Elizabeth The Queen ...Sally Bedell Smith

Queen Elizaabeth 2 is 86 this year. The last chapter of the book was on the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. The queen is probably one of the most enigmatic women today. Having been the constant in British life for the last 60 years as the monarch of one of the oldest monarchy in the world today is no mean feat. And at her age, it's really amazing to watch her still.

As a young kid, she was one of the women I admired a lot, along with Margaret Thatcher. I thought she looked regal. She still does. A queen in modern times! It's the stuff that makes fairy tales come alive. I think all of us could always do with the little magic in life. And somehow, the life of Queen Elizabeth allows that little magic to nestle in our imagination. When Prince Charles married Diana, it was another magical moment for my generation. But after that, the magic dissipated bit by bit. We learned that the Royals are humans too.

Book 6 and there is still this little magic in reading this book. It's still magical to watch her, the Queen of England.

My Plant Filter

This is our very own biological filter for our pond. I got tired of bi-weekly cleaning that I had to do with the conventional filter more than a year ago. Cleaning fish muck is a very messy affair. So, we looked around and managed to find a pot with a spout and a fibreglass container. We threw in a few plants which we felt could grow well in water. Suffice to say, the filter has worked very well. The time gap for the last round of trimming was something like 9 months. For 9 whole months I did not have to touch fish muck. 8) And the above pic is how the roots grew to the shape of the box when Other Half and Son did some sprucing. In time, if they didn't trim them, the box will probably crack as how the terracotta pot we used to contain the green keladi plant in the box has cracked from the bottom.

This time though, we left the plants be for longer. By the time we took this out, the roots were so dense that filtering was happening only at the top layer. When we cut into the roots, much of what is in the middle had rotted. While it may look nice on the outside, there were actually a lot of rotting stuff beyond what the eye can see.

Life is kinda like the plants in the box. Without outside influence or interference, we grow... and grow too... but because we do not trim our excesses such as bad habits or have no one to tell us that we aren't doing the right things, we rot from inside. Eventually we implode. Our country too is at that crossroad now.... if we don't wake up and start trimming, one day, our container will crack. The signs of rot are all there... another MAS bailout, NFC scandal, the goon-ish behaviour of ceramah crashers, the outrageous wealth of our politicians' chilldren, Proton losses, the plight of the Kenyahs, the Baram dam. There is a long list... and they are all signs that the rot has set in. Boxed as the roots were, without trimming; that's how it's like in many institutions too, be it schools, churches, mosques, temples, companies....the rot sets in if we do not trim to allow regrowth, replacement, rejuvenation....

As for my natural filter box, Other Half recently put some water cress to grow. I hope they will grow well. Vegetables are so expensive these days, not forgetting coated with pesticides too.

Sick Schools?

I think many will go into denial mode and say that everything is good with our schools. Yet if one digs around a bit, you'll see some admissions that things are not really going well, though not that sort that has sent us onto a road of real reform. Read here for a better grasp of where we really stand when compared to other countries for characteristics of first world talent base. We are lagging and getting left behind.

Statistics show us one thing but those of us down in the trenches experience it daily. So what ails our education system.... A scene from a figment of my imagination.

A teacher is teaching in class. At a glance, one student walks out of the class and back in again for no apparent reason. The teacher continues rambling, ignoring the boy. Another stands up from his chair and walks to his friend's place. He takes something and goes back to his class. A crescendo of hootings suddenly rises. Hands hang out of the classroom. One hand is seen pushing and fiddling with the plastic bag that lines the rubbish bin which is directly outside the classroom. Suddenly 2 students run down the corridor, one chasing the other, creating a ruckus. At about the same time, the Students' Affairs Senior Assistant walks down the stairs. He hears the commotion. He pays a quick glance and he scurries down the stairs. Meanwhile the cacophony of noises continue, the sort that disrupts more than anything. Teacher, Senior Assistant, both choose to ignore.

