I belong to one of the youngest races in south-east Asia. While a lot of people like to talk about the Greek or Roman civilisations, of English battles, of Germanic tribes, the rest of the world seems blind to the fact that the age of races is not the exclusive purview of Western Europe. Just as there were civilisations in Europe for centuries, there were also civilisations in Asia, Africa and the Americas older than that again. I think we forget that. While we concede that China had an empire going back millennia, how many know about the Cambodian Khmer? Or the Thai kingdoms? The fact that Vietnam had already been enslaved by China for one thousand years before they finally achieved independence in 938 CE? Or that Indian astronomy was at the forefront of the world, rivalling the Maya, even as far back as 300 BC?

As an Asian mixed-breed, I’ll be honest and say it’s frustrating to read Western histories while so much of other world histories are ignored. History did not begin two hundred, or two thousand years ago, and it did not only begin in Western Europe and its colonies. Even the Slavs have this same grumble with Western civilisation, and their case is as justified as anybody else’s, with a long and glorious history relegated, not just to the back pages, but to utter extinction. As if the great empire spanning Poland and Lithuania, the bloodthirsty warriors who defeated both the Turks AND the Crusaders, the intrigue with the notorious Italian court as dynastic marriages were consummated, and the first instances of elected monarchy in Europe, did not exist. It galls them, as similar cultural myopia galls us of browner hue.

For those people to whom such things are important, if I really wanted to devote inordinate amounts of time to it, I’m sure I could reasonably easily trace my ancestry back to 1511 plus nine months. 1511, because that’s when the first Portuguese fleet sailed into Malacca and, after vanquishing the reigning Sultan, declared the port to be under Portuguese rule. (The nine months I’ll leave to your imagination.) Like the English did with Australia, and the Americans did in North America, we see another example of tabula rasa, essentially extinguishing the heritage and technology of existing civilisations and imprinting one of its own. And it’s very difficult to avoid the conclusion that, if you can’t trace your roots to Western Europe, you’re worth nothing.

So, as the youngest race in the region, the Portuguese Eurasians are already almost 600 years old. And, you know, we do feel young. In south-east Asia, we rub shoulders mostly with Malays, Chinese and Indians, all of whom had empires, kingdoms and sultanates stretching back, verily, unto the mists of time. It’s the same if you include the Burmese, Thais, Vietnamese and Cambodians. We are the young kids on the block, the rebellious ones, the race that the others view with faint disapproval because they see us as too impetuous, our members too anarchic and (yep) too immoral. We are young in south-east Asia. And we are 600 years old. For me, personally, it helps put history — and current world politics — into perspective a bit.

Just to be sure that there’s no mistake, I personally believe that Australian educational standards have deteriorated over the past couple of decades. I apportion no blame to any one group, whether it’s tight-fisted Righters, or “bleeding heart” Lefters. No matter which federal government was in power, the descent continued.

I first started taking notice of the education system when I went to buy some paint, believe it or not. At the counter, I spoke to a friendly younger man and asked for the colour — Beowulf — mentioning, as in idle conversation, that he’d probably run across it in his high school English classes but nowhere else. He looked perplexed. “No.”

“The classic Norse [not strictly true, I now realise] poem?”
“Never did that.”
“The Romantic poets?”
“Can’t say that I remember that either.”
(Knowing it was a long shot) “Chaucer?”
“Who?”
“Shakespeare?”
“Oh yeah, we did him. We saw the movie.”

That sparked off another train of thought and it eventually emerged that the paintshop man didn’t need to actually read any novels for his “book” reports. It was enough for him to borrow a video from a shop or library and write up a report on that instead.

Which, in my usual long-winded fashion, brings me to my current blog. The Presbyterian Ladies’ College in Sydney is running a trial that will allow English students to complete time-based, assessable activities (exams, for want of a better word) by “access[ing] information from the net, speak[ing] to friends by mobile phone and listen[ing] to podcasts”. If the pilot is successful, the College

plans to expand the exam format out to all subjects by the end of 2008

Now, considering I self-educate through all three methods myself, that’s not my beef. I’m also not really worried about a student accessing a podcast in, say, a maths exam. We used to have open-book exams in Chemistry and the book didn’t help if you didn’t know the subject well in the first place (as my mediocre grades will readily attest). I’m confident that modern students are smart enough to know that this truism will apply to several subjects. No, what I’m worried about is more intangible.

