To Be a Woman...

... you're up against more. Social norms, mores, laws and yourself....

To be a woman in Malaysia... baby dumping is to be classified as murder. Guess who are the more likely 'murderers'? Yup! The women.

Mr. Bung got hauled to court for marrying a second wife, the lower court sentenced him, he appealed. Finally he only paid a meagre RM1000 fine. A woman was caught for beer drinking, she gets caned. Women get this and that law shoved at them... Why?? Cos Mr. Bung has responsibilities, so said the judge..

“As this is a first offence and the appellant has a great responsibility to the family and society, I believe that a prison sentence will affect his responsibilities to the family. Also suffering by the family can lead to problems.

“In addition, the reputation and image of appellant as a member of parliament will be viewed negatively by society if the prison sentence imposed,” he said.

I was in a shop one day. In walked a lady garbed in a burqa-like outfit. Suddenly she pushed her mobile to the shop assistant and said that her husband wanted to talk. Turned out, the husband is a doctor. And I was thinking, the wife had every inch of her (except her eyes) covered up so that other men cannot see her. Yet everyday, as a doctor, he probably sees his patients 'exposed'.... unless he's one of those pencil docs. Kinda unbalanced. Are women are merely objects to be owned like a car? A car is owned by one, cared by the owner and when you are done with it, you change it for a new one....

Girls, women... we get giddy headed way too fast. Not too long ago, a woman and her two kids got splashed with acid. Husband/Dad was responsible. The weaker sex is easier to bully and has a softer heart. I bet she will accept him if he comes crawling back with 'soft' words.

Household chores... who sees to most of the chores if there is no maid? The wo-man! Leave it to the man and they'll say no need to do unless it's dirty. Laundry??? I don't know... maybe till the last clean clothes is out of the cupboard. So, do women really get a better deal in a marriage these days? Stay at home and take care of the family - no own money. Go out and get a job - got money but more work and no time for self.

I've got colleagues who get up at 2-3 a.m. in the morning to cook during fasting month. Then they come to school to work. I seldom hear of my male colleagues doing that. Two jobs... the WO in front is just an added burden; they carry extra burden in life.

So, what while Mr. Bung, Mr. Rahim, Mr. Chua and countless Mr.(s) get off for their promiscuities, the wo-man continues to bear the brunt of the laws made lopsided by our gender-biased lawmakers. Not just that, Mr. Rahim has gone on the record to say that he's out to expose an immoral person. A (black) pot calling the kettle black? There was a story about him and a 15-year old girl back in 1994 and Lim Guan Eng went to jail for speaking up about that... Mr. Pot and Mr. Kettle.... To be a woman???? It ain't no bed of roses... anyway, roses are full of thorns to begin with.

But don't get me wrong... life as a woman in Malaysia is better than in Middle East of many African countries. Women here still have the freedom to choose, though a perverted group of religious men seems to be doing their utmost best to throw their holy edicts to curtail and even restrict the women. They seem to think that the women are the root cause to many of their sins... while most of the time this group of people gets told off, I do see some women having less of a say in what they can or want to do with their lives. It's still a very sexist world that we're living in. Ah yes! Our Mr. Bung recently says this of women drivers...

“When you honk at them, they get agitated with some even showing hand gestures to other drivers,” he said in Parliament on Monday.

Showing hand gestures? More men or women do that, I wonder? Goes to show how easily duped we the rakyat are, cos we can elect reps like him who doesn't seem to think much with their heads... I guess too that's what stories of bulls and boorish pea-brained buffoons are made up of too. And we get charmed by such characters.... guess our brains must be even smaller than peas then.

Flood???

It's end of March! And we're actually entertaining worries of flood. In my years here, never have we thought of flood at this time of the year or experienced one! And hope not to. Flood was always a year end issue, a problem which some of us who live in the lower lying areas have to reckon with.