In another class, 2 girls and 3 boys go missing from their class. The teacher writes down their names in the Discipline Book. Next lesson, teacher questions the missing students. Students tells teacher outright that they were in the library, knowing well that they had skipped their class on purpose. Their misbehavior is noted.... No action taken. In the assembly students are told that these are merely misdemeanors, nothing major. In the meantime, announcements can be heard off and on, reminding teachers that they have relief duties, interspersed with announcements admonishing students to enter their classes. Welcome to the school of our future - where the administrators sit in the office and with a mike barks out directions! The voice booms everywhere. Presence via voice. Welcome into the school of work smart....

Discipline is a problem these days. We promote Sekolah Penyayang cos it projects the right image. I listened with great incredulity one day when I was told that some teachers resort to cash incentive so that students don't skip school. This was told with some pride. There are still many teachers who genuinely want to make a difference, but the system works against them in a whole host of ways. Promotions, racism, poor leadership, a system of patronage.... You name it, a school like other institutions have begun to reflect the bigger picture of cronyism and patronage.

One day I bumped into a student who came in looking for the Biasiswa (Scholarship) teacher. He is given a stipend in the form of such scholarship! This is a student with no academic achievement to show, no good conduct.... and he is given a monthly stipend to come to school. Recently a colleague told me about this Chinese boy who has been abandoned by his parents. No scholarship for him. Such scholarships which come under the purview of the Federal and State Governments are hard to come by for non-Bumi students by the way. For no performance, a student gets an incentive. For being of certain race, you get preferential treatment. It's the same with the 1Malaysia Netbooks and so many other things. It's actually quite sickening to see such practices, which is sheer hypocrisy.

In one generation we have seen South Korea becoming the 13th largest economy in the world. They were worse off than Malaysia when we gained independence. So what happened? We pale in comparison today. They have brands like Samsung, Hyundai which have become quality products in their own rights. Samsung is head to head with Apple in smart phones and tablets. Our Proton is still trying to make a name, without much success. The company made a loss this year. Take away Government protection and it will close shop in a couple of years. Let me not even start with MAS which is bleeding the taxpayers' money, yet again. Another 2.5 billion ringgit! Gosh! How come Air Asia can make money? Take a look at Singapore. Sabah and Sarawak could have had it better had they gone Singapore's way, perhaps. We kicked Singapore out of the Federation thinking that they would come crawling back to us because they have no natural resources. Obviously we forgot that they could develop their human resources, which they have done with great success. When our oil runs dry, I think our tears will begin to flow.

And what did we do? We grew a bunch of politicians who divided us first by race, then seal the segregation with religion and stoke it with fear of our own shadows. Then for decades, in the name of race and religion began a systematic 'purge', in the process creating our very own apartheid system, lending it credence by stating how oppressed the Bumis were, creating a siege mentality for namely the Malays. Juvenile behaviour. But a group of even more authentic Bumis, the Orang Asli was conveniently left out. It is with this backdrop that the education system which used to be one of the best in this part of the world began spiraling ways downward. Now we have facilities but not that kind of knowledge workers to compliment them. It's probably just a matter of time before we begin to implode from within. The kind of people we have running the schools today... there is much left to be desired. There is a lot of talk going on. Sometimes you even see real effort.... but effort without talent or the knowledge.... you can only go that far before you stonewall.

The EPU has seen the need to improve our education system. They have a released a report on actions to be adopted. The thing is can we move on. Where education is concerned, teacher quality is one of the first that needs addressing. The thing is many of these teachers grew up at a time where they have been told that they are good when there is much room for improvement. A simple illustration. For English, I often come across teachers who speak bad English, i.e. not able to use the correct grammar yet think they are good. And that's where another problem shows. Years of being told that they are good when they are not have made them lousy lifelong learners. And so we have many half baked English teachers who think they are good teaching many wrong things to the students.... a typical case of the Malay idiom where the mother crab who cannot walk straight trying to teach her offsprings to walk straight. I often cringe at the language that comes out from their mouths. And sometimes when I take peeks into their students' work, wrong answers are marked wrongly. Double jeopardy for the learners!

