With regards to the debate on the chatbox.

Hi everyone,

First of all I would like to apologize to all readers who may be offended by Srinath's comments on the tagboard, I understand it might be offensive and uncalled for to some readers and by virtue of that I apologize for not making the following clear before:

We will be happy, glad, even thrilled to have debate about certain issues on this blog. As one parent pointed out, it is good to have a variety of perspectives on this blog because juniors, parents, etc can have a more balanced viewpoint of the situation to consider everything as a whole. However, multiple opinions will undoubtedly lead to some disagreement and heated exchanges. Let's not forget that first and foremost, we debate because we want to share our perspective on the issue and learn from other perspectives. Underlying all this debate is the basic respect that we should accord each other, not to put down each other but to understand each other's opinions, and perhaps we, as students sometimes get too caught up in the exchange and let our emotions carry us away. That is, however, no excuse to be offensive to others and if any of us cannot abide by this principle, I kindly ask that you refrain from posting.

We dont want to be censoring anything or deleting anything because we want this to be an open blog/forum where everyone can feel free to interact with each other, share their honest opinions or concerns about the school without feeling that they can only "say the good stuff" without acknowledging some of the shortcomings of our school, be it our diploma or curriculum or anything else. That would require respectfulness on everyone's parts so that no one gets offended within our small NUS High community.

On the issue of parents and students. I dont know how fit I am to comment on this because I have never been a parent. My parents never did fully understand our school curriculum, the idea of APs or how much of a crapshoot the college admissions process was, perhaps because of the fast-changing trends in education. Nonetheless, my parents always made it a point to find out what was happening in my life, to give me good advice despite never getting the full picture, and I always appreciated that. There is nothing in my life that I would not tell my parents, because I know that eventually they are there to share their life experiences with you, not to harm you, and even if they may be slightly outdated, some of them still apply.

I believe that all parents would do that because they are concerned about what is happening with their children - and that's why we have such a large number of parents visiting this blog. It does not reflect utter ignorance (all of us are ignorant to some degree, haha) but rather it reflects a concern and a want to be involved in the challenges that nushs students go through. Let us not be so quick to dismiss the opinions and concerns of parents because they do have some truth even if not in its entirety. The better way, in my opinion, would be to understand where these concerns are coming from and address these concerns from your point of view in a respectful manner.

And as always, each of our posts are only representative of our own opinions (unless stated otherwise) and not representative of any organization or anyone else, and do take everything with a grain of salt. The only exception is this heartfelt apology on behalf of collegetalk that I wished had come earlier with regard to making guidelines for postings clear.

Cheers,
Ying Zhen