Written by Karen Gwee (12A01C), this article was originally posted on Huffington Post. Karen was the chairperson of Raffles Press in her year and is currently studying journalism at Northwestern University.
Continue reading “How I Learned to Appreciate My Second Voice”
By Kang Yi Xi (15S03N)
The more altruistic amongst us often dream of changing others’ lives for the better – of serving and succeeding, of alleviating people’s suffering. As is to be expected, many of them sign up for programmes like the International Service Learning Elective, more commonly abbreviated as ISLE. In this highly sought-after enrichment programme, teams of students are tasked with planning and executing a service learning project in a South-East Asian developing country. Despite the significant cuts in the programme’s intake (only one team will be heading over this year), it is still a good time for us to reflect on some of the questions that have been plaguing development aid as of late, specifically in the context of ISLE. Numerous articles critical of international service have been published in recent months, and our home-grown enrichment programme has brought similar doubts to the forefront. For one, who winds up benefitting more – the servers, or the served? More importantly, is the latter inadvertently harmed by the efforts of the former?
By William Hoo (15A01E)
“In the moment that you are waiting for your food, do you not become the waiter?”
Beyond this pun, I doubt many Rafflesians actually know what it’s like to be the guy at the other end of the table who’s responsible for your café experience. As a way to kill time and to expose myself to some life experience, I chose to become that guy, right after Common Test 1 last year, at Sunday Folks, a quaint little ice cream shop situated in Holland V.
By Yeo Jia Qi (15S03H)
For a school that aims to mould every single one of its students into Thinkers, Leaders and Pioneers, leadership in RI is too narrow and too exclusive. Exposure to leadership opportunities and their benefits are limited to those who have made commitments that can be so remarkably heavy as to present an intimidating entry barrier. And upon the completion of their responsibilities, leaders are recognised too superficially, and too automatically. Because of these inherent shortcomings in how our school tries to fulfil its commitment to developing all of us as leaders, I argue that we must seriously reconsider our model of leadership.
The predominant way our school presents leadership is as service – to lead is to serve others. Required attributes of ‘good’ leaders would necessarily include selflessness and sacrifice. A significant number of us, including the Student Council, will have poured in a full seven months of effort when Orientation commences next week. This will no doubt help their personal development; and for their sheer collective efforts in organising an event truly meaningful to the next Year 5 batch, they definitely deserve our respect.
But leadership in RI is not inclusive. Any discussion of new suggestions on how things should be done originates from inside rather than outside a selective tight community of appointed leaders. Granted, this does not prevent minor shifts from year to year in the spirit of continual improvement, necessarily dependent on the dedication, creativity and dynamism of those appointed, such as Council rebranding Snack Attack with a pay-it-forward initiative.
Still, this creates an exclusive mentality. Everyone in the batch either has an appointment and is therefore expected to fulfil the appointment’s responsibilities, or is reduced to a passive follower without a voice, not targeted or included in school leadership initiatives. To illustrate this artificial divide, consider the CCAL Conference 2014. Though it comprised in-house workshop sessions about widely applicable leadership skills and competencies that any student could have benefited from and found useful in his or her capacity as a CCA member, the conference was only open to CCALs, despite it being held on a day without lessons. At least offering others without formal appointments the opportunity to sign up if they were interested would have cast leadership as a skill set available to everyone rather than an exclusive few. While the explanation was that the number of seats was limited and sessions were oversubscribed, it was observed by participants that there were numerous vacancies in some sessions.
In this manner, the entry barrier of the appointment, while undeniably creating an important culture of commitment and responsibility, creates a culture of leadership being an appointment-linked equivalent. Even some appointments’ promised commitments are not fulfilled, such as subject representatives being promised consultation sessions with respective subject departments in the student handbook, while no evidence of this exists in practice. A lot of Rafflesians may have a lot of appointments and leadership responsibilities, but a community that is relatively large with respect to the population is not necessarily less difficult to join. If we define leadership as service, ensuring accessibility to recognition for all should be very crucial, but we do not seem inclined to see leadership as anything other than contractual obligations and responsibilities of an appointment.
Further, the appointment is the pre-requisite for Raffles Diploma recognition of leadership. If everyone receives the RD, then opportunities to be recognised should be equally available to everyone. This would be similar to the idea behind the Community & Citizenship domain, which recognises everyone’s community service hours logged regardless of the form of service. The present status quo, however, denies recognition to those who cannot pass the entry barrier of receiving an appointment first.
To make matters worse, the selection process for leadership appointments is inevitably semi-democratic and complicated with innumerable shortcomings, so few will have the courage to apply and even fewer will have the luck to take up the said appointment. It follows that even the enthusiastic and passionate may be denied recognition simply because of the vagaries of the selection process. Then upon handover or completion, appointment holders are assured that a single or at best a few lines of text following a standardised format will automatically appear in our CCA record or RD. This utterly fails to capture the respect that truly effective leaders receive from their followers, criticise ineffective performance, point out areas for improvement, or describe the associated struggles and sacrifices of our leadership journey.