So is our education system sick? There might be some who will say we are doing great. But I think it's sad to see the state of our education. It's even sadder to see most of our secondary students not on par with their peers from Korea or Singapore. It's not that we lack talent. It's just that we lack leaders. And we the people are foolish enough to allow ourselves to be played out againt each other and wake up to our lack of things.

 

Kill Shot ...by Vince Flynn

The reading bug hasn't quite left yet. This is another book that sits on the New York Bestseller's List. Into the world of spies, of men turned into killing machines, treachery and loyalty in ine breath and patriotism it brought me. It's a book filled with action, to the very end.

The main character, Mitch Rapp is trained to kill with extreme efficiency. And he is very good at what he does, so good that the CIA lets him operate on his own, without a supporting team, which is supposed to be against protocol anf caused quite a few envious undercurrents. He is sent out into the field and is ruthlessly efficient at what he does. He has a list of scumbags which he is supposed to delete from life. A trail of bodies is left all over Europe, terrorists whose deaths would not really be missed, striking fear in those on the other side.

In a supposedly routine mission in France, something goes wrong. Unexpected assassins showed up at his kill zone and 9 bodies are left behind, one of them, his target - the Libyan Oil Minister which he disposed. Mitch barely gets away with is life. He is shot at the shoulder. And so began his quest to find out the people who put the price on his head.

The novel is a page turner all the way to the end. The plot is simple enough to follow. One can more or less tell the good guys from bad. There is a little love interest in the midst as well. Unknown too him, by being too good at what he does is also an occupational hazard. The narcissistic CIA guy behind his problem is also a traitor. Even within a same spy agency, its heads have different ideas about doing business and they can be corrupted, by money as well as power. The web of entanglement goes high up into the corridors of 2 other foreign spy agencies.

Good triumph in the end, however, after more lives were laid to waste. Good guys live and bad guys die. Funny too how such books can make one root for killers. I guess deep down in most of us, we basically don't really mind the bad guys being nicked from the face for this world. Managed to squeak this in at number 6 for the year before the month comes to an end.

Also, I read up a little bit more on the author and novel after I finished the book. Yay! There are other Mitch Rapp novels. So if I want to get a dose of this kind of action, there are a few more books like this out there.

 

And the Idiot is....?

More than 20 years ago, I did my teaching practical in a well-known school in Seremban, SMK Chan Wa. I only attended one meeting during my teaching practical and the meeting lasted only 15 minutes. I was told by the teachers that's how long their meetings usually lasted. Apparently, the Principal felt that short briefings would suffice. He must have felt his teachers were intelligent enough and also trusted them. Short meetings are a rarity these days. We have such phrases... pegang mike, syok sendiri.

These days I think, we have way too many meetings and long ones too. And they are an insult to our intelligence. Matters which can be addressed in minutes take hours. A lot of immaterial ramblings take place. Just do some simple Math and the hours which are wasted are quite staggering. Add that to the added unquantifiable factors such as stress, physical tiredness, frustrations, indignance, etc, etc... we would have lost out not only the hours but a lot of goodwill.

Next the teachers' timetables. In the old days, the Senior Assistant 1 would be the one responsible in arranging the timetable. These days many pass that responsibility to an IT literate teacher. After more than 10 years of extensive IT usage in schools, we still have many unteachable administrators who claim to be IT incapacitated but competent enough to FaceBook or use a smart phone. I think if they feel they are dinosaurs in this age of computers, they should be made extinct in admin. As a result of their unteachability, timetables these days also imply our idiocy. In some schools, teachers teach non-stop for 2 1/2 hours. Teaching is not like any office job where you can at least go on. Productivity falls over time without breaks. Usually, after 80 minutes one would be bushed and would require a breather... So to be in classes for such a long stretch would burn a teacher...

Computer softwares do the timetable. With such softwares it's only a matter of keying in the data and timetables would be generated. Of course, there are certain parameters which the operator should key in as well. There seems to be a lot of feigned or real ignorance in this process, though. I always believe that computers can't be idiots. It is whatever that is churned out that reflects the idiocy of the operator.

