Month: March 2006


  • One of the easiest things to do whenever you’re in a spot (of your own doing, of course) is to play victim. Or at least point the blame somewhere else. Genes, childhood abuse, poverty, deprivation, etc. And if not all the blame, at least, part of the blame.


    That’s what supermodel Naomi Campbell did. After being arrested for assaulting her assistant (Naomi took a leaf from Russell Crowe’s infamous phone fling), she put it down to ‘lingering resentment towards her father who left her as a child.’ I’m sure that’s true, but I also believe one has to take responsibility for one’s action anyhow.



    Campbell, who grew up in South London, said that her father abandoned the family before she was born and her mother was often gone because she worked long hours to send her daughter to prestigious schools to study singing, drama and ballet.


    “I’ve not always displayed my anger in the appropriate time,” she said in a 2000 TV interview in which she said she had attended a U.S. clinic to help manage her anger. “It’s a manifestation of a deeper issue, I think. And that, to me, I think is based on insecurity, self-esteem and loneliness.”


    [More]


    Her anger-management issue notwithstanding, I think fame perhaps has a way of amplifying insecurity and loneliness. Age catches up, looks fade, possessions lose their glitter, friends drift away, even family disappoints. On what then should a person build a life on?

  • Mother: Relax exam rules for autistic son

    [As if to underscore the perplexing state of education in the country, here's an email sent to Malaysiakini, dated 28 March].

    After failing to
    receive a reply from the Education Ministry, the mother of an autistic
    student has turned to the media to get the attention of the
    authorities.

    She made an appeal to Education Minister
    Hishamuddin Hussein to allow her son Yuri Azzari to sit for the PMR
    examination in stages over two years.

    Che An Abdul Ghani said the relaxation of the rule would enable her son to sit for four subjects in 2006 and the rest in 2007.

    She
    said Yuri Azzari suffered from autism, a condition characterised by
    abnormal mental activity, and could not take the whole examination at
    one sitting.

    The appeal was made after she consulted her son’s
    teacher in the special class at the Putrajaya Secondary School at
    Precinct 11 (1) and the views of a psychiatrist.

    “My son lacks focus, is hyperactive, and cannot focus on his studies at school or his revision at home,” she told Bernama.

    “This
    is not a question of postponement (in sitting the examination). This is
    a question of the boy’s inability to sit for the examination. I know he
    cannot do it even if he takes five years to study,” she said.

    Asked
    why she was making the request through the media, Che An said she had
    failed to get any result through other means including approaching the
    Special Education Department last January.

    She also did not receive a reply to the letter which she sent to the education minister’s office on March 19.

    Che
    An also asked the ministry to review its system on providing education
    to problematic children because the children are required to sit
    examinations together with normal children.

    According to the
    report, during the interview with his mother, Yuri, 16, who is
    physically normal, was engrossed in singing without heeding the
    presence of the reporter in his house.

  • It’s a pity that despite the stated intentions of our Education Ministry to promote ‘world-class’
    education, innovation and progress are not its best-known traits. For
    instance, homeschoolers in the country have resigned to any headway in
    discussing the merits of alternative education and seeking for
    accommodation in the present national system. In fact we have stopped
    pursuing dialogue. Compulsory education is the 800lb gorilla that is
    being fed a diet of race and politics, rendering it unresponsive to
    alternatives that challenge policies. So, how to talk? 


    Take
    the issue of facilities for children with special needs. While the
    government insists that children with special needs should be enrolled
    in conventional schools, very, very few schools have trained/qualified
    special needs teachers or facilities to be of any help. Some years ago,
    one mother I know went from meeting to meetings with the Minister
    himself seeking permission to enroll her autistic child in an
    international school, only to be turned down – this inspite of
    supporting medical reports and the fact that the international school
    (generally closed to locals by law) had the necessary resources her
    child needed.

    And
    to this day, parents intending to homeschool have been rejected for no
    reason but that it’s the law (how some parents resist official decree
    is another story for another time). Yet, homeschoolers constantly make
    the headlines, even here in Malaysia. The most recent being Yao-ban
    Chan (see March 11 post) whose family, by the way, is no longer
    resident in the country.

    Now we have math whiz Adi Putra, the seven-year old kid who fascinated everyone with his 12th
    grade mathematical ability. His parents dutifully sent him to a
    conventional school amidst great fanfare and pledges from the Education
    Ministry who promised support in cash and kind – you know, the usual
    platitudes. But he’s one sad unhappy kid.  

    On Friday, papers reported that Adi had been cutting classes because he was bored. To his parents’ consternation, Adi has been threatened with expulsion.

