What In The World Is KI?

One of the questions invariably asked in the arena of polite-but-awkward-social interaction (including, but not limited to distant family members and university tea sessions) is ‘so what subjects did you do for A Levels’? It’s just as well that the standard recitation includes your language subject at the end because I love watching the surprise that colours people’s otherwise-bored faces when I finish with ‘…KI’.

The next invariable question is ‘what’s that like?’

Everyone has a general (no pun intended) of what GP is – basically a more in-depth continuation of the argumentative O Level essay. People have less of an idea what KI is – and this includes people who actually do the subject. If you take a gander at the ‘syllabus’ document for KI you’ll see that we don’t actually have a syllabus. It’s as much of a mystery as the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot.

In the interest of alleviating some of that mystery, I thought I’d write a post about KI (and also about GP). Now I admit that, having never done the subject, I couldn’t call myself a GP expert, but hopefully this help people in understanding KI a little bit better as well as whether you should choose to do this horrendous subject. Keep in mind that my KI training came from the two-man KI department of VJC, so this might not be true across all JCs in Singapore.

With a subject as vague as Knowledge and Inquiry, there are bound to be a ridiculous amount of stories, none of which make sense. I thought I’d start with dispelling some of these myths.

1. KI is about philosophy.
If you’re thinking of buying TOK papers from the IB programme to practice, the only thing you’re going to practice is wasting your money. KI is not so much about philosophy as it is about the logic and reasoning behind philosophy. Think of it as swimming: philosophy is the springboard you dive off, but then there’s this huge pool of water down below that is a whole other story.

The first thing we were taught is not to involve too many philosophical concepts. Which means when you’re talking about, say, moral philosophy, your aim is not to talk in detail about what it is (explaining deontology and utilitarianism is a huge no-no, as I found out the hard way). Your aim is to explain whether and why they are valid – the reasoning and logic behind the concepts. I did my Independent Study on moral philosophy in the death penalty debate and I concentrated not on moral concepts but on reasoning as a form of justification for moral concepts, and why it is not necessary for there to be wholly reliable and universal moral concepts for moral knowledge to exist. 

(I’m re-reading my IS right now, and I have no idea what I’m saying. Ah, the good old days.) 

2. KI is all about smoking.
If you don’t know your stuff properly, you’re never going to get anywhere. Consider my first point – philosophy as itself is not important, but it is very important as a supplement for your arguments. No one cares whether you can define ‘a priori knowledge’ to the letter. But everyone cares when you use that definition of a priori in a sensible, rational way as part of your argument. 

This point also depends very heavily on your definition of ‘smoking’. If you define ‘smoking’ as ‘throwing stuff up randomly in the hopes that something will be come out of it’ then good luck, expect to see a D. If you define smoking as ‘I don’t know anything about philosophy but let’s see whether I can reason my way out of this’ then you’ve still got a chance of acing the paper. The most important thing about KI is not to lose your head when writing your essays – you have to plan and make sure all of your points flow in a logical, comprehensive manner. Again, KI is all about reasoning and logic, so that’s a huge part of the grading process, and you can probably scrape by if you don’t know your content but know your reasoning very well.

If you define ‘smoking’ as ‘lighting a cigarette’ then you’re probably not an arts student and I apologise. 

3. KI is easy / you don’t have to mug.
LOL, no. It’s true that our classes are very lax (considering our short-staffed department, our lessons consisted of sitting around just talking and occasionally eating chicken nuggets). But when it comes down to the actual exams and you don’t ‘get’ KI, then you are officially screwed. I took history, which involves loads of mugging, literature, which involves loads of thinking, maths, which is just horrible, and economics, which is also horrible – and I have to say KI was the hardest subject. It’s true that we have three hours to do two essays (which is a ridiculous amount of time when you take the four-essay three-hour history paper). But the thing about KI is that we don’t actually know what’s required of us. You don’t know whether you’ve written a good essay until the grade comes back. And what’s worse is the second paper: the long and short passages. Three passages to analyse and squeeze in content in two hours is a ridiculous amount of time in the opposite way from the essay. Short passages are easy but the long passage is something else. I think the highest grade I ever saw on a long passage in my cohort was 19/30. Consultations don’t help – my teacher patiently explained the long passage to me, or so I thought until I left the consult and realised I still had zero idea how to write one. 

And you must mug. 

Now that I’ve addressed some of the myths of KI, let me go into the differences between KI and GP. 