But lately, the weather has gone all unpredictable. We are reading of flood in Southern Thailand, now... during this supposedly dry season. It's normal to expect some rain during the Qing Ming (All Souls' Day) Jie. But to have torrential rains is something totally unnerving, so soon after the last flood, barely 5 months ago.

The phobia is there. News tend to take on a life of their own and become bigger. News of more places flooded, even though they are in the low lying areas send us into worry mode.

It's been raining for 2 consecutive days. We had almost 80mm of rain just yesterday, non-stop raining. Today, there was a welcomed break in the afternoon. News has it that 21 schools were closed in Perlis today because of rising waters. Some low lying areas in Changlun are also flooded. Most of us further downstream get a little flustered because in the last flood, the one more than 5 years ago, water travelled from Southern Thailand to Kangar, Jitra and then Alor Setar.

Dark skies.... I used to like rain a lot. These days, dark skies send dark worries, not only to me but to many around here too... The authorities say this is the effect of La Nina. I think we're looking at the consequences of our own doing. Global warming effects have now descended on us...

Birds of the same feather....

Why? ... of course they flock together! That's common sense.

Over the years, many of my friends migrated overseas. The Foochow community in which I am part of, value education over many things. So, our parents worked hard, scrooged and saved to give us, their children a good education. We grew up with an extra awareness that we needed to work hard because the extraordinary is required of us to make it. Cos our system was so bent on the quota; many of us who were deserving could not get into the local uni (which was the cheapest to study in) or if we secured a place, not a course of our choice. So, many parents sent their children overseas. It's still the same today.

Now if you send kids in their formative years to a country where better opportunities are in the offing, it is only natural that many of them would want to try work there for a while. But the 'while' soon become permanent. Some came home, tried to settle in but found it hard because the system here does not recognize their talent or hard work. And so, they uproot again and move back to the country where they studied, to familiar territory, so as to say.

But over the years too, I've managed to reconnect with quite few of them (with the help of FB). I've also gained 'peeks' into their lives. You see, most of them are 'bananas' (Chinese on the outside but very Westernized in their thoughts). But when I look at the photos they share, most of the time, what I'd see would be their friends are mostly from the same ethnic or at least Asians. Birds of the same feather.... they kinda still flock together.

The only thing is... even though my friends tell me, racism also exist in the places they've chosen as their new home, their opportunities are not exactly reduced by it. They have many laws to protect everyone's rights too... that's to put it very simplistically.

So, over here in Malaysia... we've all the different ethnics. We should actually be able to live together and prosper each other. If we do things rightly, it is only natural to expect progress. But ours is a society built on perceived rights... that one race has more rights than the others. So, we get a brain drain... but what should probably alarm us more is, by not doing things right, we've also allowed corruption and rot to set in. When there is no need to work hard, you can never hope to bring the best out of us. And if everything is made easy.... we'll just become lazy.

It's okay to have birds of the same feather flock together. It's okay to have your community and my community. The thing is, we've got to have the same set of rules for everyone so that we can do right....

Look! No Wires... HP 1536dnf MPF

This is definitely fun... printing and scanning minus the cables... the HP 1536nfd MPF, our new network printer! 8)

Our Canon MF4350d kaput-ed for the 3rd time in as many months, same problem I think since we've been getting the same Error Message. Our dumb luck to end up with a unit that is faulty. Anyway, each time it goes to the printer hospital, it stays a long time. Sales service is good. Can't say the same for service. We were sold by the durability our old Canon MF5750 and when it gave way after 5 years of heavy use, we got a Canon MF4350d as its replacement. But before its first birthday was even over, we were already getting its Error 225 message. Went into the forums and discovered that it seems a common problem.

We thought we could trust a name... cos our older model, the MF 5750 was totally reliable and hardy. Learned one lesson through this... a good name with a positive experience is not good enough to guarantee another good experience. I am totally cheesed off by Canon this time around, especially the slow service.

