Today I had the privilege of attending the Thinking Festival at Mayflower Secondary School. Adopting the theme “Thinking Learner, Learning Thinker”, this first Thinking Festival stressed the twin importance of developing students into both thinkers and learners. I am proud to say that the school’s vision of being an Inviting Institution, and cultivating Thinking Learners and Useful Citizens is being fulfilled.
I was impressed at how the students of Mayflower Secondary interacted with the grassroots leaders of the Youth Environmental Guardians (YEG) at the Central Regional Environmental Workshop. They have educated the community about climate change, fight against chikungunya and dengue fever.
This Thinking Festival has encouraged the students and improved their thinking abilities. I enjoyed interacting with the students, watching them presenting their projects and engaging them in discussions. The student projects were creative, innovative, and showcased their care for the environment. Many projects were practical and applicable towards solving our current problems.
At this technological age, I believe that teachers should play the role of a facilitator to the students’ learning journey; empowering them, and allowing them to think, be creative and explore their own ideas.
I also had the opportunity to witness the Mayflower Speaker’s Corner, where a debate, “Are Singaporeans good thinkers?”, was taking place. I was particularly impressed by a very engaging young debater, Jeremiah. Below are some of his more compelling arguments:
“…my friends and I decided to try out a simple experiment. We created a short-queue for no reason…just to see if our schoolmates would join in. True enough…our queue got longer and when we asked some of them why they were queuing, they had no idea…assumed that those in front must have a good reason to do so…Remember the Hello Kitty craze at McDonald’s…people queued for hours, got into senseless fights, threw away food only to keep the cat…Honestly how many of them are Kitty fans? So once again, this could be a sign that Singaporeans are superior in following trends without giving much thought to their actions.”
“…a group of youths recently set up a website called geeksnotfreaks.com. They wanted to highlight that Singaporeans are paying too much to Telcos for their subscriptions. They brought their case to Hong Lim Park. What’s the result? Nothing has changed, few people turned up, their speeches uninspiring. Singaporeans can’t really think and don’t bother to do so.”
I would like to wish the students and teachers of Mayflower Secondary School many more years of happy thinking.
