I got to see more sides of my classmates/colleagues today =)
hahaa. especially my milder colleagues.
was talking to carolyn today about the reasons as to why we became counsellors. think she brought up a very good reminder point .. that God has given us experiences and giftings in this area.. and to not serve Him in this area is like being unfaithful with the talents that we have.
Today I also realized that there're more people who took a paycut just to be a counsellor. hee. There're 3 former discipline masters, 2 former HODs and 1 formerly working at MOE HQ in my class. soo. well. seeing how the cap of the job is at $4000+, and how HODs usually earn at least 1000-2000 more than that, yes i think they took a paycut. lol.
quite sacrificial =)

We learned affective intervention today.
quite a scary ground to step on i think.
'cos i think transference happens easier in this context. since you're dealing with emotions. i was volunteered for the second sample therapy session using body scanning and visual imagery.
lol.
i forgot where i was and only remembered that i'm in nie b2 when my lecturer (who's my counsellor at that moment) reminded me about it. it took some time to 'come back'.
anyway, through this session, i realized that my lecturer counsels very well. hahaha. his whole tone, mannerism. very soothing. hahaha.
but he's not a good lecturer.
hahahaha

ahhhhhhhhhhh
one of my classmates just emailed me to ask if i can vet his assignment O.o
i've not even started! LOL. i just decided on the topic today. ahhahaa.
faint.
think my classmates are all more hardworking than me =) haha.
alright! i shall finish the assignment by this week. hahaa

Hehehe. My first try at Left 4 Dead today =)

Quite fun =) haha. though i can understand why people have motion sickness after that. lol.
Was just thinking in the afternoon that I lack an action game. lol. think i found my answer. though the lan shop at paradiz is horrendously priced =\

after having a sorethroat for 4 days, the sore throat kinda dissipated =)
and now i'm down with a runny nose and a scratchy throat. was sneezing away in class today 'cos my classroom's a little dusty.
and i woke up feeling quite unwell after a nap just now. very restless sleep =) lol. but feeling much better now.
this week is catchingupwithreadings week =) hahahaa.
and also starttodoassignments'cosihave3assignmentstohandinbeforeandaftercamp week.
lol.
God! preserve my body!
hahaa
oh! but really thank God that my sorethroat didn't affect my voice on saturday.. and i didn't have any other thing except for tt sorethroat on sat. hahaa. was praying to God to protect my health 'cos i don't want to be unwell while singing on stage. hahahaha

After a week of theory, we did something interesting in Dr Wong's class today =)
We finally had the chance to integrate all we've learned into practice. We did peer counselling.
lol.
it's very tiring. it's like u have to multitask in your brain and yet not show that you're multitasking. it's kinda like an intense shepherding session, but keeping structures and theories in mind, and being more mindful of your own body language, the other person's body language, your own speech patterns and the ways you structure your word, the other person's way of reply and content. and in the midst of it all, you need to evaluate quickly what the person is sharing, and form in your mind the different systems surrounding the people. you also have to make a mental note in your mind to remember what the person has said 'cos you need to write your case report after the session.
lol.
annd it's always easier to slip into the non-counsellor mode (for me la) into a i-am-your-friend mode. ahhhhhhhhhhhh
have to remind myself that i am a professional. i am a professional. i am a professional. i am a professional.
and we also have to be very aware of our own reactions (in our minds) and in our body language. need to beware of transference and countertransference issues. professionalism forbids us for counselling our own friends and family members.
suddenly seeing how broad this field can be (e.g. specializing in certain forms of counselling).

Joined the nus people at the exam hq today =) hehe.

I was actually quite surprised to see the turnout on the first day of the reading week. haha. thought there'll be much lesser people than this =) but glad that there's more! hahaa.
think i should pop by ntu hq one of these days too. . haven't had the chance to. hhaaha.
and i just realized that i have lots of readings to catch up on! the crazy lecturer for module 1 gave a few chapters per book per lecture O.o which means i have at least 12 chapters to catch up on! ahhhhhhhh

Daniel sent this to encourage us =)

“I am not made for perilous quests,” cried Frodo. I wish I had never seen the Ring! Why did it come to me? Why was I chosen?”

“Such questions cannot be answered,” said Gandalf. “You may be sure that it was not for any merit that others do not possess; not for power or wisdom, at any rate. But you have been chosen and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.”

J.R.R. Tolkien – The Fellowship of the Ring.