The first thing that concerns me is revisionism. The problem with the Internet is that you really have to already know what you’re looking for before you look for it. And if you think there’s been some shenanigans going on with regards to any particular subject, searching can take, not only a lot of time, but a lot of sifting. Chances are, all you’re going to get on the first page of a search is what [vested interests, whomever they may be] want you to see. Remember the post on the CIA Factbook and Singapore I did in April? To get to the truth required more time than a normal exam duration. In forty to sixty minutes, all the average student is likely to find is the skin, the mere facade, of an issue, and not its muscles or bones. So what an internet search is really doing is assessing a student’s ability to couch search engine queries, rather than her ability to investigate a topic.

Secondly, the thinking is done by the clock, with results based on how “persuasive” the student is. Does that mean it doesn’t matter whether the thinking is correct, as long as its persuasive? The answer has to be yes if ALL you’re using as an assessment criterion is “persuasion” …

They were allowed to search for information about the speech online and get friends’ points of view, but the girls were only marked on use of persuasive language. [my emphasis]

Both Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill were brilliant orators. Doesn’t mean they were right about everything. But the students are being assessed only according to that ability. Philosophically and morally, this is a very dangerous slope the College is traversing.

Thirdly, why even have such activities as time-based assessments? Students already use the net and their friends to put together assignments. Why impose a deadline on already extant strategies?

Dierdre Coleman, the English teacher behind the pilot, told the Sydney Morning Herald that children must prepare for real-world information access methods.

But, Ms Coleman, surely you know that this is already the normal way all students put together assignments? They get together in groups, hunt up all available resources (library, internet, newspapers, older siblings, parents, each other, etc.) and craft their responses accordingly. You must know this. The other teachers must know this. Which means that the only logical reason the school is doing this is to drum up more business. You have to admit, it looks good on a prospectus. “We teach our students the value of using modern, up-to-date information access methods to gain more knowledge of the world around them.” Yep, getting an A in Google searches. Not much wrong with that.

A bit more (albeit shallow) digging reveals that the Presbyterian Ladies College in Armidale struck some financial troubles and therefore merged with the College in Sydney in 2005 in order to continue operating. We’re now 3 years along. Could it be that the merged entity is still suffering some financial difficulties? Difficulties that have led to its Marketing department spinning a ludicrous method as something desirable? Were the teachers perhaps asked to come up with suggestions to improve the “prestige” of the College (and thus increase its revenue) and Ms Coleman came up with the best idea?

I have already spent more than an hour on this blog and, as you can see, haven’t even scratched the surface of the real meat of the matter, which is the whys and wherefores of the College’s new policy. The problem is, I could be completely wrong. Ms Coleman could be an absolute angel who utterly believes that she is helping train the tech-savvy female generation of the future. But if you think my arguments were in any way persuasive, then it didn’t matter that I was slighting, not only an individual, but an entire educational institution, did it? Not according to the College’s own criteria.

Makes you wonder what a teenager looking down the barrel of a ticking clock would be able to achieve with a much meatier topic.

POSTSCRIPT: The College itself, on a link from its front page to a letter from the Principal says, in part, that

An interesting sideline was to see how some reports confused ‘assessment’ with ‘examination’.

Dr McKeith, if the ‘assessment’ is time-based, assessed in comparison with other members of the same class, and contributes to the final subject score for a particular student then — I’m sorry to say — it’s an exam. I find it interesting that you seem to think that an ‘assessment’ of a student’s skills against her peers within a classroom situation is somehow not the same as an ‘examination’ or ‘exam’, if you will. (Dr McKeith’s statement is masterful in that it manages to cast light on the peripheral issues of the pilot (thus dazzling the unwary), without delving into the very real educational and philosophical questions such a pilot raises. He is, undoubtedly, well suited to the position of principal of a very large, and prosperous, private college.)

We have ordered the equivalent of twenty — count ‘em! — library-style bookshelves for our house. Can you say ka-CHING! There was really nothing else we could do. If you’re a serious collector of books, the stuff they laughingly call bookshelves in places like Ikea just don’t cut the mustard. And custom-built timber shelves cost even more than the metal ones we’ve shelled out for.

