Shame.

Today, I attended a student dialogue session with the chairperson of Youth Olympic Games in one of NIE's LTs. It was meant to start at 5p.m. and I was 45 minutes early; Ludwig's lecture ended early and it was just a 1-minute walk across the triangle parade. As students were filling up the seats, I saw that some students were handed slips of papers by persons-in-charge, etc. There were pre-set questions on these little slips of paper that these students were to ask when the organizing big shots opened the floor for questions after they're done with their addresses, for Just-In-Case situations where no one will actually ask any question (of course, that's the worst case scenario, but knowing the nonchalance of our local students, I guess there's a need for that).

When the floor was eventually opened for questions, I realized that not all the students who raised them were the ones holding onto those slips. What really surprised me back there was that, there were people who were genuinely interested about YOG, people who were not given those pre-questions, and people who were not there only because their clubs made it compulsory for them to attend the session.

I felt that it was a shame that people who did not really want to be there (a.k.a. those delegated to ask the generic pre-thought-questions) had to take up bulk of the time of the Q&A portion that was set aside, when so many others came up with their own questions that were really interesting.