It's now back to the printer hospital... don't know how long it will be incarcerated there. Anyway, we decided to return to HP. Got a HP1536dnf MFP cos it's supposed to be Mac-friendly and is one of the printers that supports AirPrint. The Canon will be a spare when it comes back... probably in a couple weeks' time.

It's totally cool to be able to scan on the fly this being a network printer.... LOL! We've had to fix a printer switch for the different computers and it's nice to just be sitting on the couch and press print... and ta-da... the printed sheet appears. Same thing for scanning though you have to get up and put the pile of papers in the document feeder. Totally cool!!!

Now to see whether this printer lasts. Our first HP Printer, I think, was the HP Laserjet 5L which we gave to a friend some years back. It's still going strong. It's at least 10 years old I think! So, we're hoping that perhaps this latest addition of HP will be equally hardy.

These days, the things don't seem to be made to last.... 8(

Setting Boundaries

One of the things I do for my gal is to have lessons with her... well not everything since I am semi-illiterate where Mandarin is concerned. I used to follow her (learn Mandarin while teaching her) when she was in lower primary but work got in the way and I gave up. So, while I can read, I stumble more and more over characters not known. Time constraints have made it stressful to keep going back to the dictionary. One of the hazards of working moms. But I still have sit down lessons with her.

The thing is, because I don't set boundaries for her, she happily does whatever that comes her way. The results has been quite encouraging. She writes better than okay for her age... where English is concerned. And I throw in what she terms as fun stuff... anagrams, poetry, puzzles, word games. She used to be wary of puzzles (word and logic) probably because this is something they don't do at school. But after getting a hang of it, they often clamor for more. Occasionally, I'd email short stories for them to read on their IPads.... I tell them we're going green, cut down on paper wastage. The kids all have IPads... so I turn that into a novelty for learning, for now.

I've learned this too... given the right 'support' from parents (and teachers), we can often move or set boundaries where kids learning are concerned. We can tickle their brains, prod it and set forth more creativity or fill them with just facts, just for passing exams...

I've learned too from the experience with my boy, most stuff they learn.... they forget soon after the exam is over. So if we fail to work on the attitude and instill a love for learning for themselves, we will fail to inculcate lifelong learning for them and miss the opportunity to set them on a path to continually better themselves. We've got to teach them that there is a world out there that we must try to understand because it's supposed to make us more humble when we begin to understand how small we actually are. That unfortunately has gotten lost in the myriad of results that we chase these days. We set our boundaries for them and limit their potentials.

At schools, we teach them to write. And they write beautiful and flawless essays from memory. Ask them to write something original. They tell you they don't know where to begin. For continuous essay writing (one title or a phrase is given) in SPM, majority of the students will only write descriptive or narrative essays. There was one year when I made my students memorize a few types of situations for descriptive and narrative writing - a person, a scary experience, a trip, a happy occasion - and I made sure I taught them how to modify the beginning and the ending. I even had one student score an A2 for her English! She cannot speak or write well... but even for language, memorizing helps. Continuous Writing makes up a big part of the overall marks. So, it is not uncommon to have students score A+ (under the current grading system) in English but still not be able to write or articulate their thoughts well. We've all fine tuned our memorizing abilities down to the dot! And it works super well. Again we set our boundaries.

Other Half suggests that I take out the old exam papers from our time for the kids to do... I told him we don't have to look far. Just take our neighbour-down-south's Primary Six exercises for comparison. Even my Form 5 students won't be able to handle them well. The vocabulary is just way beyond them.

Kids learn Geography and History. But they have mostly local content. I think learning about the savannah, prairie, tundra helps us have a better idea of our world. I think learning about Hitler, Mao Tse-tung or even Napolean Bonarparte helps understand our world, of how we can learn from past mistakes. But what do we do? We build our own tempurung (coconut shell) and poke a few holes in the shell to allow some view outside.... limited learning which limits our world. Boundaries...

But unfortunately, in the end, it's still the A(s) that matters.... Boundaries!

