freaking letter that tells you to redo your project. I emailed a certain PW teacher-in-charge in my school about my PW project. Me and my groupmates have spent many hours on our GPP and we are happy with what we came up with. Our topic is the journey of the Freedom Writers (for those who are oblivious to the term "Freedom Writers", pls go and Google or smth) and our proposal is to get the teacher to come down and give a talk to the juvenile delinquents in Singapore. In addition, we will conduct a reflective essay workshop with her and get the juvenile delinquents to write an essay on their life, then compile the essays into a book. The book will be handed out to youths to prevent youths from living a life of crime.
I bet you guys think my group's proposal is crazy right? Well, actually, I think it's crazy too, but it's do-able. My group have already finalized the GPP, wrote a letter to Erin Gruwell (the teacher of the Freedom Writers). We are already preparing to contact the Freedom Writers till we learned that we need to go through a series of procedure. The first in the list is to get the approval to the school and our PW teacher. Since Miss Ong left us (gosh I miss her lessons), we have Mr Chiong to teach us. Since he is overseas now, I decided to send the letter and GPP to Mrs ******* for approval.
Check out the email excerpt we got from her:
"Dear Wilfred,
1. PLEASE DO NOT WRITE TO MS GRUWELL.
2. You are not authorised to carry out this project, and you definitely do not have the funding for this, nor the necessary access to the proposed teenage journey takers. If you write to Ms Gruwell you will be misleading her.
3. You need to focus your research on the needs of the propsed journey takers.
The current stage of your PW should focus on the following:
> -- Do some reading on the causes of juvenile delinquency in Singapore and in other urban environments.
> -- Try to find speeches made by social workers, counsellors and therapists about the causes of delinquency and the needs of delinquents.
> -- Check the websites of organisations that deal with delinquents in Singapore.
> -- Find out what programmes are currently offered for delinquents in Singapore. Also, what programmes are available for delinquents as well as programmes like wilderness bootcamps etc for misbehaving teenagers (there are some such programmes in Australia, for example).
> -- Then tailor a programme to suit your target group in Singapore that goes beyond the current programmes in singapore. This should be an ADAPTATION of programmes not available in Singapore at present, as well as aspects of Grunwell's journey. This will be your planned journey.
> -- In order to find out if your planned journey will work, show or talk about your PROPOSAL (NOT the whole GPP) with therapists, youth counsellors and administrators at institutions for teenage delinquents here in Singapore.
4. Trying to contact Ms Grunwell is IRRELEVANT to the project.
5. My advice to you now:- Put aside your GPP for now and focus on getting all the above information together."
Check out point number 3.
Isn't that almost equivalent to saying "redo your research". If she said that, it would have saved me the agony of reading the email. You don't think that we have done our research and looked through the alternatives???!!! The only thing that Singapore is doing for the juvenile delinquents is putting them in jail and give them counselling. If the teacher doesn't think so, she should try doing some research too. My group is giving the delinquents a chance to change themselves and here a teacher come along and say "no"! Outrageous!
Check out number 4 too.
"Irrelevant"? Hello...... Ms. Erin Gruwell is the key person to our project!! I can't believe a teacher in our school would say contacting the most important person to our project irrelevant??!! WTF!! JunKang sms-ed me and said that she probably want us to tone down our project. The point here is that we WANT to carry out with such a large scale project, unlike some other groups who just wanna scrape through and barely get an A. We want to do the best project HC has ever seen.
But I couldn't argue with point no. 2 though. My group need to secure the sponsorship first before asking her to come. And we also need to contact the Boy's Home/ Girl's Home/ Boy's Hostel first. At least she's right about that point.
How I wish Miss Ong was still around to give us guidance. Our idea is crazy but she encouraged us to go on with it. I spoke to her on Saturday during the class outing. At least she didnt give my group the *raised eyebrow* look and ask us to redo our proposal. We need more teachers like Miss Ong and Miss Erin Gruwell. Like seriously. They sacrificed their time and pride to reach out to students and give them the best guidance. Even though Miss Ong has left the school, she still helped us out in our project.
To add on to the shitty morning, I still have Change reheasal to go to in the afternoon. I dont see the point in having the reheasal when half the dancers cannot make it. Karlton, Pao Pao have Fac Comm Camp. Si Quan and Hui Hua have BSP camp. I bet the others have things on too. Today's just not my day. But now I must worry bout my PW.
Nvm. Mrs *******, we will improve our letter and get the necessary funds for our project. Next week, prepare for our improved proposal! We are not going to give up or tone down our project! And we will freaking contact her! If we cannot contact her in the name of the school, we will contact her with our names. There's no offence in doing that. We'll be back!
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