    The
    parents of the seven-year-old boy have received show-cause letters from
    his school, SK Jalan Matang Buluh in Bagan Serai, warning them that he
    could be expelled for cutting classes too often. 

     

    His
    mother Serihana Elias, a former teacher, said her son was reluctant to
    go to school because he was bored with the basic syllabus of reading,
    writing and counting (mengira)  laid down by the Education Ministry. 

     

    Adi
    Putra, who could read newspapers by the age of four, had told his
    mother that he would prefer studying at a school like Sekolah Islam
    Antarabangsa in Kuala Lumpur.

     

    What was the school thinking?

     

    Anyway, there’s good news for Adi finally. Education Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin said yesterday:
    “The ministry has organised some programmes for him but we are not
    forcing anyone to do it.  If his father wants him to change
    schools, I have no problems with that. Just send in the application and
    I will approve it.”       

     

    That’s
    commendable. It’s a concession that’s reluctantly made, apparently, if
    you read what Perak Education Department director Mohammed Zakaria Mohd
    Noor had to     say (Adi comes from Perak). The department director was reported to have said they would have “preferred Adi Putra to complete his national primary school curriculum so that he could become a well-rounded individual.”


    You know what they say about schools dumbing down on real education? It’s true, and it’s happening. Here.

  • Now if someone asks me if I believe in God, I shake my head like I couldn’t give a shit, but the truth is, I do. I just don’t know what to do about it…I’d always considered the military, but that movie Top Gun put me over the edge. Tom Cruise on that Nija, banging that girl. F–kin A. That was me. Sounds idiotic, and I’m savvy to that now; but walking out of the dark theatre into the mall parking lot, that blazing hot August sun screaming down, I felt that film move me like calling from God.


    (James Heartsock, the central character in Ethan Hawke’s novel, Ash Wednesday) 

  • The Muhammad caricature controversy drew a thoughtful editorial from Christianity Today (03/14/06) which I happen to agree with. Centuries earlier, Byzantine Christians were caught up in bloody sectarian violence over depiction of saints and prophets that the years between 762 and 775 were known as the “decade of blood.” Thousands then were exiled, tortured, or killed. Looking back at the mid-1500s, veneration of relics and the display of “graven images” again resulted in mayhem and destruction, so the editorial reminded readers.


     


    Back then it wasn’t the freedom of expression that was at issue. So what’s the correct response? When does freedom become offense?


     


    At the height of the caricature controversy, the European Evangelical Alliance issued a statement, saying, “We long for a society in which people think hard before expressing ideas that are bound to cause deep offense.”

    The advice echoes Paul’s instruction to the Corinthians: “Give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God, just as I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, that they may be saved.” Press freedom may be a universal human right, but Paul reminds us that while exercising a right might be “lawful,” it is not always “helpful.” Restraint demonstrates charity and hospitality—not appeasement.

    (Read the rest here)

     


    Today, the ongoing tit-for-tat destruction and killing that’s taking place in Nigeria by vengeful Christians, tells us that we can’t be pointing to the speck in another’s eye when a plank is in our own. Yet at the same time I am not of the opinion that the principle of charity is any less relevant. In fact, if we want to survive, civilisation as we know it needs to practise it more than ever.


     


    Link: Nigeria religious conflict

  • Melbourne University’s youngest-ever PhD graduate is a homeschooler

    Achievers
    who are homeschoolers are not unusual and scores make the headlines
    every year. But when Melbourne Uni reported that its youngest ever PHD
    grad was a homeschooler who was born in Malaysia ( his family lived in
    New Zealand since he was three and later in Australia when he was 16),
    lots of people here sat up and took notice.

    WHEN he was 10, while his peers swung
    from monkey bars and charged around with rugby balls, Yao-ban Chan sat year 12
    exams in statistics and calculus. He scored 91 and 90.

    It is such a mind-boggling
    accomplishment that it almost makes his latest achievement seem commonplace.

    At 21, today he becomes the
    youngest-ever PhD graduate at Melbourne
    University    .

    “I always liked maths, I always
    found it fun,” Mr Chan said with trademark understatement from his office
    in the university’s mathematics department yesterday. Mr Chan, who was born in Malaysia
    and raised in New Zealand,
    was largely home-schooled by his mother Peck-Woon, a microbiologist, and father
    George, a director with Heinz.

    (Read the rest here)

    According to the 2001 Newsletter of the New Zealand Mathematical Society,
    Yao-ban was also an accomplished pianist who
    studied piano performance (passed LTCL last year) and was a regular
    accompanist
    and singer with his church choir. At home, he palyed computer
    games and table tennis. He also read extensively and wrote fantasy
    stories and had s put up two origami exhibitions and conducted a
    demonstration class.

    Way to go Yao-ban!