Yet Another SPM

11 years of secondary schooling and it boils down to your SPM result. One of my duties include doing the analysis of the SPM results of my school. And data provides interesting insights. One more interesting note, this year we had to do our own analysis. For some reason (and there are many rumours flying around) the department were not able to supply us with the data like previous years. In the age of computers, one would think that that would just be a couple of clicks away... hmmmm

One foremost in my mind is how easy it is to pass SPM these days. I based this on the comparison of students' achievements in school tests. I think passing marks for many subjects are probably in the tens. I think too that perhaps there is a compromise in the quality of marking too. Students who cannot even write a proper sentence in English can pass their English. And students who consistently score below 10 marks in their school tests can pass too.

The importance of keeping students in the class. Passing grades go up if you can keep them in the class when they're supposed to be there; not the extra classes! In normal day-schools, one of the problems we face is the problem of truancy. Many students come to school but do not remain there. Sometimes they hide in the school compound. There are those who sneak out too. Yet there are those who left home in their uniforms but never made it to school. It is difficult to keep students in the classroom.

A culture of 'kesian' (pity) is pervasive everywhere. That is why, I salute my former Students' Affairs Senior Assistant. A small diminutive lady, she packs twice as many punches as any male teacher I know. Not one to mince her words or actions, students were terrified of her. Yet I know her to be generous to a fault with the students too.... once they do what is right. She walks her talk and it's hard not to see that when results go up, a lot of it has to do with her effort of keeping the students in class. A teacher would only need to tell her that so and so skipped class and you can count on her pursuing those kids, even if it took days sometimes.... the kids wizened up and they will skip school the following day, hoping that they'll be forgotten.

Another SPM topic - I hear that many Chinese students meet their Waterloo with their Chinese subject. I basically don't understand why they have to set standards so high for Chinese. One reason why many Chinese kids miss up on their straight A(s) is because of their Chinese. The other honour belongs to BM. Being in a Chinese school does not make it any easier to score an A for Chinese. But being in a national school will help a Chinese students score better in BM! Go figure.

And if you compare Moral Studies with Pengajian Islam, it's way easier to score an A in Pengajian Islam. It's always difficult to see our Malaysian Education system as being fair. And what might be fair to another might not be to the other. We are all befuddled by our politics.

The push for a higher ratio of students studying Science. I look at the results and my set shows that many of my Science students would be better off taking the Arts or Humanities. They'd get A(s) in BM, Sejarah, Pengajian Islam, and perhaps Science and Maths but hardly ever from Physics, Chemistry, Add Maths or Physics. In fact most of them get D(s) and E(s) for the latter. I think it's wrong advice. These kids would probably be scoring straight or near straight A(s) doing the subjects that they can cope with.

Oh ya! This is the best SPM for the nation in 4 years, according to reports. I think students who do well this year stand to get a windfall, especially the non-Malays. What comes around almost every 5 years? Election!!! There's a likelihood of more scholarships for students who performed well. Keep the parents happy.... feel good factor. It will translate to votes. The GPK improved from 5.34 to 5.19 (lower GPK being better). So, if election is before the next SPM, next year's batch will not be so lucky. Aiya.... now parents have to start planning their kids to coincide with the country's election. LOL! Will next year's GPK continue to improve? It'd be interesting to see whether there is a trend of better results during election (or near election) years. My thoughts are just conjectures. Anyway, I think our education has been politicized.... not a good thing.

So another SPM gone by, another set with its own tale. But one thing stands I think... today's SPM grads don't seem any better despite more sophistications in methodology and facilities.

Being used...

In a pensive state of mind.

This is an old song from so long ago... and the lyrics been going through my mind.

But this is kind of genre was more off the path of mainstream music even back in the days of my youth.... kinda weird in a way. Not something I like but it just kinda played itself in my head like a broken record.

Might not make much sense but today the Selfish Self seem more prominent. How easily we betray ourselves too..... but then again, sometimes 'desperation' makes us do all kinds of things, agree to everything.

Magnanimity, humility, grace and patience I require.