You gotta read it. Can this be true?

NEW YORK – Students are using a new ring tone to receive messages in class,
and many teachers can’t even hear the ring. Some students are downloading a ring tone off the Internet that is too
high-pitched to be heard by most adults. With it, high schoolers can receive
text message alerts on their cell phones without the teacher knowing.

As people age, many develop what’s known as aging ear, a loss of the ability
to hear higher-frequency sounds.

The ring tone is a spin-off of technology that was originally meant to repel
teenagers, not help them. A Welsh security company developed the tone to help
shopkeepers disperse young people loitering in front of their stores while
leaving adults unaffected. The company called their product the “Mosquito.”

Donna Lewis, a teacher in Manhattan, says her colleague played the ring for a
classroom of first-graders, and all of them could hear it, while the adults
couldn’t hear anything.

I
just want to say that I am one of those guys who just can’t stand ring
tones. It irritates the heck out of me and more so when they go off during
a church or a business meeting. I understand the thrill of a
customised ring tone or maybe a few bars of a favourite song, but 
isn’t it getting out of hand?

I  attended a funeral for my aunt a few years ago and the pastor
who was presiding at the grave site didn’t switch his mobile off. It
went off once, he cooly fished it out of his pocket, switched it
off,  apologised and continued. A couple of minutes later, it rang
again, and without batting an eyelid switched it off and continued. Not
a word of apology. 5 minutes later it went off for the 3rd time! He
spoke into the phone while we all stood around the casket all agape,
than continued without a thought. Someone’s got to give the man a prize.

Then I had to come across this. This too, takes the cake – Nokia 8801
features an orchestral ringtone composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto!

The aural accompaniment of the Nokia 8801 is equally inspired. 
Award-winning composer and musician Ryuichi Sakamoto was commissioned
to compose the ringtones and alerts. Throughout his distinguished
career, Sakamoto has crossed musical and technological boundaries,
experimenting with different musical styles and making a name for
himself in popular, orchestral and film music.

What
can I say? As long as it doesn’t interrupt meetings, movie screenings,
church services, funerals, weddings, etc I’ll even call it art.

It was a letter to the editor that did it.

I had picked up this magazine headlined
GOING TO SCHOOL set below a sepia tinted photo of a Jinjang dump yard. Across
the top, its nameplate spelled out phases.
Its lower case type seemed a few sizes too small I thought, as if embarrassed
by its own appearance. I was intrigued.

Inside, an editorial by Biscuit-Eating Guy
proclaimed it was the “new,
transmogrified and completely refurbished issue of Phases magazine.” I did
not know much about its previous incarnation, but the new phases (vol.5 no.1) certainly looked cool. There were barely
disguised gripes against schools, compelling interviews, and rather angsty
scribbling (the kind that passes for creative writing) that invariably ended on
a positive note. Hmm. Besides, a lot of the writers were between 14 and 21.
Nice, a magazine for teens, written mainly by teens. I was sold.

A brief mention about homeschool caught my
eye; I wrote a letter to the editor (which led to my contributing an article on
entertainment a couple of issues later). Ends up, I’m making amends by hosting
a dinner for the conspirators Alvin, Huey Fern, and Pang. Six years later I’m
still paying.

You see, there’s nothing quite like phases
in Malaysia.  The magazine hoped to
encourage a passion for the written word, develop the ‘habit of art’ and a
facility to articulate stories and ideas that reflect the drama of our
God-haunted world. Its dream was to turn out thinking young writers who could
change words into salt and light. Yet like Flannery O’Connor, writing
competence was not all we were after. As she put it, competence alone is
deadly. “What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this
from a writing class,” she said. Which explains why from the beginning part
of the plan was to build a community of like-minded teens who would help one
another find his or her personal vision.

And for a while they came, teens caught in
an awkward limbo between idealism and cynicism, young writers in search of
light, who end up finding a voice of their own along the way. We had good fun,
great writing, and authentic community – online and off.

Several issues later phases had,
well, phased (again). Should that surprise when a magazine is named after
cycles of change and passages of time? 
But don’t write us off because we think there’s life in phases
yet. As the moon waxes and wanes, so dreams do emerge unscathed from the
shadows.

Enter PHASES ONLINE.

So here we are in the wild woolly web, and
bye-bye to phases the dead tree edition. We think being online is simply
another step forward in realising our vision. It’s as much a spiritual quest as
it’s a literary one, inspired by a God who was himself the Word made flesh.

Somewhere out there is a young person with
words blazing like fire in the bones, that he or she cannot hold in. Welcome to
phases online. You’re just the sort of person we’d love to hear from.

Here’s a letter that I found on Malaysiakini. Can anyone verify this?
——————————————————————–
School textbooks advocating murder

Very Concerned Mother

May 25, 06 4:20pm

I wonder if the
present government is aware that violence and murder is being preached
through its own curricula and textbooks. This is not an exaggeration. I
urge the government to seriously consider if its curriculum for Islamic
Education is what it wants to feed young minds.

