Embarrassing Ads by Private Schools

It can be pretty annoying to see your letter box stuffed with ads you take no interest in. Who delivers these ads and why is it that nobody seems to have seen the delivery men? Once I happened to be awake at about 5 in the morning and I heard a motorcycle stopping just outside my gate. I looked out of my window and I saw a man stuffing ads into my letter box. He then moved to the other houses down the road. Like a thief in the night, he operates at this unearthly hour.

Except for KFC ads (and I'm a huge KFC fan), I usually throw away all the other ads without reading them. Almost exactly a year ago, I got an ad from a private school that went by the name of Stalford. It amused me a little because everyone knows anything that sounds like 'Stanford' is a good name for a private school. There's one that calls itself 'Stamford' and you can't fault the management because they'll tell you that they were thinking of Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore, and it didn't once occur to them that their name would sound a little like Stanford University. And Stalford? Come on, 'L' is two letters away from the 'N' of Stanford, so where's the similarity?

There were many errors in the ad and I took a pic of it and forgot all about it until just the other night as I was going through some of my old photos and I saw Stalford's ad again.

What's really funny is this bit about their English and GP teacher.

In that short writeup, there are 4 language errors which I've indicated in luminous red. And it's a writeup about Stalford's English and GP department! Evidently, Mdm Rubie's 'secret of constructing essays' remained an impenetrable secret to the advertisers of Stalford.

Out of curiosity, I looked up Stalford's website and this time, they have a section that talks about their 'star tutor' who is another English and GP teacher.

A year ago, they wrote about Mdm Rubie having 'developed her own pedagogy'. Not to be outdone, their current 'star tutor' is now said to have 'devised her authentic set of teaching pedagogy', no doubt to differentiate this kind of pedagogy from the kind that has nothing to do with teaching and education. And they really should not use the word 'authentic' if they don't know what it means.

I'm just wondering if next year they will have a new English language and General Paper teacher who will be reported as having 'discovered, developed and enhanced a proactive [I'm surprised they left out this gem of business-speak] and holistic educational academic teaching pedagogy'.