It would seem appropriate to say here that I will try to avoid over-generalizing opinions of other people. I will mainly use either logic or my own personal opinion without trying to represent anyone else. I think that's fair for everyone when inevitably someone rages, they have someone to direct it towards.
Also, I'm waiting for my laundry to dry.
~~~
Let's start with my favourite topic! Orientation!
So by now I assume a good number of people have heard about our decision to disband RHOC. By that I mean, we will not be continuing our legacy that has lasted at least a good 20 years, and we will not be, as much as I can help it, interfering or advising the new batch of orientation committees.
There are a number of reasons for this, and people have started to question myself or my members about it. Most of them start with "Eh why nobody want to do RHOC anymore? You all cannot find successor ar?"
To fully understand why, we have to backtrack way way back. All the way back to when RHOC lasted 3 weeks. I cannot imagine a RHOC that lasts 3 weeks. Neither can any of my contemporaries. But from what I understand, RHOC is this huge entity of fear, excitement, fun and mostly reactionary movement from clueless freshmen that stretches even into the school time. This RHOC would have incredible things, from typical orientation games, to an insane Cozy Bedroom tunnel constructed our of Comm Hall tables that stretched from our front porch to where T-lab is now, to a phoenix explosion so loud people once called Clementi Police to come down to investigate, to a Sentosa day that lasted from morning til the next day, to Block Orientation that actually made the freshies slide down the slope in every block, to IBG that actually had some competitiveness. What we have today, is simply a watered down version. Many of my predecessors could only dream of doing something as massive as this.
And most amazingly of all, it was planned within a 3 month period when exams end in May til end July.
With that, I come to the first reason for ending RHOC; because it will always remain a sliver of what is an actually impressive package. When we RHOCers start planning, we always ask ourselves and our incoming committee members whether they want to maintain the traditional activities. Invariably we will say yes, because we look back at our seniors and marvel at the great job they have done and wonder if we will ever reach that same greatness. We have set our expectations based on the successes of the past and naturally, want to emulate that same success, either through direct imitation or through capturing the essence of the activity or the camp. The fundamental problem with that it's impossible for us to go back to "the good old days", because today's safety restrictions and expectations are much greater than they were before. It's easy to point the finger at OSA or even SCRC and accuse them of clamping down too harshly on the camp planners, but it turns out that this problem is simply a symptom of perceptions throughout the nation. Sentosa has banned both (unofficial) overnight stays as well as burning of campfires or BBQs. Parents are calling into Hall Office before the camp even begins. This is not the same world our seniors lived in 20 years ago. We couldn't get away with things even if we wanted to.
I do not see a future where the circumstances around RHOC start moving in the opposite direction, where we are encouraged or at least supported to go to the extent that our seniors did. I can only see our activities become more and more restricted. Since we place such a huge importance on continuity and legacy, it is only inevitable that RHOC becomes more and more watered down. This is perhaps one of the reasons why we always seem one step behind other faculty camps, or even RHEX in terms of genuinely fun activities, because we are tied down by both our and the hall residents' expectations of us to remain a "legacy", a legacy that they did not know have been eroding and eroding ever since an administrator first started paying attention to hall camps.
On a similar topic, we move on to reason number 2, the new generation of campers. The RHOC that we know today is based around the "1990s freshmen". They had different tastes, different preferences and most importantly different levels of tolerances. At that time, it wasn't unusual to see freshmen in actual confusion and frustration but yet still go through with something forced upon them. Pain was a powerful way of bonding people. I understood that very clearly when I was still wearing an NPCC uniform. It's sad to say but today's kids aren't like that. They have been pampered by parents throughout a good part of their lives and do not simply accept that they have to go through group suffering, choosing instead to just walk away. Last year, we had this "revolution" incident during the Big Ball Game, where some freshmen actually demanded their rights to not be treated terribly and wanted to just walk away. This year, I was so afraid of that happening en masse that I actually stationed more seniors at the ground floor and prepped them to "counsel" and reduce damage.
This may seem like a small problem, but its sinisterness lies in its deception. For every one such case where walking away is brought to our attention, regardless of how dramatic it was, 5 of them slip under our radar. Like most, I was never aware of the fact that so many people were walking away. It is only during my time as chairperson, that this really hit me right smack in the face. With PDPA seriously enforced this year, we had to directly collect information from freshmen, and it became starkly obvious that there was a serious number of people who were not even going to give the camp a chance, outrightly telling us that they are checking into hall but not attending the camp. And that is even before the camp has started! As camp coordinators, we can only focus our attention and actions on whoever is present, and if they are not present, we totally cannot do anything about it.
What I suspect is that future generations of freshmen will be less tolerant to the type of camp that we run. We are not as friendly, as approachable, or as "entry-level" as other camps. I think anyone who has attended RHOC understands that there is a level of strictness precisely because of the legacy that it carries. The trend that we have witnessed is that more and more freshmen are unwilling to put themselves through this, and more freshmen are willing to walk away back to their rooms, while the camp is happening right outside their rooms, if they find it unsatisfactory. This was an unimaginable circumstance to RHOCers 20 years ago, but this is something we constantly see today.