Health shall be my new goal. hahaha.
spiritually, physically, emotionally, psychologically healthy =)
was just telling my cg pple that i was just talking to my colleague the other day, commenting that i feel ashamed for not exercising ('cos the crazy guy runs or goes to the gym for 2 hrs per day) when i listen to him talk. and he said that i should exercise.. 'cos of aesthetic reasons.
LOL
i was like aesthetic reasons. hahaa. so funny.
but upon further thought, i think i really should exercise. hahaa.
my health has to be up up up when i deal with my clients in the future =) lol

i think i may be coming down with a flu.
having symptoms of slight sore throat and blocked nose =\
coupled with the fact that i'm surrounded by sick pple in class =S

lol.
i realized that for this week,
1) i've not watched anime at all =\
2) i've been sleeping at 2am or later everyday =) hahaha
3) my auto-wakeup time is 7.10am

boundaries are very important =)
hahaha. think it's something that kept popping up and popping up and popping up in the past months.
physical boundaries. mental boundaries. emotional boundaries.
boundaries keep things safe, yet allowing for a safe gate of contact =)
some of my group people are quite close. lol. having the opportunity to share lives in the course is prob the reason why. i mean, when you discuss about life everyday, and talk about relationships with people, and even share certain problems, understandings.. important to keep emotional boundaries =) hahaa. need to keep gender boundaries too =)
------------------
as everyone in my group is married, conversations sometimes revert back to children, family life.. hahaha. so i've been getting tips from people! hahahaha. and gaining information about how it's like.
it's interesting to hear that actually having a child is really quite important to a couple. the impact of not having one, or having miscarriages, is really quite great, and possibly quite traumatic as well (especially when u have more than one miscarriage).
must take care of your bodies too =)

one thing i learned today.
counsellors need counselling too.
second thing i learned.
(can't be shared. lol)
third thing i learned.
i'm starting to love my profession more and more.

hehe.
Introduce a film to the people out there :P
The Olive Depression, directed by Joshua Lim.
It's about the weeks before a boy enters NS.
I have personally not watched the movie.. and I have not heard any reviews of the film... but i'm recommending it 'cos i know the director's father. hahahahaa. he's in my counseling class =) People thought he was mad to send his son overseas to study film making and directing when his son could have been a medical doctor. lol. the supportive father behind the son's back!=)
so yea. hahaa.
it's shown in Sinema now. Timings can be found on this website.
Realized that i've been blogging a lot about my class. it's interesting 'cos everyday i learn new things about the people in my class.. and about the school education system, and about my profession. and what to do to get myself registered as a counsellor in Singapore.
some pictures =)
My module 2 project group mates. bharathi, luona, daniel, mong, me and steven (note that everyone in my group, with the exception of yours truly, is married. lol).
ah. which reminds me. i should be doing work. i have quite a lot of work to catch up with (considering that there's no time in between lessons to study at all).

hee.
think my class is full of resources.
and the fact that we see one another everyday makes it easy for resources to be shared=) like experiences... or love.. hahaha.
experiences such as parenting experiences (everyone, but 3 of us, in my class is either married with kids or married with no kids.. of course some look like they're very young but actually have 3 kids or something. lol), experiences dealing with the prisons ministry, experiences dealing with children in school settings, experiences with girls in moral danger, personal experiences of being in gangs.. experiences of dealing with children in gangs (singapore and hongkong)..
met samuel on the bus to NIE in the morning.. and we were just sharing about why we wanted to be counsellors. lol. he used to be a pai gia when he was young.. being involved in a gang.. was not (surprisingly) involved in gang fights, but was asked to peddle drugs. but he said he was quite blessed in the sense whereby he was rather protected even when he was in the gang.. though he did take it for granted.. lol. dunno whether it's a good thing or a bad thing when he said that he came to his senses while lying in a pool of blood and looking at the sky.
but for Samuel it was a spiritual transformation. God changed his heart. lol. sorta like the ironmen as well.
so yup. my class is full of interesting people such as these.
oh. love 'cos zarina (who's a mother) woke up at 5am to bake chocolate muffins for all of us. hahahahaa.

