Induction course 2008 part 1

I've been attending an induction course for the past 2 weeks as it is a compulsory course for all new civil servant. It was practically a torture session if you ask me. No doubt there were some very informative topics about leaves, allowances and medical benefit in it but most were in my opinion insignificant. Yes you read me clearly...... INSIGNIFICANT! and there was also some history of how our education system was formed. Pftt........ no connection there........ (I HATE HISTORY)

My reasoning for this induction course was that there were too many employees in this sector and in order to segregate some work to them, courses like these were invented. Well most of the useful topics are presented by speakers who are already burden with loads of work by their post and still they are further burdened with all these minor seminars. While for all those useless topics i guess they have too much time on their hands and therefore they are call to torture us and in a way to occupy their working time.

Some of the speakers were very good as they conducted their presentation in a very interesting way by occasionally slipping in cases, jokes, funny pictures to keep us alive and awake throughout his speech. There are also those who just babble on by reading their powerpoint slides. What's the point for those speakers? what's the point? The question keeps repeating itself in my head throughout the induction course.

My suggestion would be to provide each new civil servant with an employees handbook so that they can refer to if they encounter any problems. The handbook of course will state the common rules and regulation and if there is a special case, we would refer to the person in charge of that section. There can be hundred and one scenarios just on rights to claim certain allowances which can't go into the book altogether. If courses held was for this purpose then it would not be a best solution as we might not be able to think 0f these 101 scenarios unless we encounted it let alone during that 4 hours of talk. Besides, printing a handbook by the bulk is much more cheaper than having to pay for the accommodation, food and traveling for a duration of 2 weeks to all who attended this course.

In the teaching profession, i would have hoped that the government would allocated funds to send teacher to attend courses that helps in the field of teaching such as courses organised by MELTA. They have various kinds of courses which explores the possibility of using a particular materials to come up with creative and effective ways of teaching or maybe a much more lively and interesting method to pass on the knowledge to students. Now wouldn't that be more interesting and relevant?

How does the minds of those people works still puzzles me but for all i know is that to survive you have to make the best out of the things around you and to make the best out of this induction course would be to get ample of rest before going back to the tedious task of teaching.

Alleluyah!!!!!! ^-^