It's nice to know not all Professors are robotic maniacs

Below is an email from Prof Phoon to the graduating class of 2008:

Hi Moses and Junxing,

Thank you very much for the gracious invitation and for allowing me to share your celebration. Please feel free to share my email with your cohort.

I do know that all of you have worked hard throughout your stay in NUS. There are probably lots of inconsolable disappointments along the way. However, I am genuinely proud of your efforts and your achievements.

I am not an expert in pedagogy. But I would like to think that you are worth more than grades and a university degree. If we define education in the broadest sense of cultivating a decent person, all of you have done marvelously well! The girls have grown into fine ladies and the boys have grown into self-assured men - this is your best gift to your parents and teachers who have tirelessly nurtured you to this present point of your life.

Dropping off the thin veneer of swankier buildings and juiced-up facilities, education in its most elemental form essentially reduces to the mutual love and respect between the teacher and his/her students and the fellowship between students. Somewhere along the road to wealth and success, we seem to have lost a little of what really counts …

There are certainly more challenges ahead in our highly competitive globalized world for all of you, but one should never lose heart. As TS Eliot most famously put it in Four Quartets, “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

So ... after four long hard years in NUS, I am here to bid a fond personal farewell to all of you. In your headlong pursuit of success in our rather material oriented environment, I would like to offer you one last quote by Nietzsche:

"And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh."

My very best wishes to the graduating class of 2008!

Cheers,
KK

Althou i have never taken his module before, the rest were telling me he is a very nice prof... and he was the one who treated us drinks!!