Recently, I was given a timetable with 4 periods in one stretch! Earlier, a friend had complained on her FB her 2 hour plus marathon classes for a few days a week. In my case, after some teachers complained it was rectified the next day. An oversight, yet again a reflection of the apathy and also of abuse in blocking specific blocks of time for the operators of the software. It is often not uncommon to find the timetable teacher and those close to him with very agreeable timetables.

To ensure that the timetables generated are good, the final process would involve one of the administrators checking it. The fact that such timetables where 2 or 3 classes are stuck together like Siamese twins is also an indicator that many of our administrators are inept or just plain lazy. I think it is safe to assume that signatures are penned without so much of a glance at the timetables. Frustration levels build up, teachers get worn out.... we have very few leaders who will go out into the trenches with us these days.

Distribution of classes should also be 'fair'. But what constitutes fair? When I was a student, good classes usually get the 'good' teachers. Face it, there are good apples and bad apples. These days, good and bad apples are all considered good apples. Anyway, the system is rife with abuses now. Picture the monkey tree... any monkey above will continue to give shit to the monkeys below. The crap unloading is basically like a train out of control these days... made worse by our very own apartheid-like policies. Double standards can never be good for a society in the long run. And the rot in our education system is a result of such double standards.

Last year was a year of 1Malaysia Netbook. Free computers for those with household income of less thn 3K. There were mutterings among students. Apparently teachers' children in my work place were also given. And one of those teachers had recently been given a promotion too. I wonder if indeed it's true her kid had received the Netbook, does it mean that somebody falsified information when filling in the forms? Cos it is unlikely that her household income is less than the stipulated minimum. And the fact that the admin close their eyes to it. For not having integrity, you get rewarded too! How's that?

My generation is a generation grown up on "Gua tolong lu, lu tolong gua.' And if anyone dares confront them, they'd do a 'Jessie Ooi aka Ms Tow Truck' on you and throw you a how-dare-you and then go on a rant about their rights and privileges which they claim is enshrined in the Constitution.... which if true means that we have a Constitution that promotes keadilan with caveats.... only if it suits them. This is what happens when we put people with questionable level of integrity and and a check and balance mechanism that is skewed. One only has to look at what one political party goons behave to see how the politicians in power reek everything that is questionable.

Basically, ours is a system that has been built on skewed moral values coated by this veneer of religion.... to the point that the judicial dares not cite a shoe throwing imam for contempt. LOL! It was only made public after uproars in the media that the judicial lodged a police report over the incident. But I am sure the are juicy stories behind this lack of action.... could be a case of conscience being pricked since this imam is one frustrated fler for some reasons....

So, who are the idiots? Looks like it's us who choose to remain silent or continue to stand by and watch it all unfold....

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks ...by Rebecca Skloot

Now this is one interesting book! And it's non-fiction. The oldest human cell line and immortality for the unsuspecting woman whose cells have lived on way after her mortal body has returned to the earth. A cell line is basically a line created from one set of cells. They grow it in the labs. Before this particulr cell line it had not been possible to culture human cells in the lab.

I learned a lot reading this one. Tremendous fun too. HeLa cells made it possible to propagate the polio virus, which made the development of its vaccine possible. Like many in my generation, I got my polio shots. Now I learn that I should be grateful to her cell line. It also was responsible for the discovery of the role telomerase in the degradation of cells and the discovery of HPV vaccines. Many have won Nobel Prizes and other research awards on account of this cell line. But it's prevalence and virility have also caused contamination of cultures running up millions in losses.

And where did the cells come from? From Henrietta Lacks, died at 31, mother of 5, in Baltimore, Maryland, against the the backdrop of racial America. She was black, obviously. Before she died of cervical cancer, doctors At John Hopkins managed to get a sample of her cancer cells. It's also a story of human ingenuity too, where pioneers like Dr. George Gey built their own labs, as in literally with their own hands and spent their own money building them. Hers were the first human cells which could grow in cultures - it achieved immortality in the labs. So Henrietta's renegade cells lived on even long after those of her generation with normal cells expired. This is an interesting site about her and her famous cell line.