yea man.
today we had another full day of lessons.
lol.
our first time having module 2! =D Foundations of group guidance.
it was interesting =) think our lecturer (isabella) is very dynamic. lol. but she went through the whole lesson very quickly. hahaha. probably 'cos it's content heavy ba.
caught a few good ideas for her.. can use them in the future (for games, ice breakers... hahahaha)
but think this module is not going to be easy. i look at the individual assignment and was quite lost for a moment. lol. need to design a programme in relation to a specific life challenge. it's... interesting.
oh! but we formed a new group today =D hahaa. so my group has very interesting pple.. like bharathi (who happened to be the teacher my sister is doing relief teaching work after.. -it's a small world after all-), daniel (ahhhhh. i wanna kill this guy sometimes. he keeps playing pranks on me O.o), steven (our very innocent engineer-turned-counsellor. hahahaha) and Mong (my look-very-young-but-is-actually-a-mother friend) :)
lol.
quite enjoyable i think =) it got quite funny when we played the 'team-bonding' games (yes, we did tt in class). and it got quite funny when we did the de-sensitization exercise in class for module 3 (which was about sex last week. it's also about sex this week. and it'll be about sex next week. shows how much they're trying to infuse us with the knowledge and skills in this area so that we can do the sexuality programme in schools. --> 'cos no one else wanna touch this area -.-||).
i have the permission to put up these pictures! =) the things we did...
we played snap with these cards. and to win the cards we had to shout out the words on the cards. it's to desensitize us to the words so that when we talk about them in the future, we can do it with a straight face. believe me, condom was the mildest word there. i think we all learned new terms.
--> some questions which teenagers really wrote down (which we attempted to answer).
we also watched Get Rea! (our favourite video series) on teenage sex and abortion. hmmm. really quite sad. thank God we dun really get desensitized to this. discussed gray areas too.. like we're bound by legal obligation to report if a teenage girl confides that she's had sex. under the penal code, a guy who has sex with a girl who's under 14 has committed statutory rape, and under the women's charter, a guy who has sex with a girl (unless by way of marriage) has committed an offence. so yes. that's the legal obligation.
BUT. does that mean u really go and report? a girl who is afraid of letting her parents know and is already very nervous and tense about the whole situation may possibly go to extreme means due to the emotions felt in that situation. what if the girl commits suicide 'cos she felt that she has no way out of this?
yup.
and it's a very real situation. the situation is more clearcut if the girl is pregnant though. lol

average case load is 80 per yr.
wow.
hahaha.
faint.
poor principal needs to do a lot of things.
and heard tt some people actually revert back to teaching 'cos counselling got too heavy for them.
hmmm.

ah. 11.15am is supposed to be a late time for me... but it's at this moment that i have a sudden desire to do a lot of things (e.g. read books, read journals). hahahaha.
to wake up at 6am is too early for a nightbird like me!
like what Angie (my cool funky lecturer who plays WOW) says,
'i'm an owl, not a lark.'

second day was a bit more tiring than the first 'cos i had to wake up at 6am instead of 6.30am. lol.
all of a sudden, i appreciate how near NUS is to the rest of the world, in comparison to NIE. hahahaa. the things you realize only when you're forced to travel further. to the people who travel to NTU everyday, wo pei fu ni men. lol
today was more of a revision on adolescence (of which i took an entire module on back in nus, so it was really a brief revision). haha. afternoon was PBL PBL and more PBL. and it suddenly struck me that PBL was what we were doing in social work classes in nus too! hahaha.
Oh! today we discussed about the definitions of freedom and having boundaries. This arose from the discussion on causes that contributed to teenagers or kids being beyond parental control (of which parents would have had filed a complaint against their own child in the juvenile court and have relinquished the 'taking care' of the child to the state). 'cos we realized that for children beyond parental control, most of the time, the parents may have been very caring to their child (contrary to the other group of delinquents whereby the parents may have been negligent towards their child in the form of loving them), yet their child went 'beyond their control', so to speak. reason being that when the child was growing up, they either did not set proper boundaries for the child (e.g. curfew of 11pm), or they swung from one extreme (being very tight with the child), to suddenly letting go and letting the child run free (e.g. the child is growing up, needs a little bit of freedom, so no harm she come back at 2am, go to clubs..). It reminds me of permissive parenting.
lol.
but i don't agree with the lecturer (who strongly advocates the role of the family in the influence of a child) completely in her view of the family's role. i believe that there're a lot of possible mediating factors (e.g. peers, personal beliefs) which may have set the boundaries for the child in his/her mind, even when boundaries to be set by an adult figure are not present. lol.
anyway, today i got to know my classmates more! :) for eg, there're two girls i hang out with more often.. i realized that one is a mother (!!!!!! she didn't look that old O.o) and one is 5 years older than me (she didn't look that old either!). hahaa. okay. i feel really young.
not to mention that i ended up in the same project group as the oldest guy in the class. it's like you're doing a project with your dad o.O

