| Summary on the sequence of events Lau Siu-wai (HKPC, class of 1959) May 18, 2007 |
When the sad news of PC math invitational story broke in early April ( http://www.lighterspc.com/talk714.html ) that PC lost every single event, the Lighters were disappointed and upset. We held intense discussions on the Net for days. At the time, we were in the middle of a fund raising effort for our Golden Anniversary Reunion in 2009. This sad news impacted on our confidence in PC and the Fund Raising Effort. I took upon myself to initiated a movement to recruit 10-15 PCers who are currently active in the academic community to cosign a letter to be sent to Pui-Ching "How Guam" Ho Kin-Chung (member of the board of the Trustees, and Chancellor of both PCMS, and PCPS). Ho " How-Guam" is a professor of Environmental Science, and Dean of Science and Technology at the HK Open University (http://www.ouhk.edu.hk/~sctwww/es/staff_drho.htm). The intention of the letter was to alert him of the poor academic preparedness of current PC students. In two days, we had 7 PC cosigners ready to go with it (see reference [1]). On April 26, 2007, I had a relatively long discussion on the phone with Dan Tsui [class of 1957 [1]], he was of the opinion that some 10-15 guys collectively writing to Ho "How Guam" could be too overbearing and may induce a negative effect. That was certainly a possibility. He thinks some of us are too far away from HK; therefore, do not really know the situation in HK. He suggested that I contact three other PCers who are currently in HK, and thus, may know better. At this time, I stopped contacting other PCers to lend support for this cosignatory effort. After some deliberation, I decided to call Ho "How Guam" myself. One PCer to another PCer. "Uno a uno" so to speak. A brief message was first sent to Ho "How-Guam" at the end of April about the disastrous Math Competition results, followed by a phone call a few days later on May 1, 2007, which turned out to be Labor Day in HK. We kept missing each other for phone contacts for the next 10-15 days, due to one thing or another. In the mean time, KC Ho sent two messages to me, and I excerpt as follows : Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 11:13:13 +0800 Dear Professor Lau, Thank you for your warm concerns over the mathematics standard of Pui Ching Middle School. As the Supervisor of the School, I always have heartiest appreciation over the enthusiastic support of our alumni on the current development of the School. Once received your e-mail last week, I had instructed Principal Yip Chee Tim to attend to the matter eagerly. With no doubt, we will try the best efforts in maintaining the excellent reputation and distinguished academic outputs of Pui Ching. Furthermore, I have requested Principal Yip to explain to you personally what happened about the Maths Competition a few months ago for clarification of misunderstanding. Honestly saying, I have strong confidence that our teaching and learning activities, particularly those related to science and technology, are still at the top level of HK educational circle… Date: Tue, 15 May 2007 10:51:53 +0800 …. We have extremely good results in the School Certificate Examination during the past years. For examples, in 2005, we had one "10 A" and one "9A 1B". Last year we did not have 10 As, solely because we did not recommend students to take 10 examined subjects as other school do. We still had 8As last year. In average, our English, Chinese, Physics, Math, Computing results are excellent with overall passing rate higher than 95% and a lot of As in all subjects every year. I can assure you that our academic standard has never dropped. Instead, even in the difficult environment for Chinese-Medium-Instruction schools in HK, we are able to achieve the standard as good as other famous English-teaching high schools like DBS, Queen College etc. In certain technological areas, such as IT, Pui Ching is the leading school in HK. If allowable, let me ring you back to explain and clarify. To make a very long story short, we made phone contact on May 15 at ~ 8:30 PM. Had a relatively long and meaningful chat. He took time to explain to me many PC issues that I was not aware before. We touched based on the issue of " One straight dragon", the proposed Pui-Ching College, and the School Cert Exam. He reaffirmed that PC academic standard has been very high, told me that PC School Cert Exam high achievers appeared on the PC webpage (on the left upper corner, and scrolling under the PC insignia of the PC weblink http://www.puiching.edu.hk/). I copied the name list shown as below: It is not clear if these results were for 2006, or for an extended period of a few years. He promised to get me a list of PC high achievers in the School Cert Exam for the past 5 to 10 years. I asked KC if PC was really good, why was it that we lost every single event at the PC Math Invitational. He told me that not the best math students represented PC at the Math Competition, hence the disastrous results, according to the PCMS principal. While this excuse appeared lame, I did find the following sublink that summarizes all the competition awards since 2001. These results seem quite decent, including other Math competitions: http://www.puiching.edu.hk/schoolevent/2005/summary/ (competition awards). My interactions with Ho “How-Guam” led me to believe that PC is a reasonable shape, and that it would continue to improve with future developments (details omitted here). I do believe, however, there is much room for improvement, for example, clearly there seems a communication gap between HKPC Alum Club and PCMS. In ending, I want to thank HKPC Alumni Association for many helpful discussions. “How-Guam “Ho Kon-Chung for his patience with me, and his openness in expressing his view. Principal Lee of the PCPS for his phone discussion. Special thanks are due to those PCers listed in Reference [1] who gave me support and guidance during this event [1]. The PC saga continues, its well-being is in the helping hands of all of us. We mustn't let her down, because… When we sang the PC school flag song back then, we meant it that : " Pui-Ching School will never die". ---------------- [1] These 8 persons were involved with the cosignatory letter matter: Edward Yang (EEE Dept., HKU and Columbia, class of 1953)--- http://www.eee.hku.hk/staff_personal/esyang.htm Lu Jeu Sham (Physics Dept., UC San Diego, class of 1955)--- http://physics.ucsd.edu/~ljssst/Web page.html Dan Tsui (EE Dept, Princeton University, Class of 1957)--- http://www.ee.princeton.edu/people/Tsui.php S.S.Lau ( ECE Dept., UC San Diego, class of 1959)--- http://www.ece.ucsd.edu/~sslau/ Yum-Tong Siu (Mathematics Dept, Harvard University, class of 1960)--- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yum-Tong_Siu Albert Yee (Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, UC Irvine, class of 1962)--- http://www.eng.uci.edu/user/252 Kei May Lau ( EEE Dept., HKUST, class of 1972)--- http://www.ece.ust.hk/people/faculty/kmlau.html Simon Wong (EE Dept., Stanford University, class of 1972)--- http://marco.stanford.edu/swong/ |
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