There was one chapter in the book where Rebecca (the author) brought Deborah and Zakariyya (Henrietta's children who were still babies when she died) to John Hopkins to see their mother's cells. When Dr. Christoph Lengauer invited them to look at the cells under the microscope, Zakariyya asked this question, "If those our mother's cells," he said, "how come they ain't black even though she was black?" And the doctor replied that cells don't have colour under the microscope. They're clear till we put color on them with a dye.

That's what racism is all about. We colour people with our colours. Except that in life, those colours are represented by everything created in our minds. But under the different colour skin that each of us have are the same things and those things will all meet the same end once the telomerase lines run out.

The writer brings us into and through the lives of Henrietta's family. She also brings the reader into a world where human tissues, antibodies, actually just about everything related to us has price tags - opportunities translated to not just cures but also dollars and cents. And it's also a book which touches, even though subtly, that the poor, the underprivileged usually turns to faith because there is nothing else they can turn to. It also highlights the ignorant practices - marriage within the same family and the promiscuity of that generation. Henrietta married her first cousin and he was a womanizer who brought back syphilis and gonorrhea to her. Her children have hearing problems and one was committed to an asylum where she died.

Reading about this makes biology come to life. And it's a pity that such books will not make it to the reading list of many of our children because of the lack of their English. Such books inspire and spark imaginations. If it's firing up the young minds to take up the Sciences, then we should put books such as this on the must read book list for them, not some books that require little or no imagination like the ones you find in the literature list in our secondary schools now.

Definitely a good read. I was glued. Finished it in one and a half day... number 5 for the year! Actually, reading is about the only thing that I can do when I have to sit with my gal while she does her school work... school tests are coming soon, hence the reading frenzy too. 8) Cos that's all I can do in between explanations...

 

Iceberg ...by Clive Cussler

A novel can help us de-stress. Pick up a book where the good guys win in the end will put you in a better mood. And that's what I did. In the Dirk Pitt series, you have a all-round hero; suave, intelligent, brave, quick and seemingly invincible.

A yacht is spotted frozen on an iceberg and that sends Dirk onto another swashbuckling adventure, and there was one scene where he actually went swashbuckling; with dressed up pirates and their cutlasses. From an iceberg in the frigid Atlantic north to an island of geysers and aurora borealis, Iceland and even Disneyland, the good guys went on a chase to right a wrong. This novel brings us into a world of conspiracy and manouverings; where the wealthy think they own the world. They justify their ruthlessness by making the excuse that it's a necessary sacrifice for the greater good of mankind. Come to think of it, this actually is what we see and experience in real life too. Everything can be turned into an excuse.

Reading is fun cos the author gets to dictate the story line and you get to choose what type of story you want to read. Anyway, in this kind of novel, everything that is birthed in evil, the sins of the past eventually catches up. Good guys triumph in the end. Now wouldn't it be nice to see our cows unscandalised, our health taken care properly and how environment freed from the scourge of rare earth byproducts? Or that the denuded forests become forests again so that her natives can have their homes restored, or the so many leakages plugged so that our cost of living does not keep spiraling upwards. If only life is as simple to dictate like a novel.... But this is the real world. In the real world, bad guys do get away. They also become larger than life... on this earth. They wield influence with impunity. They grab, take, plunder, seize and do anything they fancy because they can, and they know it. Empires rise... and they fall. One way or the other, the fall usually has something to do with greed.

Anyway, the book is a good way to escape momentarily into a world good triumph over evil in the end, where the good rises from a great deal of bruising to deal the final blow to an evil plot. The world is safe once more. 8) The hero is magnanimous in the end. Good guy with a great heart. And oh ya! He gets to go back into the arms a great gal too. LOL! Book 4 but though the heart was momentarily lifted, the eyes took a 'beating' from staring too long at the screen. Still, I'd say this is an enjoyable read...