Semester: AY18/19 Sem II
Professor(s): Anne Raffin
Workload: Manageable
Overall: I am super interested in the topic of education, so I generally enjoyed this course. The various lectures on the history of education in Singapore to education as part of nation building were quite enjoyable to me. Lectures were at 8am so it was a little bit of a struggle for me. Prof Anne is a really unique professor (more on this later) so it might be interesting to take her class. Some people love her and others hate her. The readings for this course was also very manageable. Prof Anne did not assigned a lot of readings and the readings were not particularly difficult either. Overall, an enjoyable and rather chill 3k module.
Assignments: The large assignment for this mod was a pairwork research paper. Its weightage was around 30-40% of the course. So it is super important to have a good groupmate. I did it with my friend whom I know I could work well with so that definitely helped. It is rather open-ended as you could choose your topic and delve deeper into an area which you are interested in. Prof Anne gave set question for the research paper as well as an option to suggest your own topic. My partner and I made full use of the option to propose our own topic and had quite a bit of fun doing research for it. This research paper was called the mid-term exam but was due towards the end of the semester.
Exams: There was only one written final exam for this course. The final exam was very manageable if you have done all the readings and are able to cite some of them in the course of the essay. Prof Anne gave us a mix of 2-3 short-answer questions and one compulsory essay question (if I don’t remember wrongly). Should be a very manageable finals as long as you studied.
Professor(s): Prof Anne is such an interesting character. She has a very unique accent (as she is French) and is also so blunt sometimes it becomes funny. I can totally remember how she low-key dissed herself in front of the whole class by saying that she worked in a restaurant or something after getting her degree and only became a soci prof because she had no choice hahaha. She is also definitely one who says it as it is. I remember how she asked us why NUS found it so hard to get Alumni donations unlike other universities in the world and then proceeded to ask us if we ever felt valued in NUS. And this totally struck me and I felt like I had a new revelation about why I’m not filled with the NUS school spirit. Love how she is not PC hahah. She tends to forget names (unless you are an exchanger or look like you are from the west) and will usually just whack a name if she wants to call on you during lectures. She also likes to treat lectures like tutorials sometimes and make pairs say things. Prof Anne also only tries to remember half the names in class, so it’s always that same few people she is struggling to call. She also have a tendency to let exchangers talk more which I don’t love but it is what it is.
Tutorials: We had Prof Anne for our tutorial. Tutorials normally has Prof Anne distributing some readings and showing us discussion questions before we breakup into groups to read and discuss. It then follows with each group sharing their thoughts with the class. Her tendency to forget names also shows here but tutorials ain’t bad.
Recommend? I saw that Prof Anne is no longer taking this course but the new course outline looks very interesting and arguably even better than what Prof Anne had? But judging based on Prof Anne alone, I would still generally recommend this mod as a manageable 3k to clear! And if you love the topic of education, this will be a really good course to take and provide additional perspectives on Singapore’s education system.
コメント