Championing the arts
Unbelievable. Simply unfuckingbelievable. From Friday's Straits Times (which I only read today):
At this point in the article, I assumed that she had, instead, been reading short story and poetry collections. I was wrong.
Seldom have I seen two phrases as unequally yoked as 'genuine passion' and 'sit down and apply the skills we've been taught'. Then again, maybe I'm inappropriately old-fashioned for my age—my definition of what it means to have 'genuine passion' for literature would include, well, reading it.
I don't recall having heard that before from a writer under 50, but if you do the math, you'll see that Candice Wan achieved this remarkable feat at age 16. Someone give her a prize!
Oh. Right.
Understandably, certain people seem to find this inspiring:
Incidentally, those three novels she did read? They're by. . . Dan Brown. Go figure.
I wonder what Miss K thinks of all this.
Literature winner read only 3 novels in 2 years
A TEEN who prefers news magazines to novels has won an international award for ENglish Literature students.
Candice Wan Shu Ting picked up the 2004 Angus Ross prize, an annual award for the best performancein the A-level English examination by candidates outside Britain.
The former Saint Andrew's Junior College divinity student, who confessed to reading just three novels in the last two years, makes no apology for not being a bookworm.
At this point in the article, I assumed that she had, instead, been reading short story and poetry collections. I was wrong.
"What's important about Literature is being able to appreciate the text for what it is, and to have the genuine passion to sit down and apply the skills we've been taught," said the 18-year-old, who attended Crescent Girls' Secondary and Radin Mas Primary.
Seldom have I seen two phrases as unequally yoked as 'genuine passion' and 'sit down and apply the skills we've been taught'. Then again, maybe I'm inappropriately old-fashioned for my age—my definition of what it means to have 'genuine passion' for literature would include, well, reading it.
Explaining why she does not read novels, she said: "As I've grown older, I've developed my own style of writing poems and short stories, and no longer need to read novels for ideas or to emulate techniques."
I don't recall having heard that before from a writer under 50, but if you do the math, you'll see that Candice Wan achieved this remarkable feat at age 16. Someone give her a prize!
Oh. Right.
Understandably, certain people seem to find this inspiring:
CANDICE WAN.. man.. she sure is the role model we shd look up to.. Literature Book Prize!!! She sure did SAJC proud.. and not forgetting to mention THE ARTS FACULTY.. yea!
Incidentally, those three novels she did read? They're by. . . Dan Brown. Go figure.
I wonder what Miss K thinks of all this.
posted by Nicholas at 2:40 PM
36 Comments:
Dan Brown.. yes. Apparently so she can answer questions about her faith.
Divinity student no less. Damn hardcore.
Oh, goodness.
Maybe that's why they're allowing/wanting sci fac students (like me)to do lit.
You're kidding, right?
Surfed by from Mr. Brown - are you Nicholas from RJ Debate by any chance? Or is the world just not that small?
- Xueling
Hahahaha! Let the browning BEGIN!
For all intents and purposes, she's probably a good practical criticism student (a component of A levels literature syllabus). If I understand her correctly, we shouldn't bother even to read her own poems and stories (much less Shakespeare or Shelley), otherwise we would have to cannibalise them for ideas and emulate her techniques for our own writings. And all along, I thought I was reading novels for historical and cultural insights, lyrical language, beguiling characters or simply for fun. What a fool I am!
-budak-
she reads dan brown and gets mentioned by mr brown. how brown can this get?
Wah! From now on, I shall not buy any new books. Shall develop my own style! Maybe one day I'll win Crabby Prize for Literature.
ps. That girl must either be darn talented or darn arrogant!
Xueling: Nope, that's not me. Like Candice 'Passion For Applying Skills' Wan, I went to SA.
Johnny: About time, too.
Budak: I guess her philosophy is that only bad writers need to bother reading.
Crazy: I'm sure she's both. Not that it needs to be said, but the Angus Ross isn't at all easy to get.
sekali she's like many of the students that go home and mug a lot, ace an exam, then say that they nv mug at all.. you noe.
or maybe dan brown paid her to make his books even more famous than they already are. imagine. angus ross, PLUS money! ;)
what sour grapes. the girl read only a few books and managed to do well, which demonstrates that it's not so much quantity but what goes through your mind as you read it. As for the reference to skills, I'm sure thinking skills are needed to analyse lit texts, and this girl has them.
Certainly. What she doesn't have is 'genuine passion' (a cringe-inducing phrase, by the by).
Cut the girl some slack. She is young (18?) and she has just won an important international prize and being featured on the nation-building press and all.
Which one of us do not remember being young and invulnerable and completely sure of our world? :)
Whether it is sheer talent or sheer arrogance, I suppose time will tell.
yeah i remember being 18 and not needing to read anything anymore. and now i is a genuis. but let teenagers be arrogant, all the same.
3 books in 2 yrs and they have to be dan brown's?
literature students everywhere are cringing in indignation.
dan brown = hardcore lit what. u just don't know it yet *snigger* anyway..let's not be overly critical of the girl with the amazing analytical-and-applicational skills, who still manages to maintain the exact amount of genuine passion (but not too much because what would the educational system think !!) to achieve such glorious results.
aiyo.
Application skills, not applicational. No such word.