There will be some out there who will ask us to tone it down to cater to this ever- growing group. My problem is that this is already toned down and yet freshies are leaving before they ever reach the end. There is only so much I can do in this aspect of the camp because we have been here too long already. Our seniors have done too good a job to teaching us to think this way. I no longer know how to do a Big Ball Game that doesn't involve tekkaning people. In fact, I cannot even imagine someone less fierce conducting it. That is the extent to which I am , as Dr. Ho will put it, "in love with the plan." The way RHOC was set up and how it developed over the years has made it into this form that all of us have experienced. Whether as RHOCers, we like it or not, is irrelevant. But to fail to capture that essence is to do it injustice, at least for those of us who have understood the message that the seniors have passed down. I am both unwilling and unable to change RHOC into a form that can cater to this new generation of freshmen, the ones that run at the first sign of pain. And I know that this is a growing population, which will become larger as the years go by. It is simply a sign of the times. We must accept that. Everyone of us in the meeting room were asked to imagine a form of the Big Ball Game that doesn't alienate this group. None of us could do it. That is why I believe disbanding RHOC and setting up a new orientation programme from scratch is the ideal way to go, with as little assistance from present RHOCers as possible.
And then there are the problems that we never found a fix for. One thing that I don't suspect will change in our favour, at least in the next 5 years, is the hall vs faculty competition. There has been a constant competition for freshmen attention between these 2 groups ever since I stepped into hall. At least from what I observe, faculty events are either getting a lot more support, or way less oversight, because both the scale and the engagement is getting more and more ridiculous. There are fundamentally elements that act in their favour, most importantly, the prime timing of their FOPs as well as the undivided attention they get, seeing as there is no competition from outside bodies. Halls cannot act as early because the dates never come in soon enough. Students must always accept their course of choosing before they even think about coming into hall. And with that, there is a good solid month or 2 of attention on them. Furthermore, all their camps require applications, which means the interested campers self-select and get surrounded by other interested campers, creating a false impression that their entire faculty is filled with such people. Contrast that with the forced nature of hall and the cramped schedule of our orientation and its easy to see why the appeal of faculty is so strong. And with the problems I already mentioned above, the differences become even starker. I have contemplated this problem with RHOCers over the years and often we simply see it as another limitation that RHOC must endure. With OSA clamping down harder and harder on hall camps, not just ours, but other halls as well, along with seemingly little interference for the faculty ones, it just seems like a losing battle. I once joked that for a faculty camp, you can have zero programmes but enough OGLs and freshmen and everyone will still consider it a success. The success of a faculty has no dependence on neither the excellence of the execution or the competency of its coordinators. They literally, in all sense of the word, just need to get their freshmen and seniors to show up.
All these are things that are inevitable, and if we choose to force our way through, we will only prolong the inevitable. On the other hand, we can start to fix things that we can fix now. We have real problems in the hall right now. We can try to fix them.
For FOPs, meaning RHEX and RHOC, we have quite a lot of oversight from the SCRC. At least from my perspective, there is a serious disagreement between our agenda and what method we believe is the best way to achieve it. I think we want different things and when that becomes contested, people become frustrated. Take the never-ending angst fest that is RHEX. Nothing puts it quite into perspective as having 4 consecutive RHEX heads telling their successors that same thing; the job is not worth it. The SCRC has its own pressures from upper management. We understand that. But at the same time, we want to feel like our management has our back, that it's willing to support and guide us when they see the conviction we have in what we do. Now, we see a lot of shutting down and shrinking away instead.
I'm a pessimist. I don't assume things will turn out better just because I want it to. I see 2 options to end this conflict. Either the SCRC changes its perspective, which none of us believe will happen to a degree that we are satisfied with, or we change our perspective. I believe if you install a new group of people to run orientation, you will attract a new breed of people. Since this group of coordinators are new, they are more open to influence, and since this is a key event for hall, the SCRC will most likely have a hand in ensuring that this runs smoothly. If the influence from the SCRC is there, it is possible that the camp they run attracts the kind of people who agree with SCRC, because that's the nature of the camp. Take RHEX for an example, RHEX will always draw in people who like RHEX, and people who don't like RHEX either will get turned off and don't apply, or they will still apply and end up finding something they like about hall. This cycle repeats itself and it's not inconceivable that you attract people who have similar tastes. I think the same thing can be done regarding SCRC. The timing just takes more time to adjust because there is still a resistance to them present in hall.
So these are all the external reasons. There are also some internal ones. RHOC has a very serious demand on students' time. Everyone who has been through RHOC has had to sacrifice. They have had to sacrifice their vacation time and more importantly, they have had to sacrifice time making friends with freshies during the most optimum time. The demands on an undergraduate's time is getting greater and greater. Summer school, internship, IA, SEP, NOC, community projects, etc. The list goes on and on. I cannot bring myself to "coerce" somebody to carry on doing RHOC because at the end of the day, RHOC is just a camp. It's just a camp for 200-odd people who had so much fun with each other they won't remember what you gave up for them. I can't bring myself to make them give up the things that really matter for something as insignificant as a camp.
All I can do is present the options and let them decide themselves. Sometimes I even advise them to drop RHOC, because they would be sacrificing too much. I have already seen when students cannot juggle, and often they make the choice and have to live with it. I am proud that I come from a line of people who has kept up this legacy. I am proud of the people who have made this sacrifice alongside me. But at the same time, I can't help but wish my juniors didn't have to. That they could have had the time to spend making friends with freshmen. Because that's what I wanted.
In short, I hope you understand why we chose to disband. Do not reduce our rationales into "cuz nobody want to do lor" I think that's is really disrespectful of the agony we went through to make this decision. We really do hope for a better future. We gave up our chance to do it next year, so that others may do it better. This is a new opportunity for the hall. Maybe you can succeed where we have failed. Good luck.
No comments:
Post a Comment