Month: December 2023

HAVE YOURSEF A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS

The Supreme Court has ruled that they cannot have a nativity scene in Washington, D.C. This wasn’t for any religious reasons. They couldn’t find three wise men and a virgin. – Comedian Jay Leno

You have to feel for people like Charlie Brown, the nicest born loser you could ever hope to meet. Especially when he confesses that he’s developed a new philosophy on life. “I’m only going to dread one day at a time.” 

But even Charlie Brown must have felt better around this time of year. I mean, it’s the most wonderful time for a beer. OK, no more puns. They really do sleigh some people.

I used to think Manhattan’s Little Italy used to look lovely on Christmas Eve –  its cold and frosty ambience, its red and green lights going twink-twink-twinkling. Then I saw Singapore’s Orchard Road with its mile-long fairyland of lights and I was suitably impressed. The extravaganza  goes on for over a month. 

But for sheer spectacle, there’s little to beat Rebecca’s kampung, the Portuguese Settlement in Malacca. The residents there are all Catholic and so every home attempts to strut its most festive stuff, all the Christmastide you could think of in one place. The result is nothing short of  breathtaking, a carnival of light and colour that envelopes the entire village. Indeed, it gets a bit much, to the extent that it’s often clogged with camera-toting tourists gawking at the locals with all the curiosity one associates with zoos. 

Most people have good memories associated with Christmas. But for Bill “Bah, Humbug” Maher, it’s “about family and memories, and the looks on the carolers’ faces when I set the dogs on them.” 

I loved the film The Grinch.  It fairly dripped Yuletide, with its abundance of snow, red and green presents, eggnog, mulled wine, and sleigh bells going ring-ring-ring-a-ling; all set to rhyme and presided over by the cantankerously funny Grinch, marvelously played by Jim Carey. It must have resonated because it became the highest grossing Christmas film of all time. 

You might say that the season isn’t just a day for us, it’s more of a frame of mind. There’s something about entering a mall and seeing the Christmastide,   hearing those familiar carols, that cheers me up. When Raisa was very young she used to bounce around with excitement. 

Not any more though. She’s pretty blasé about it now although when she used to live in Austria,  the pictures she sent back to us about Christmas in an Austrian village with her in-laws, looked straight out of the home of Cindy Lou Who in  Whoville.

We still continue with our “traditions.” The tree gets trimmed on the first day of Advent – two weeks ago – and the house becomes redolent with the smell of pineapple tarts just around now. Even the government radio stations play an carol every now and then.

We leave for Portugal on Tuesday where we will link up with Raisa, Hannes and our grand-dog, Wally, an affable and cute-as-a-button Coton.

It will be moderately  cold there but if last winter was anything to go by, it promises to be nice with afternoon temperatures rising to 19 degrees. The food is great, the prices are reasonable and it will  begin to look a lot like Christmas. 

Until then, have a lovely little Christmas and may the New Year be a better one for everybody.  

ENDS 

EDUCATING MALAYSIA

You know there’s a problem with the education system when you realise that out of the 3R’s, only one begins with an ‘R’ – TV personality Dennis Miller

I used to be pretty good at math in high school although I remember asking Mr Chan Lok Chin, our often-testy additional mathematics teacher, about the utility of calculus. 

Actually, my precise question was: “Why are we learning this, Sir?” His retort was equally precise: “Because I said so.” 

And so I did and, because he was an excellent teacher, I actually enjoyed being able to derive logical solutions out of seeming gobbledygook.  I went on to join the Selangor Club where, not unreasonably, we were all taught never to drink and derive.

But my long-ago question about its utility remains valid. I suspect the American writer and humorist, Fran Lebowitz, reached the same, gloomy conclusion about algebra. “Stand firm in your refusal to remain conscious during algebra; in real life, I assure you there is no such thing as algebra.” 

Education is, I suppose, what remains when you subtract what you’ve forgotten from what you’ve learned. That residual knowledge, built up by reading and experiential living, should equip us sufficiently to enable us, for example, to teach our kids basic math or balance our cheque-books.  It opens the door to opportunity and a way forward, to allow a person to become the best he or she can be. 

That’s the theory but it presupposes an education system that has reasonably good teachers teaching the relevant subject matter in reasonably good environments. The education that my classmates and I received at the hands of people like Mr Chan all those years ago, for example. 

There’s the rub. It’s not clear if it’s happening, if new generations of better educated Malaysians are being constantly, and consistently, produced. 