Saint Andrew's ! I miss it so much. I hate Miss K though. The worst old maid ever.
*Gasp*! She's still there? Wow ...
she is no lover of literature. i really hope she is misquoted, because someone like her obviously got extremely lucky. nobody reads 3 novels in 2 years and gets away with claiming she has 'geniune passion' for literature. even alfian saat reads, what makes her think she doesn't. she is no genius, and i'm not sour, i'm just extremely angry that the angus ross prize could go to someone so undeserving, to someone who isn't even a student of literature, but merely a student sitting an exam where ability can be approximated easily and examiners fooled. for god's sake you divinity student, dan brown isn't even literature, it's just some words on a piece of paper put together in an interesting order, designed to sell and numb the minds of the ignorant, like john grisham. don't get me wrong, they are good in that they are interesting and can caputre the imagination of the masses with their ideas and their plot progression, but they are not in any way expert manipulators of the language. on the other hand, people like thomas hardy and joseph conrad are. i hope she reads a lot of short stories or she's really into poetry. otherwise, she is simply, as a literature student, not doing any justice to the good name of professor ross.
Cemel: Hey, don't hate on the big K! She's cool. Barred me from class for half a year (okay, so that's a bit of a simplification), but she's cool. [g]
maybe that's why England's dropping the A's like a hot coal? :P
just 'coz words don't exist, doesn't mean you can't make them exist..anyway. miss k made me throw away my socks once =( i had to retrieve them from the bin outside the staff room.
Throw away your socks? Ha, that's new to me.
My favourite Miss K moment was when this guy in my class told her he wouldn't commit some offence again (I can't remember what) and she asked him what would happen if he did. He said, 'If I do it again, you can screw me upside down.' She replied, 'You're damn right I can "screw you upside down."' He then turned around, bent over, pointed to his arse and said, 'Come lah!'
Actually, that's more of a Yeow Chong moment than a Miss K moment, but the anecdote stands.
hey i got here via mrbrown too. i've heard abt candice from many people, so i'd like to state for the record that from what i hear, she's an extremely nice person. not arrogant at all. she must be just talented. and well if she only read 3 books because she was so immersed in her actual lit texts, maybe it does make sense after all? haha let's all just be happy for her and not sour or spiteful. she made notes for her friends who weren't doing well in lit. she deserves it la.
i was in SAJC for past three months this year! :)
i couldn't help giggling everytime i heard her say to the J2 boys,"YOU LITTLE SHITHEADS. GO AND WASH THAT CRAP OUT OF YOUR HAIR OR YOU WON'T EVER SEE YOUR HAIR AGAIN."
[sorry, this is rather irrelevant to your post, but i just couldn't resist.]
This post gets my vote for "Best Original Use Of The Phrase 'Unequally Yoked' 2005".
DK
That's nothing. My friend, very much the humanities type, posted this conversation he had on his blog (http://accipicchia.blogspot.com):
Puay: Yo, did you read about the girl from SAJC who won the Angus Ross Prize this year? Apparently she read only 3 books in the past 2 years, all of them by Dan Brown.
Me: Isn't Angus Ross a steakhouse in the US?
Puay: Dude, that's BLACK ANGUS.
Me: Oh.
Maybe I'm wrong, but even apart from this precedent, and remembering that the prize is awarded to a student population outside the UK - would it be too far out to suggest that the examiners in Cambridge warm better to reticent, mellow scripts that know their place, fitting with some postcolonial concept of our indigenous academic standards? Being threatened by an impassioned deconstruction of one of their much-loved national poets? One could imagine an equivalent award within the UK going to a paper with a totally different temperament... possibly?
hi nicholas i just came across your page and i would like to make a VERY simple statement.
if you, mr brown, or anyone else who commented here or anywhere about candice, think she shouldn't have won the book prize, go prove that you are deserving of it then.
the book prize isn't easy to get at all as you said yourself. so the very fact that she could get it clearly shows that she deserves it.
oh, did i mention? she's not the best lit student in singapore.
she's the best in the commonwealth. which happens to be quite large (the British empire once covered two-thirds of the Earth's surface)
and IF you didn't already know, you're 19 the year after your a levels, not 16.
quote:'you'll see that Candice Wan achieved this remarkable feat at age 16. Someone give her a prize!
'
thanks (:
A bit touchy aren't we. I wonder why? =)
But please be subjective.
It's no doubt that she deserved it being in competition with the whole Commonwealth outside the UK.
Before university where you really get to choose your field of study, students are given a set of curiculum which are common to all for the most part. Even in secondary schools and junior colleges, you decide which field of studies you would like to persue but a subset of courses are expected of you.
If you do well in Chemistry for A levels and are the best in the whole Commonwealth, does it mean you have to like chemistry outside your studies? Do you have a lab at home that you do experiments? You don't have to like chemistry to do well. It might help or you might be so good at it that it becomes your favorite subject, but that is not required.
Likewise, doing well in Literature for A levels do not have a prerequsite to like reading novels or poems or books. You just have like Candice said to use what you have learned and apply it.
I understand this might seem unfair to those who live, breath and eat literature, but understand that the application part determines the grade and the examiners cannot judge holisticly based on her life, but based on just the work that they have to judge by.
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Candice Wan = prostitute
not very nice abt saying abt someone when you dunno her at all.
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