It's the 1st day of the Teachers Conference. The opening was, frankly, quite bad. It was very cliche and I wished I could find a hole to hide my head out of embarassment. But the video they showed - an excerpt from the BBC documentary "Trials of Life" - about birds weaving their nests, was quite good. The speech by Angela Ow was, erm, pointless. The opening address by Tharman was not as good as some of his better ones. Overall quite a waste of time for the morning.

The first keynote address was delivered by Dr John Seely Brown, former Chief Scientist of Xerox Corp and current Distinguished fellow of Idea Factory, was quite good though it contained nothing new for me. I guess after a while and some experiences of going to conferences you will hear the same things being repeated. He did have one thing I've not heard of though - the KEEP toolkit.

One thought that I had today was how the speeches of the Minister and Angela Ow painted such a rosy picture of innovations and collaborations amongst teachers, but which I can hardly see around me. Can it really be that it's my bad karma that I'm in the wrong schools, or are they juz being hoodwinked by sweet-talkers? My experience in the Singaporean system is that people like to make things sound really nice and exciting but when you go in and take a look yourself, you wonder whether your sense of reality is the same as others. During one of the breakout sessions, I overheard someone congratulating a speaker on his project and the two of them agreed on how well it looks on the speaker's work review. My eyes nearly popped out. Also, during the Q&A for Dr Brown's talk, someone from the audience said that everything that he spoke of has already been done in singapore, for example in project work (ok, are we in the same Matrix or what!?). She goes on to ask how can we assess project work. You get my point ...

Maybe I'm just too cynical.