in case you guys didn't know, i'm currently taking a part-time overseas degree with a UK university now. all would be well and wonderful if not for the fact that my uncle is the principle of the school and my cousin who is a Staff Nurse as well is in the course too. she's quite the devout Christian, though not the pushy, ardent type, like my father. two months into the course, she prolly knows that i'm a smoker and have piercings (a great taboo within the paternal family). well, i was never that close to her to begin with.

the classmates within the class are quite of a wide diversity. there are mothers, expectant mothers, Indian Nationals, PRCs, girls who have armpit hair, smokers, people with tattoos, loud-mouthed chaps, etc. it's almost like a Motley Crue (i don't know how to do umlauts, apologies) of sorts, minus the mothers and expectant ones. not everyone in the class is really of the same learning speed however. i'm not gonna start labelling any of my classmates with degretory terms, but here's a few classic quotes that i constantly hear during class:

'If you constantly scold the nursing students, you will only bring down their morality'
- during a lesson about mentorship, let's extend our arms to welcome a new generation of heathens, harlots and charlatans.

UK Lecturer: Alright, you guys can go for a short coffee break now. Be back at quarter to ten!
Student: That's 9.50 right?
- WTH?

UK Lecturer: 'You can actually purchase these nursing texts online. Like Amazon?'
Student: 'What's Amazon ah?'
- i can't find an appropriate smarmy remark for this.

slow-learning students are one of the things i have learnt to cope with since my student nursing days at the polytechnic. i can fully understand that people have different learning speeds and are perhaps not that familiar with googling things up on the internet and thus need to ask extra yet seemingly redundant questions during class. generally, they give me plenty of time during classes to doodle on the notepad and think of witty theories like the above about nursing and prostitutes. i do have a problem however, with slow-teaching lecturers. and that's what this class is currently experiencing.

the cool thing about this nursing degree is that it accommodates the constantly changing work schedules of the typical hospital nurse. there are morning and evening classes, both taught by two different lecturers. the not-so-cool thing however, is that both lecturers are of a different (dare i say it?)... teaching calibre. the morning classes are taught by a Chinese lady who happens to be a consultant with my Uncle's school. she was trained in the UK and is pretty much good friends with one of the Principle Lecturers in the UK university. suffice to say, she's the old school of nursing type. the evening classes are taught by a Peranakan lady with a hairdo that reminds me of a curator in a very high-crass museum. she's a very 'modern' lady of sorts. with plenty of experience in the local nursing education system.

the usual attendance for the morning classes is one or two miserable peeps that have to attend it when they've got conflicting shift schedules. the evening classes are a different story however. they usually number in the 20s. on a good day, they can even hit the 30s. so evidently, the evening classes are more popular than the morning ones. and for a good reason too. given that i've been attending a lot of morning classes due to my night shifts, i daresay that i'm well-equipped to make a judgement on this. you see, the old school of nursing lecturer doesn't really prepare her stuff well. i agree that she has the adequate nursing skills to handle patients in the hospital. but she's just not that cut out for teaching. actually, wait a minute. she doesn't really teach during class. she just hands out questions and topic for us to google up during class and calls it self-learning.

which would be all great if not for the fact that the students in class are devotees to the School of Rote Memory. they pay top dollar for the degree course to be infused and force-fed with knowledge. to tell the truth, i'm fine with both the rote memory and self-learning systems of learning. the fact that the old school of nursing lecturer constantly fumbles in her lessons is quite a motivating factor for me to do a speed search on the topic and bombard her with retorts during the lesson. but hey, this is Singapore and nobody ever said 'NO' to service and knowledge force-feeding, did they?

so it seems that a revolution is on the way. my classmates are rather unhappy with the way things are going now at school. and when they prodded for my opinion, i gave a rather balanced viewpoint of things (tsk, these librans... typical). what did they really want to do with the morning class lecturer. fire her? get the management to speak to her? send her back to UK (she previously worked and lived in the UK for an extensive period of time) to drink tea and nurse old ladies in Gingham dresses? basically, i told them to consider their moves before they made one.

of course i conveniently neglected to tell them that my uncle was the principle of the school, and because of that i got a whopping $9k discount for my education fees. well, i'm not one to bite the hand that feeds me.