I quite enjoyed my first day of 'work' hahaha :D
it's quite exciting.
when i first went into the classroom, i was greeted personally by my lecturers. hahaa.
there're 23 students in my class, and i'm the youngest (very obviously). the next one youngest is probably 25 or 26 O.o the oldest is 61. half of the class have been teachers before they converted to being full time school counsellors. and everyone has had formal work experience (except for me). it's super interesting :D
but thank God that i can understand the things well.. 'cos they're things i'm interested in! and things which i've done in psychology (my lecturers are mostly psychologists =D)
so yeah.
we spent the first day having orientation (for the first half of the day. boring stuff, e.g. introduction to geNIEus and library orientation. it gets kinda amazing at the things people don't know 'cos they're of an older genderation. think we really take our knowledge of the computer for granted), and the second half having lessons. and to start everything off (and possibly to break any form of ice between all of us), the first (and only) topic was sex.
quite a fruitful discussion.. revisited certain things about the images and covert messages about sex from the media (e.g. an advertisement of Madonna who's fallen on the steps with a half eaten apple in hand to sell some product --> fallen woman --> apple as a symbol of the forbidden fruit --> sin as attractive?), as well as discussions about how we first got our knowledge of the topic, what messages were conveyed, implications, how do we define abstinence (which i thought was pretty good. talking in terms of level of arousel instead of specifically what not to do), certain factors which predispose teenagers (how to define teenagers nowadays when their physical knowledge may supercede their mental maturity) to premarital sex, values about this topic... my group was the youngest group (hahaa. well, it had me:), but i think our group was quite knowledgeable and experienced about this topic 'cos well, this generation tends to be overexposed to things related to the topic). so yup.
i was just sharing with some of the ntu people (when i went to ntu hq) that it's quite sad to watch a video about a girl who is of the same age as me, but has already changed multiple sexual partners (her first experience was at 10 yrs old 'cos she was raped by her mother's boyfriend) she worked at macs for a while, but became a prostitute in the end. she took up drugs. now she's married with 2 kids, but she can't change her profession 'cos she's got no qualifications (she stopped studying since p6) and she can't stop everything at a time..
and then you hear from girls who became pregnant 'cos of premarital sex, and they gave birth to the children (though some of the parents tried ways to get them to abort) and gave their own children up for adoption .. and how when they talk about their child, they still cry because it hurts. it just hurt your heart as well to hear about such things, and you can't stop thinking about how they really need God to heal their hurts, how they really need God to show them the unconditional love they've been craving for.
i think i'm going to enjoy this module a lot (like when i read about the sexual abuse cases, it was heartbreaking, but it's something that i'm really interested in). hee.
hee. some jokes came up too (shared by our lecturer 'cos she was illustrating how ignorant she and her biological teacher in the past was towards this topic).
apparently, she asked her bio teacher (when she was 14) what petting means. and the teacher replied with a straight face
' petting is what teachers do to favourite students' (haha. i thought this was pretty funny.. 'cos it's obviously wrong. and yet u can understand where the mistake came from).
and when one of her students (a boy in a certain boy's school) asked my lecturer ('cos she's a counsellor in the school) if oral sex was okay.. my poor ignorant lecturer replied that it's fine as long as you just talk about it o.O
so it was pretty interesting :) i was thinking about how when i'm a parent, i'm definitely going to
1) spend quality time with my children
2) talk openly about sexual issues with my children (so they'll get the proper knowledge from the proper place --> which'll shape their understanding and attitude towards it)
yup.

hehe.
maybe 'cos it's my proper full time job...
but i think i treat it a little differently from my part time jobs. hahaha.
like, in terms of disciplining myself to sleep earlier. hahaha. i feel the desire to sleep earlier 'cos i anticipate a few days of having to wake up earlier.
whereby in the previous months, i can chiong for one or 2 days, then sleep later or something. hahaa.
yes.
a bit curious as to what kind of people i'll meet tmr, and a bit hesitant as to what kind of image i'd want to portray from the start. hahahaa.
see how ba=]
not sure if i should bring my laptop to school either (since my laptop bag is quite heavy O.o)