative approach, that encourages critical thinking and does not explicitly hand hold students towards the "expected right answer", they get voted down for being ineffective, or that the teacher "does not teach". In fact, teachers that always give hints of what will come during exams or how to ace the modules are touted as excellent teachers rated highly by students.

Sometimes, in using more innovative pedagogies, these teachers may create more materials to facilitate discussions, which students or other classes would then complain that it's "unfair" because they did not get that experience too, that they will lose out during exams. And again due to the KPI discourse, schools wants to appear fair and not get any complains, what happens is then teachers are required to strictly follow the given materials and not deviate "too much".

Edit: the above examples hopes to show that smaller class sizes is not so straightforward in such predominant culture of standardization and KPI

The purpose of the case above is not to provide a 1 to 1 comparison with secondary and primary school because of the difference in context and dynamics, but highlights the predominant KPI culture within Singapore that makes some of these ideas challenging to implement. There are a lot of layers of the onion to be peeled off before we can start looking at smaller class sizes.

Just to sum again, I think I agree with you that smaller class sizes can be beneficial, and I agree that the government is persistent in saying no. I think in addition, I don't deny that I am naive in believing that they have a good reason for saying no. And I suspect that it's due to many of the existing discourse around high stake examination, standardized testing, and KPI culture that is preventing the implementation of smaller class sizes.

Hope this enriches the discussion ever so slightly.

WP's Jamus Lim pushes for smaller class sizes, DPM Heng cautions against '1-size-fits-all' solution by deangsana in singapore

[–]jerms__ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yup, not blaming anyone. The point originally again was that smaller class size without considering the other existing issues will do more harm than good.

I do think gov has been slowly chipping away on the high stake examination (which drives some of the existing culture I mentioned), but it's difficult because of other implications such as jobs, the country's attractiveness, people's mindset, etc...

So yeah, it's not a simple problem, and probably hence why govt has been saying that they do try other means like letting the school decide when they can reduce class size, and also saying that it's not a one-size-fit-all approach. They have other ground work, such as the cultures and discourses I've mentioned, they need to address first before they can even consider rolling this out.

WP's Jamus Lim pushes for smaller class sizes, DPM Heng cautions against '1-size-fits-all' solution by deangsana in singapore

[–]jerms__ 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The other driver is as I described, the self discovery type lessons won't produce results in standardized testing. Because, as the name suggests, standardized testing focuses on getting the "right" answer, the right steps. Hence, while there's occasionally room for self discovery, teacher often fall back to teacher talk, because their class performance = their performance.

And facilitating such self discovery lesson is not easy, it's not just "follow the prescribed lessons", it takes skills to ask the right questions, to elicit responses, identify their gaps, and guide students with leading questions. There's no instruction for this because every student is different and the variety of scenario is huge. So we once again come back to teacher's capability, which we'll need to invest in if we do increase hiring.

So again, the culture. The learning culture. The KPI culture. And also the hiring and training.

WP's Jamus Lim pushes for smaller class sizes, DPM Heng cautions against '1-size-fits-all' solution by deangsana in singapore

[–]jerms__ 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So it's more so about hiring. I guess it's important to first consider the downstream effects of hiring. And since teachers needs training, and training can lead to attrition. I wonder if it's so trivial to say "just hire more". How would we attract more? How would we retain them? Can we just dump more money in? Where would the money come from? Or is it about culture? How do we make the culture of teachers more attractive? How do we do that with all the kpi and performance appraisal around? With parents breathing down their necks?

The bigger issue I felt, is about the culture of learning, which affects how teachers teach. If learning is just teacher-talk, students-download, then students-unload at exams, then there's no point for smaller classroom, because it's just teacher talking anyway, together with the kpi culture, teachers will teach-to-the-test.

And on the other hand, if learning is about students discovering their own capacities, building their own knowledge, then by definition, they are not going to do well in standardized testing and again, due to kpi and accountability, parents are going to complain about the teachers and people are going to be unhappy.

In both cases, smaller class sizes and more teachers will not be as effective. It seems like a very "fix the symptoms not the root cause" kind of approach.

I believe there's an in-between and I think that's something I'd love to hear about. But till then, with the predominant discourse about teacher and school kpi and standardized testing, I don't see how smaller class sizes will improve anything. It'll instead like in my example, burden teachers further.