I argue that we need to make leadership more inclusive and more dynamic by extending its boundaries beyond appointment-based leadership to include personal, day-to-day leadership, whether in daily school life or community service, thus lowering the entry barriers to recognition. We can also recognise leadership effectiveness more qualitatively. We can do this in three ways: by broadening recognition, redesigning the preparation process for leaders, and making committing more flexible.
First, we should attempt to broaden recognition of acts of leadership, which are equally valid however small they are. More personal leadership, including matters such as conduct and character, could be recognised too. Those who organise their own events, or initiate their own community service projects involving working with peers, should be given credit for leadership on top of the community service they perform. Peer appraisals and testimonials from friends or teachers involved can better gauge one’s actual effectiveness as a leader than automatic recognition on one’s portfolio upon completing one’s duties or a simple quantity of CiP hours. Internal school awards such as the FIRE award represent valuable platforms to realise this possibility. In particular, the RD presents a real opportunity to improve on the standardised MOE CCA grading system, which summarises one’s sacrifices in a black-and-white printout of tables and numbers of points, by actually offering qualitative rather than quantitative recognition. The Diploma is, however, a missed chance at present because any recognised merit still needs to fall under neat categories of positional basis.
Second, we should redesign the ways in which our new leaders are prepared for their responsibilities. We can do so by making the preparation more open and more diverse. Making preparation more open would mean offering opportunities for learning, such as the CCAL Conference, to all students. This is something the Foundations of Service Learning workshops have already achieved and in so doing successfully presented service as a universal endeavour everyone is equally capable of. Making preparation more diverse would mean focusing on holistic exposure, such as inviting alumni for assembly talks on leadership. It should also involve toning down the focus on physical preparation: developing leadership and self-confidence through bonding on expeditions or challenging adventure trips like ALPS, which though effective, are but one way to prepare students for leadership roles. This would widen our expectations of our leaders and give leadership a more flexible, fluid and inclusive definition.
Third, we should make committing to leadership in RI more flexible. No one should fear that any contribution is too insignificant or informal (being not dignified by an appointment or title) to be recognised qualitatively, and thus be willing to commit themselves to their own degrees of comfort. More people, especially those without formal appointments, or the deserving who have had to decline such commitments for personal reasons, should be invited to come onboard in any way they can in the managing of events by those already responsible, since an important skill of leadership is managing peers in complex, practical contexts. This should be an indicator of effectiveness of leadership and can be included in the way our school assesses and recognises leaders’ contributions.
These suggestions are ambitious and wide-ranging. I am under no illusion that most of them will be exceedingly difficult to implement in entirety. Meeting the resultant challenges will require much willpower and persistence. But the spirit of reform and continual improvement is fundamental to ensuring leaders through the times continue to be effective in serving their followers and fulfilling changing expectations, setting themselves apart. RI needs to rediscover that spirit. It is time to begin thinking about making our model of leadership more inclusive.
By Myko Philip (15A01B)
“Your emotional resilience must be higher. How are you going to survive if your resilience quotient is so low?” A memorable lesson from that night’s tortuous but meaningful reprimand. The scene of the crime: oppressive 31˚C heat at midnight; invasive and almost painfully suburban yellow lights; Chopin Op. 28 No. 4 (a lovely, plaintive prelude aptly titled “Suffocation”) on the piano; me, crying.
I am telling you this because a peer of mine, Yeo Jia Qi, recently published an article on our website extolling the virtues of being more open and candid with our emotions. He was prompted to write this article because in his view there was a patent dearth of emotion in our institution or society at large. This aberration, he claims, is due to our fears of being emotional, a fear which he implies is irrational and even deleterious. While I agree with him that we should not be afraid to feel, I think that most people are right in their attempts to be emotionally reserved and cool. This is different from being emotionally dead and completely apathetic, and I think is a good balance to strive for.
Before I proceed, there are certain ambiguities I would like to clarify. Does Mr Yeo, for instance, refer to Rafflesians or society in general when he says that “we fear being emotional”? And on that point, does he genuinely believe that Rafflesians or Singaporeans are cold phlegmatic grade-scoring machines who deliberately suppress their emotions? And why do they do so? Mr Yeo offers us his theory that people are afraid to feel because of a pervasive “uncertainty about what emotions can be expressed appropriately” which “perhaps creates an unconscious need to control our anger, fear, sadness or empathy”. In my personal experience, most conversation with friends and teachers — once the trimmings like witty banter and mordant commentary on current affairs or sensational gossip have been taken away — involves extensive emotional exchange. Friends are not afraid to show displeasure (is not our country’s chief industrial output complaints?) or voice out their misgivings and doubts. Constantly, the sense of being loveless and its accompanying deluge of solitude and feelings of inadequacy are brought up. Even the fear of growing old, which at our age seems a distant and irrelevant consideration, is a perennial conversational centerpiece. Add to that the immense trepidation of being thrown into the wide, unstructured world where what you do and learn is no longer dictated to you by the quantifiable and easily compartmentalized sentences on a single-A4 page of paper. We feel all the time. And these friends are not just my batch of Humanities students, but include also sporty rugby players and floorballers and proudly self-titled science geeks on the other side of the campus. In fact, I believe that the opposite of what Mr Yeo says is true: that the uncertainties we uncomfortably swim in provoke emotions and emotional discourse. There is no choke point in the circulation of emotions in the school. Yes, there are many out there who are unable to confide their emotions in a close friend. But is this really a fear of sharing emotions? I argue that the issue is in the demand and not the supply. And to this extent we should try to be more inclusive and friendly towards these people who, more than anything, are so withdrawn because out of kindness they are afraid of being ‘burdens’ or ruining your day. Are they afraid of sharing emotions? Or have they just not found an appropriate human outlet? Hence the diaries, which are not a running away from showing emotion but an attempt to confront it within one’s self whilst waiting for someone to approach them and ask if they need help.