1. GP is easier.
I taught GP at SRJC for a period of about two months, including the A Level results day, and thank goodness I got an A for KI otherwise I’d be ruing the day I took the bloody subject. While I taught I realised that GP was the easiest subject I’d done for a long time. It’s just point, elaboration, explanation, and as long as you know your content you can definitely score and A. And you have twelve questions to choose from, what even! In KI we have a one out of two choice for one essay and one out of four for the other. And when your paper was done in a DAFUQ year like mine was, there really is only one essay question you can choose to do. (Men cannot know what women know. I mean what?) GP requires very little thinking – at least, this is compared to KI – it really is just an extended O level English essay. As long as your points make some sort of sense and you memorise enough examples you’ve definitely scored well. 

Another thing that makes GP easier is the sheer amount of model essays there are. KS Bull is a popularly referenced resource and schools always give out model essays anyway. We didn’t have a single model KI essay to read (those in KS Bull don’t count because to be honest we didn’t think they were very good). The passages are stunningly difficult compared to comprehension. And finally, GP doesn’t have a 3000 word research essay that most people end up winging close to the deadline because of all the other subjects they’re taking. We often say that KI shouldn’t be a H2, it should be a H3, because it’s that difficult.

2. GP is more structured.
GP has a very set, specific way of doing things. With KI it’s more of an ‘anything goes’ phenomenon, which is why an A for KI is guaranteed much, much less than an A for GP. Even the best command of English won’t help you if you don’t actually know what you’re talking about and don’t have a semblance of reasoning (as I found out, again, the hard way). And comprehension? They’re actually giving you questions to answer, I mean MAN I would love if they did that for KI. But nope – in KI, you pick your own question for the independent study, and if you pick the question wrongly then you’re pretty much screwed no matter what you do for the next six months. I can’t stress enough how rigid the GP method is compared to KI – so if you think that writing an argumentative essay is difficult enough because you have to think independently, don’t even think about taking KI. 

3. KI is a lot more interactive.
The best KI lessons are when everyone speaks up and you get to hear different opinions. We argued a hell of a lot in our classes and people always had some sort of disagreement going on – which really forms the backbone of KI. In GP there’s mostly only one way of doing a question (unless it’s a really open-ended question). You guys even have ‘absolute’ questions – the only ‘absolute’ we have in KI is ‘absolutely not’ written above your U grade. I guess the good thing about this part is that we get to explore a lot of avenues that GP doesn’t give you, but at the same time it’d be nice having a set answer to fall back on, which KI doesn’t provide.

4. KI is a lot broader and deeper.
My experience of GP is just learning rote facts for different areas. But even these areas are constrained to what’s going on in the world today. KI meanwhile delves into all sorts of areas, both past and present – central to it all of course is the umbrella topic of epistemology, but we explore philosophies of anything from maths to art to history (yes we do the history of history) to of course my pet (by pet I mean I never want to hear the words ‘moral’ or ‘ethical’ again) topic morality/ethics. Every branch has like a dozen mini-branches and it gets very messy and complex and deep. The upside of this is that you’re always prepared to talk about any conversation topic thrown at you during parties. 

So should you take KI or GP? 
I took KI because I thought it would be interesting and it is – just that when it comes to the actual exam it’s very painful. It’s a good subject to take as a side hobby-type thing, but not as an A level examination unless you’re confident with your reasoning and argumentation skills.

Taking KI shouldn’t be done out of an interest in philosophy because KI is a lot more than philosophy. You should take KI if you enjoy arguing, independent thinking, and learning to look at things in different ways (let’s be honest – if you take KI you’ll never look at life the normal way again). Also take it if you’re not doing A Levels just for the sake of getting the grades, because KI is more of a holistic experience rather than to get an A. It develops your thinking and improves your critical appreciation of things by a vast amount. The skills I learnt with KI are invaluable. 

If you want a safe A, go with GP. The importance of a safe A in the Singaporean ‘everyone gets an A’ context cannot be underestimated. 

It all really depends on what sort of person you are – whether you enjoy studying, or you enjoy results. KI is ridiculously hard – there’s no doubt about that. And it doesn’t get enough recognition for all of its difficulty. But looking back at the journey I have very few regrets going on the road less taken.