I was shocked
and disturbed to find out that the secondary school syllabus for
Islamic Education (Pendidikan Islam) includes learning how to deal with
apostates and that one of the prescriptions is to kill them off.

In
many widely-used Pendidikan Islam workbooks (which base their texts on
the Ministry of Education’s syllabus), imposing a death sentence on
apostates is offered as a religious duty. Allow me to extract some of
what is written (and the original Malay version for readers to check on
context and accuracy).

For example, under the heading ‘Ways of Dealing with Apostates’ (Cara menangani orang murtad), the following precepts are given:

1. Advise and persuade the offender to repent and return to Islam
   (menasihati dan memintanya supaya bertaubat dan kembali kepada Islam)

2. To impose a death sentence (melaksanakan hukuman bunuh)

The text also has a heading which reads: ‘The death sentence against
an apostate who refuses to repent and return to Islam has several
virtues’. (Hukuman bunuh terhadap orang murtad yang tidak mahu kembali
kepada ajaran Islam mempunyai beberapa hikmah).

Among which are:

1. To show to others at large that Islam is not a religion to be
   mocked at will (menunjukkan kepada orang ramai bahawa Islam bukanlah
   agama yang boleh dipersenda dengan sewenang-wenangnya).

2. So that no one will dare to denigrate the Islamic religion (supaya tidak ada orang yang berani memburuk-burukkan agama Islam).

I am not sure now whether the hudud laws passed in Kelantan and
Terengganu are now being activated. But for the rest of Malaysia,
punishing someone labeled apostate is nothing but a grave act!

We
live in a society where everything mouthed by leaders and the
authorities (textbooks included) are accepted as the gospel truth. How
can we be sure that children fed the above commands will not one day
act to fulfill their jihad?

Sadly, it is going to be of the
brutal kind and we shall trace the answers behind such a tragedy to our
very own government-endorsed textbooks.

Kenny Drew Jr (All About Jazz) rants about the decline of black
music into negativity and stupidity. But it’s an abyss filled with greenbacks….

Recently, I’ve been listening to a lot of my
favorite music from that time, and to be honest, I am disgusted and sickened at
how far our music has declined in the quality of the music and its message. How
the hell did we get from Motown to Death Row; from Earth Wind & Fire to
Ludacris; from Luther Vandross to 50Cent?

I remember a time in our music when songs
had great melodies and chord changes, you actually had to be able to sing or
play an instument to become a musician, and Michael Jackson was black! It’s a
sad commentary on our culture and society when the biggest thing in popular
music is an ex-crack dealer whose claim to fame is being shot nine times, and
one of the greatest entertainers in the world was on trial for child
molestation. If that’s not a sign of the coming Apocalypse, I don’t know what
is! And if 50Cent was really shot nine times, why couldn’t one of those bullets
have hit a vital organ? Who the f***  was shooting at him: Stevie Wonder? And as
far as all these black rappers getting shot, how about a little equal
opportunity violence here? Can’t somebody pop a cap in Eminem’s white ass? [Read the rest here]

About Kenney Drew Jr

C.S. Lewis was an unhappy
victim of public schools and he said so in his autobiography Surprised By Joy.

“If the parents in each
generation always or often knew what really goes on at their sons’ schools, the
history of education would be very different.”

The sad truth is, most
parents are happy to leave education to schools because of one or two reasons;
(1) Both mom and dad are working professionals with little time to pay
attention to junior’s schooling, and (2) both parents believe that educating
children are beyond their competence anyway. Leave it to the experts, they say.
We all have ideals, not least regarding the kind of schools and education we
think any decent child deserves, or what any government is obliged to offer.
But wishful thinking is a sheer waste of energy is it not?

You can see I am a pessimist
by inclination. Unlike my friend – let’s call him Bob – who thinks one can’t
possibly maintain sanity in Malaysia without a modicum of hopeful thinking. It’s easy to
walk away, he says, but you can still make a difference if you work at it, try
hard enough, push the envelope. I have had dreams too, but present realities
have all but convinced me that one ought to work towards change but I’ll be
working harder on alternatives. It’s one of the primary reasons I
homeschool.

A year later, the family (or rather, all who could make it) gathered in Cheras Cemetary around the newly installed headstone at Dad’s final resting place. It’s a simple design, with nothing elaborate, but Mom initially felt was too ‘simple.’

On that hot Sunday afternoon Mom asked for Psalm 139 to be read and Lai Lin did so in halting mandarin.

My frame was not hidden from you

when I was made in the secret place.

When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,

your eyes saw my unformed body.

All the days ordained for me

were written in your book

before one of them came to be.

How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!

How vast is the sum of them! 

[Ps 139:15-17]

Over 50 years of a shared life – one doesn’t just close the chapter and continue as if everything’s back to normal. Mom is still working out her loss, and though her grief was somewhat bravely contained, the dam finally broke.

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.

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?

[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.

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.