Monday, September 30, 2013

READERS ARE CREATIVE PEOPLE (EDITED VERSION OF MY BOOK WEEK SPEECH)



READERS ARE CREATIVE PEOPLE
By TH
On August 9, I (Thomas) was invited to speak at Twinky Winky International School in Port Moresby as part of their closing ceremony to the 2013 National Book Week celebrations.
The school, which takes in students from kindergarten to Grade 6, started the day with some songs and prayer, with the programme directed by mistress of ceremony, the 10-year-old Grade 5 student Evangeline Gideon.
After the speeches and item presentation, I accompanied some staff and students to visit the Port Moresby General Hospital children’s ward where the students gave books, dolls, toiletries and sweets to the children there. 
The message below is an edited version of the talk given by me to the children on that day.


Photo: Grade 1 students at Pinky Winky International School performing an item during the National Book Week closing ceremony.



THE TALK
Good morning students. Good morning teachers, parents, guardians, visitors and friends of Twinky Winky International School.
Thank you for giving me the privilege to speak to you on this special week – the National Book Week.
You have been told time and again that books are important – they are valuable.
They help you develop your communication skills – reading, writing and speaking the language you are reading in, English or any other language.
If you want to be a good lawyer or judge, you must read books. If you want to be a writer, you must read books. If you want to become a good journalist, you must read. If you plan to be a scientist, engineer or doctor, you must read – and love to read.
Reading also helps you learn a lot – a lot about different things.
If I leave you today, I want you to remember a phrase: “I must read!”
You must repeat it, do what is says and you would become successful in school and later in life.
Reading does not only help you do well in English or literature, where you compose story plots, heart-warming poems and award-winning screenplays. No, it also helps create new technologies or methods of doing something in the scientific or engineering world.
That is what I want you to learn today. 
Let me point you to a few people who were readers. Their lives show their ability to create or invent new things or procedures. Later, I will say a few things about myself and what books were to me.

THE LIVES OF THOSE WHO READ
The first person is the inventor of the incandescent light bulb. He also invented the first sound-recording device called the phonograph. (“Phono” means sound and “graph” means to write, or record.)
That person is Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931). Edison stared talking late in life, at the age of four. But as soon as he could talk, Edison asked people questions about everything. When they said “we do not know” he asked them: “Why?”
After only three months in Grade 1, Edison left school because a teacher called him a bad name and his mother taught him how to read, write and do arithmetic.
When he could read, Edison borrowed books from a library and read them. Soon he completed all the books in the library – shelves and shelves of books.
With so much information in his mind, he was able to come up with many ideas and inventions that have improved the lives of men, women and children.

The second person is Mike Lazaridis (1961-). Lazaridis and another person invented Blackberry, the smartphone that allows you to send emails to your friends. It was like a portable computer.
At the age of 12, Lazaridis won a prize for reading all the science books in Windsor Public Library, Ontario, Canada.
With so much information in his mind, like Edison, in years to come he created an important device for everyone.
Both Edison and Laziridis became good businessmen. Laziridis is doing very well today.  

Then there is Dr Ben Carson (1951-), the medical doctor (or neurosurgeon). 
When Carson was about the same age as some of you are now, his mother who was a Grade 3 school-leaver, told him and his elder brother to watch less television and borrow books from the library to read.
Every week Carson and his brother would go to the public library, borrow a book and read. At first he did not like it. But over time the interest developed and he realised that he was learning a lot too – outside of class and more than what his teacher was teaching him.
The mother also told Carson and his brother to write a book report/review on each book they borrowed each week. The report would be checked by the mother.
Such simple things helped Carson develop his mind, something that you all must do in school.
As a doctor, he has devised new ways of performing difficult but life-saving operations. 
So, you see, reading helps us in many ways.

WHAT BOOKS ARE TO ME
Before working as a journalist, I was teaching students in school – those who were much older than you.
While I taught during the day, I was reading in the night and writing my own stories. Those stories were about places, people and things that interested me. 
I am privileged because I grew up in a home where both my parents taught others – my mother was a primary school teacher back in the 1970s, while my father was a lecturer in a teachers’ college.
From them I learned the worth of books early.
No, I did not learn to read before I went to school, but I would sit down at home, take down a few books from the shelves and flip through the pages of the few big picture books and magazines that we had. 
Those showed me places and people in different parts of PNG and the world.
My father’s friend worked in a news agency and would also bring along comics and magazines that we loved browsing through. 
When I was 12, I attended a boarding school and there was a library where we could borrow books each week.
The librarian was a Catholic nun and gave us a simple exercise to do – for each week.
And I think that exercise was the single most important thing that helped develop my writing skills – to express what I learned by reading and felt about books I read.
We were told by the library teacher to read at least one book a week and write a book review of the book that we read.
At that time there were a lot of us who read three or four books a week but reviewed just one.
The review was simple. We were to describe in a few paragraphs in a given exercise book what the book was about.
We were told to write the title of the book at the top and the name of the author (or authors) under that as well as other details such as which company published it, in what year and the number of pages the book had.
In the exercise we could also express what we felt about the story in it.
That simple exercise brought together two important skills that you all must work hard to master in school and out of school – reading and writing.
Good writers read a lot. Experts in writing tell us that if we want to develop our writing skills, we must read - and read a lot.
With reading skills, we must learn to write properly - and be clear with what we write.

SUMMARY  
Readers not only make good authors of books or write good scripts for plays – they also produce new technologies.
The lives of Edison, Lazaridis and Carson show that inventions or new methods and processes of doing things in science are created by readers.
In the lives of those three, you saw that when they were like you – nine, 10 or 11 years old – they gave time to read and loved reading.
It was not university that prepared their minds. It was the exercise of reading the hundreds of books while they were young as you are now.
One day, one of you, a student at Twinky Winky may create a new smartphone or technology. But to create new technologies, you must have ideas and the best way to get a lot of ideas is to read.
To end my talk, let me read something I wrote for you. (See what I read to them on Aug 14's post.)