P.S. if you need some KI help, my academic blog has some incoherent KI ramblings that might be of use 🙂

It’s All English To Me

Because of a series of circumstances (including but not limited to a) my over-eagerness to study in the United Kingdom and b) my desperate need to acquire money despite having nothing to spend it on) I have been spending my pre University days giving tuition to a host of colourful characters. The great thing about tuition is that you get to meet a lot of people you wouldn’t ordinarily have met – the downside is that you’ll have to teach things that you wouldn’t ordinarily have taught. Raised on a diet of thick academic history books and friends who have actually read Hemingway, teaching kids whose standards of English are shockingly low came as a bit of a rude awakening. 

One of my students is this little old Indian lady who took it upon herself to go to ITE and learn English. I think this is a very courageous decision and it’s certainly great to hear about someone who, though old, wants to continue learning. Unfortunately, the recent change in the English syllabus has done nothing to help her. Instead of the good old proper comprehension, you now have ridiculous things like ‘name three things that help the advertisement to achieve its purpose – font size, layout, colour of text etc.’ It’s probably done in the name of cultivating a sense of literature (because it’s quite obvious that the comprehension paper is now skewed towards literature) in the young, but I don’t believe that this is the right way to go about doing so.

Literature is great. It’s a really useful subject because it broadens your mind to a lot of different things and allows you to examine situations from different perspectives. After literature (and Knowledge and Inquiry) I never looked at anything the same way again; I’m always digging from hidden meanings and even in a normal book or movie I’m going ‘my god what symbolism’ or other things that make my parents give me strange looks involving raised eyebrows. But the fact of the matter is that English and Literature are vastly different subjects and each of them should be kept to their own arena. This is what is done in JC, with GP and Literature two completely different subjects. Literature requires a standard of English beyond what is regular and this is why only certain types of students choose to venture onto that dangerous path.

By blurring the line, the O level syllabus has made it even harder for students to improve. The simple fact of the matter is that a lot of students don’t have the requisite standard of English to pass a normal comprehension paper, let alone something Literature based. Going back to the little old lady, she doesn’t understand words like ‘weave’ and ‘images’.  She asked me to explain to her what ‘bits of sticks’ meant. How is someone like that going to be able to understand concepts like irony and tone and symbolism? And it’s not just her – another student is seventeen years old and can’t string together a grammatically-correct sentence. Still more children are struggling with the very fundamentals. By skipping these fundamentals completely and going on to a higher-level topic, we are coming dangerously close to leaving even more children in the lurch. The students I taught at SRJC were woefully underprepared for the rigour of the GP syllabus; making the English paper at O Levels even tougher (and demanding different things that GP does, to boot) does not solve the problem.

Another thing I don’t like about the syllabus is that there is no right answer, yet they persist on giving ‘right’ answers nevertheless. For a secondary school paper it’s important that there are proper answers. Secondary school I feel is where English is really drilled into you; the rules of grammar, of vocabulary, of writing a proper essay that will then make the transition into GP easier. The syllabus now is, for the lack of a better word, fluffy. The ‘name three things’ question is ridiculous – any number of things could help the advertisement achieve its purpose, and it all depends on you as a person which features stick out the most. And all of the questions are like that. Just go take a look at any given Section A paper nowadays. You’ll probably not get all of the questions right regardless of your prowess in English, which is stupid. A paper meant to test the standard of English is wrong when someone who has an excellent command of the language is able to fail.

Finally, you can’t expect teachers to set papers like this when they evidently have no training in the area. All the papers I’ve gone through with my students have mistakes in them, be it with grammar or with reasoning or with the actual answers. How can you expect students to improve in English when their teachers are making mistakes? Already my students have picked up some bad habits like problems with subject verb agreement and tense – habits that were found in the papers they were doing. It’s easy to demand a higher standard and much harder to implement it, I know; but all the same steps have to be taken to ensure that we don’t pass down the wrong values and ideas to students. 

I would personally much rather reinstate the old syllabus. At least that was a good drilling of English, covering actual comprehension; allowing students to understand the basic level before choosing to move on to something more complex. Despite the common perception that literature and English are similar (hence the term English Literature) it couldn’t be further from the truth. Pursuing this mix won’t help students to appreciate Literature more; it’ll simply lead to more students failing English and hating both subjects. Students who want to take literature will take it without having to be force-fed. If you want to increase the appreciation for literature, then do it properly – by fostering interest in the subject as a subject and not cross-breeding it with English. That’s something best left for mad scientists holed up in top secret labs to pursue.