Moreover, our doubts over whether our emotions are appropriate or not are symptoms of having powerful and authentic emotions in the first place. We only doubt whether they are appropriate or not because we doubt if we are experiencing them in excess. When Mr Yeo talks about anger management, his argument is invalid insofar as anger management is not traditionally an attempt to stifle mild harmless annoyance but to control violent urges that are potentially dangerous to the people around us. He derides it as a “palatable way of saying not to show [anger]”. But that’s because that is exactly what it is. Someone only goes for anger management when his anger is so extreme that it becomes both unhealthy and even unsafe for him and for everyone around him. The same goes for depression. Ironically, the trivial sadnesses that we experience are more likely to flow out from us than more profound angst that we hesitantly harbor like a fugitive only because he has no other home. For every confession of terrible, seemingly insurmountable misery, you will have three others about the bus being crowded or the timetables being unfair or the death of some likeable character in a television show. When anguish is genuine, however, the fear of feeling it is entirely justified, and letting depression flow naturally isn’t something we should encourage. Depression can be debilitating. It seems clichéd to say that it saps all the energy out of you like a vacuum cleaner, but it does. It can be a cruel hindrance to any form of productivity and activity. It feels like a self-imposed glass ceiling stopping you from doing what you want to do. You fear emotion in these cases because it might consume you. Is that wrong? Mr Yeo rightly points out that people are afraid to express emotions when their severity is of such magnitude. And for those who are unable to find a willing, listening ear, the Raffles Guidance Centre (or the Underground, as it is affectionately called) is always there. But excessive anger is harmful and depression is an illness. To eradicate both is something all parties rightly desire. He correctly identifies the fact that a “respect for others’ lives” prompts a reluctance to “affect them with our own emotions” or that we feel “vulnerable” when we expose ourselves so completely to the world. But when feelings are trivial, there is nothing wrong with people keeping them in. And when feelings are in excess and powerful, they are right in trying to control them. While Mr Yeo is right that we should not attempt to deny our emotions, we should keep them in check when they start hampering us from functioning.
Which brings us back to where we started, with me in the middle of the night practicing a piano piece I didn’t even like for an inordinate number of times in order to satisfy my parents that I was ready for my piano exam. Cue my father’s spiel; cue my crying.
Mother: [sternly] Why are you crying?
Myko: I-… I don’t know.
Mother: [her voice rising in anger or incredulity] Why are you crying? Are you stressed? Are you stressed, Myko?
Myko: Yes.
Father: This thing is so small already and you feel stressed? You feel stressed? You think the world is easy? Wait until you get a job, then you will know what stress means. Wait until you live under Martial Law and are poor and don’t know if you have food on the table tomorrow, then you will know what stress means. Crying? Pah.
But is there not some truth to this? My parents, and many other parents for that matter, have shared for the first twenty years of their life an intimate relationship with suffering and tribulation. They have had prodigious knowledge of the world’s capacity for indifference from a very young age. My parents both lived near the poverty line under martial law in the Philippines when a dictator came to power. For many of us who bemoan the need to assemble at 7.40am in the morning half the days of the week, their suffering and pain and emotions are far beyond what we can imagine. And yet they soldiered on.
Of course depression can be debilitating and affect anyone, even if they seem to have every reason to be happy: relative financial security, popularity, family. We all remember Robin Williams from last year. But many who are not afflicted by depression are right to sometimes try and inject perspective in their life. Their emotions are inconsequential compared to what others are feeling, and if they begin to accumulate insidiously and affect our way of thinking, then that’s bad. So when I cried because I was “stressed” and thought that crying might earn me some sympathy, my parents were entirely correct in scolding me. Sometimes, we truly need a wakeup call from our insular, self-centered thought-processes and have to be reminded that we are not the only people in society. We need to be reminded that when a mental illness is as obstructive and painful as physical illness, mental training applies as much as physical training. That sometimes when emotions are really trivial, we shouldn’t at all play the sympathy card or claim that people just don’t understand us for what we are. Iago in Othello reminds us that “’Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus” and if our bodies and minds are the gardens, he says, we are the gardeners.