PNG EDUCATION EXAM SCHEDULES

THESE are the schedules for the different exams for this year.
Grade 10 examination schedule
Oct 1 – Mathematics
Oct 2 – Business Studies
Oct 3 – Agriculture
Oct 4 – Social Science

Oct 7 – Science
Oct 8 – Arts
Oct 9 – Design & Technology
Oct 10 – Personal Development
Oct 11 – English

Grade 12 examination schedule
Oct 14-18 & Oct 21-25

Grade 8 examination schedule
Oct 28-31

Thursday, September 26, 2013

LEARN AND LIVE ITEM: PREPARE FOR EXAMS ... ITEM No.3



PREPARE FOR EXAMS. ITEM No.3: MY STUDY PREPARATION FOR EXAMS (FOR SEPT 18)
I SAID in the last item that you do not have to study beyond midnight – or even beyond 10pm, if you start early each evening.
In one of my best years of study at the tertiary level, I started studying at 7pm and ended at 9.30pm, every night. By 10.30pm, I would be in bed reading a book – which might not be related to any of the courses I was studying.
I was able to study early because the soccer season was over and I had more time.
(Some of you who participate in sports should withdraw from competition to concentrate on your studies. The grades that will be written on your certificate cannot be rewritten in following years. But you can always play your favourite sports next year or for another decade yet.)

If I were a Grade 10 student studying four examinable subjects, this is a possible study plan that I could use. (Adapt the plan appropriately if you are studying six or more.)
I will have early dinner at 6pm on Monday, shower, pack my books and go to the library and pick a corner away from the main foyer.
From 6.30pm-7.00pm, I will complete all English homework. Any incomplete work is left for later.   
From 7.00pm-7.30pm, I will do all Maths work. Any incomplete work is left for later.
From 7.30pm-8.00pm, I will do Science work. Again, any incomplete work is left for later.
From 8.00pm-8.30pm, I will complete Social Science work. Any incomplete work is left for later.
I may take a 10-minute break to go sit down at the newspaper section and read some news to relax.
From 8.45pm to 9.15pm, I study English, in preparing for the exams.
I will go over past assignment and test papers. I will note important points in a summary book – a different notebook to the one I use to take notes during lessons.

Next week, at the same time, I will start go through my notebooks and summarise important points. I will continue to do that until exam time.
It is better trying to memorise notes in a summarised form than as in full notes taken from class or textbooks.
After 9.15pm, I go over to complete outstanding homework, starting with English, then Maths, and the others.
By 10pm, I pack up and leave.
Anything that is not completed can be completed in my room – or early the next day.
My aim was to go to bed at 10pm – or 10.30pm at the latest.
And, I read before going to sleep – a good mental exercise.

I am usually awake at 6am and can squeeze in another 30 minutes to do some study before breakfast.
And, since I usually get to class about 20 minutes before class starts, I can squeeze in more time to complete tasks that were not completed yesterday, or continue revising some English.
On Tuesday evening, I will follow the same routine, but I will study Maths. On Wednesday, I follow the same routine and study Science and on Thursday, the same, but I study Social Science.
Friday is a time to relax and I may do some work in the morning on Saturday and Sunday evening, depending on how my study went in the week.
In the next week, I follow the routine as described above.     

Next item: How do you write your exam?

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

LEARN AND LIVE ITEM: PREPARING FOR EXAMS ITEM 2 (FOR SEPT 11)

WHAT DO YOU DO TO PREPARE FOR YOUR EXAMS  
FROM the last item, you learned that that your study time could be divided into homework time and study time.
But you do not have to study after completing homework.
You might want to study before doing homework because study might require that you are fresh.
It is true that some subjects are hard to study when you have worn out your brain on other things.

The best way to study for your exams is to go over all your past assignment and test papers.
Teachers or lecturers who set the exams usually draw their exam questions from past questions given in tests and assignments. Some even give hints about how much of which units would be set in the exams.
(That is common at the university level. And no, that is not cheating. Some lecturers at university give hints because they do not want struggling students to fail.)

In going through past assignments and test papers, redo the questions asked and pay attention to the ones that you got wrong and try to understand how you got them wrong.
Redoing the questions in Maths would mean you rewrite the problems in another exercise book and solve them again. It is only when you can solve a problem again, without looking at a solution, that you would know that you understand the problem.  

Besides redoing past test and assignment questions, go over your notebooks or lecture notes and summarise points.
Summarising points is a very good way of revising.
In Science, it could mean stating briefly the reactants and products of the processes of photosynthesis and respiration.
If you can correctly write the word equation of the two, you can write mini-essays on the two processes without difficulties.

Use a separate notebook to summarise topics for one subject. List the main details as you go through your notebook, page by page.
When you summarise, you are bringing out the main points and you will remember better.
Yes, that would require you to write a bit more too. But the method has worked for millions of successful students who use that.

At times, you may have to memorise definitions or laws. Write those in the summary book and on small slips of papers/cards that you can easily flip over when you are eating, riding in the bus or waiting for a game to start.
Some concepts in certain subjects (such as Maths, Science and Business) are better remembered in the form of equations and formulas.
Make sure you learn them and memorise them. For those at high school and primary school, memorising the times tables would help you in Maths. (That is a fact!)

In some cases, use diagrams, flow charts or photos to summarise concepts.
The water and nutrient cycles in Science and climograph in Social Science are best remembered if you recreate them in the form of diagrams or graphs.       
Try not to study beyond midnight. It is not necessary if you start early in the night. More on this in the next item.

Next item: My study preparation for exams