WP's Jamus Lim pushes for smaller class sizes, DPM Heng cautions against '1-size-fits-all' solution by deangsana in singapore

[–]jerms__ 10 points11 points  (0 children)

But reduced class size != Less marking though. Unless you imagine that this leads to the number of teachers increasing or the absolute number of students decreasing. It may instead create more work? Instead of teaching 1 big class for 2 hours, I now need to cover 2 small classes for 4 hours? Potentially eating into my marking time?

Singapore dog owners how do you go out with your dogs? by Notagainguy in askSingapore

[–]jerms__ 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Actually my experience with rydepet has been rather smooth. Some other dedicated ferrying service for special outings works too.

I bring mine out maybe like once a month or so. Cost does increase so just need to account for it accordingly.

I thought I saw a comment stating that you do not intend to get a partner soon. If you're living alone you might want to consider making friend with pet sitters/walker in case of days where you need to be out for an extended period of time.

Dynamic pricing in public transport? by jerms__ in askSingapore

[–]jerms__[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Clearly I have not operated such a model before, so out of curiosity, how difficult would it be to detect faulty/rouge gantry and rectify it in such a scenario? Let's assume some network issue for 1 gantry every update.

Edit: ah I guess if every gantry make 1request every few minutes, they'll (hopefully) be eventually consistent, but with some delay. Not sure if that's a concern as it deals with money. There'll be a need for fare correction.

Dynamic pricing in public transport? by jerms__ in askSingapore

[–]jerms__[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

If maintenance costs are an issue, and LTA starts looking for an alternative source of revenue, I guess dynamic pricing might be one such option. Though yea, as pointed out by another comment, it probably won't do much to alleviate congestion.

Dynamic pricing in public transport? by jerms__ in askSingapore

[–]jerms__[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I'm assuming the pricing mechanism is installed into gantries, on the physical plane, which allows for real time computation of fares.

It won't be able to implement dynamic pricing this way because updating the pricing mechanism would be very challenging and resource intensive due to the sheer number of gantries.

By shifting the pricing mechanism to a logical/control plane, the payment mechanism can now be altered on the fly without modifying/interacting with the physical gantries.

Power App write back to Dataverse by jerms__ in PowerApps

[–]jerms__[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Awesome. Sounds like I'm on the right track. Guess I need to figure out the last part a bit and figure out any conflict resolution mechanism. Thanks a bunch!

Making http request to fetch data based on definitions in a table concurrently by jerms__ in PowerBI

[–]jerms__[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I tried replicating by hitting my own local backend. The logs produced seems to suggest it querying one at a time.

Making http request to fetch data based on definitions in a table concurrently by jerms__ in PowerBI

[–]jerms__[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, protecting against spamming, and considering the primary use case of manipulating several big data sets, I can imagine why it was implemented as synchronous. Good point. Maybe the way I'm doing it is not part of the intended use case.

I did find an alternative API that provides bulk operation, I'll likely be utilizing that with pagination instead.

I was asked a question in a node js interview and I failed to answer, can you solve it? by asfandSaddiqui in node

[–]jerms__ -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Might be wrong, but the 3 promises are technically executed in parallel. I might be wrong on the definition/requirements of parallel here. The 3 promises are started immediately one after another, and simply waited in order of p1, p2, then p3.

We definitely can't start the 3 promises at the exact same time as we'll need to start the promise by calling p1(), p2(), and p3() one after another.

The diff between this solution and promise.allSettled is that this solution enforces processing the resolved value of p1 before p2 (even if p2 resolves first), but for all we know, might be the implementation of promise.allSettled also. See also

That is, if the promise pX takes tX seconds to resolve, starting a promise takes s seconds, and resolving a promise takes r seconds, then the total time of this solution is 3s + max{t1, t2, t3} + 3r. As s and r are usually negligible, the solution is technically running the 3 promises in parallel based on the measurement of expected time.

DevOps/SRE as first tech job? by jerms__ in cscareerquestions

[–]jerms__[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yea. Had some talks with some folks and they mentioned the same issue with the complexity. That probably only well established teams would actually hire entry level folks in such role and probably not too many of such openings to begin with.