Going by our latest PISA scores, it’s not. The Programme for Intermediate Student Assessment, or PISA, is a global  evaluation of 15-year-olds that’s standardised so that comparisons can reasonably be made. 

PISA assesses not only whether students can reproduce knowledge, but whether they can extrapolate from what they have learnt and apply their knowledge in new situations. 

Alarm bells should ring: we have declined steadily since the tests began in 2000.  In the latest (2022) PISA rankings, the country dropped on all three metrics — sciences, math and reading literacy.

The latest PISA scores show that Malaysian 15-year-olds scored 409 in math (down from 440 previously), 416 in science (down from 438 in 2018). In reading, Malaysians scored 388, down from 415.

Only 1.2% of the students were excellent at math, and only 0.5% were good at science. Less than half, just 42%, were good at reading.

Needless to say, Singapore topped all three metrics. In the region, Cambodia, Brunei, Singapore and the Philippines all improved their rankings from previously. Only Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia saw their ranking decline with ours truly being the worst, with a 32-point drop. Pressed for an explanation, the Director-General of Education craftily equivocated, “The situation,” harrumphed the worthy, “wasn’t unique to Malaysia.” 

The solutions aren’t rocket science either. There is a lack of qualified teachers. Indeed, there is a serious lack of math, science and English teachers. 

It can’t be for the lack of money.  Education received the lion’s share of the 2023 budget: almost 20%, or RM75 billion out of RM390 billion, all told.  

It’s nonsensical. There is a preference to build new schools instead of maintaining and repairing old ones. There is a proliferation of religious and rewritten history texts without good reason. Dr Mahathir has repeatedly  alluded to the former but he did nothing about it. 

Anwar Ibrahim has talked ceaselessly about reform. He should begin with the Pisa scores and insist on solutions.  

And he should  start now.

ENDS

LIVE AND LET LIVE 

England and Manchester United footballer George Best was well known for his wit, even when he was down on his luck. Asked what happened to all his money, the former football star shrugged and replied: “I spent an awful lot on booze, birds and cars. And the rest, I just squandered.” 

Best knew a lot about frittering money away. So does the state government of Johor, apparently.  

Consider its latest idea of salvation for its “sinners.” Early this week, Fared Khalid, the chairman of the state’s religious affairs committee announced that Johor would soon set up a “rehabilitation centre” for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) practitioners. 

In what would be “a first of its kind” for the country, the centre would “rehabilitate” same-sex partners for “going against” Islamic teachings.

Meanwhile, assets were “being prepared” while there would be “dormitories” for both “male and female” trainees. The facility would be up and running by July. 

Mercifully, no estimates of the money required for such an experiment were mentioned. What exactly constituted the sinister sounding “rehabilitation” wasn’t specified either. In truth, few details were proffered.

Indeed, it’s hard to know what they might be because no known case of spontaneous “conversion” has ever been documented. 

It’s not because of a want of trying. Alan Turing was a brilliant Cambridge mathematician and code breaker who may have been primarily responsible for the Allies’ victory in World War 2. It was Turing who headed a team that cracked the German’s famously unbreakable Enigma code. It allowed the Allies to dominate the seas by taking out German U-boats that had been decimating Allied merchant shipping.

You’d think that would have deserved a medal, if not a peerage, at the very least. Nope. The British government actually prosecuted Turing for being homosexual. Under a klieg-glare of publicity, he was found guilty and forced to undergo hormonal castration. Not unreasonably, it precipitated his suicide in 1954. 

In 2004, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a seriously belated but no less public apology on behalf of the British government to Turing’s family for “the appalling way he was treated.” 

Whether this cuts any ice with the fire and brimstone types is moot. Ditto the Christian right wing who are all for castration, hormonal or otherwise. 

But I digress. 

When in clerical garb, our politicians aren’t especially well read. OK, “clerical garb” wasn’t necessary. It’s also likely they haven’t heard of Turing, nor one suspects, could they have cared less. 

They might, at least, then consider the following facts. 

Homosexuality, for instance, isn’t “unnatural.” A 2019 paper in Nature, for example, observed such behaviour across 1,500 species. 

Finally, conversion therapy – trying to fix someone’s sexual orientation or identity – has never succeeded. Not once. The methods used have ranged from the religious to the grotesque – counselling, religious intervention, surgical or hormonal castration, electroshock therapy and nausea-inducing drugs, to name but a few. In short, nothing’s worked or seen to have worked. 

Instead of re-confirming that the earth does, indeed, travel around the sun,  Johor would do well to save its time and money for more useful things. 

ENDS