But bookshelves mean unpacking boxes and books. And unpacking books means taking several trips down various memory lanes. And I didn’t realise that I had more autographed books than I thought, from Terry Pratchett, Patrick Tilley, Greg Bear, Jeri Smith-Ready, Karyna da Rosa, and Liane Spicer to name a few. I thought it was only a recent obsession of mine, but I now see I’ve had this desire for many years. There are some boxes that haven’t seen the light of day for ten years, as evidenced by the pages of local newsprint that cover and pad them. A couple (including a copy of Robert Silverberg’s “Sunrise on Mercury”) have been termited to oblivion. Lucky I had several spare copies.

Which brings me to another point. Having owned a bookshop in a past life, it’s inevitable that I’d end up with multiple copies of various books. “Spock’s World” by Diane Duane for one, “Queen of Angels” by Greg Bear for another. The question is, what should I do with these copies? I know J will be eyeing my fiction shelves with a jaundiced eye, looking for more room for his ancient histories, and he will inevitably question the wisdom of holding several copies of Gibson’s “Mona Lisa Overdrive” or Lumley’s Necroscope books, there to take up valuable shelf space, while Seutonius languishes in a pile on the floor. At the moment, I’m thinking of donating my spare copies to a couple of libraries. (When you have 5 copies of a particular Asimov anthology, it’s easy to spread the cheer.) I was also thinking of doing a review of the book before I dispense my charity. That should keep me occupied on Wednesday’s when War Games runs out, methinks.

In other news, I also have to add an erratum. I mentioned that Robert Asprin was the person responsible for the best Lensman parody (”Backstage Lensman“) I’ve ever read. I was wrong. The piece was written by Randall Garrett, not Mr. Asprin. Many apologies to the memories of both.

While we were at the Mid-Valley Mall in KL, we saw a martial arts demonstration, somehow incongruously intertwined with an electronics exhibition. That is, one of those open spaces in a shopping mall was done over to highlight a company’s line of products in mobile phones, video-recorders and small appliances and, amid all this glass, microcircuitry and glass (and did I mention the glass?), a tae kwon do group did a demonstration. Okay, so here’s my take on this for any future martial arts instructors thinking of grabbing a few bucks/a bit of publicity by doing the same thing.

1. Although nothing happened in this instance, take it from me (and every other mother in the world) that (a) well-behaved children jumping around and (b) cases of expensive electronic gear, do not mix.
2. If you’re the instructor, work out yourself. There’s nothing that dents the credibility of a dojo more than having an overweight instructor who puffs and wheezes after completing two boring-ass defensive movements against (yawn) an attacker with a pretend knife. (Extra bonus hint: no right-minded, half-competent knife attacker EVAH attacks overhand. That’s only for movies … and, er, martial arts demonstrations.)
3. When you get your students to break planks of wood, it’s good that you make the scoring on the back of the plank as invisible as possible. But try to also make the little markers — telling the assistants which way to rotate the plank — a little less obvious as well, m’kay?
4. Try to be innovative by coming up with something a little different. Like setting up a more realistic street setting for a demonstration, or another way to perform a form/kata. It means you have to think a little, but it will pay off.

I’m not a fan of the Korean or Japanese martial arts (not until the advanced stages, when all arts blur together), so I’ll keep the rest of my comments to myself … and to a relaxing husband over a scotch, as we talk over our various martial arts experiences and watch the koi in our pond snuffle around the lotuses and not get any. Mwahahahaha.

POSTSCRIPT: I meant to blog on Friday but … well, here was the sitch. In our storeroom — at the very back, do a u-turn and, yep, right there under the stairs just where the bottom of the stairs meets the floor — was a metal pail, half-full of acrylic slate sealer. The bottom seal of the pail decided to expire and the sealer leaked out, muchas litres of it, soaking into a dozen large cardboard packing boxes (full of stuff, natch!), tool-bearing plastic crates, brooms, mops, assorted tins, etc. on its way to freedom . The first we found out about it was when a strong smell, and some thick gooey stuff, started leaking out from beneath the door.

Oh. My. God. Needless to say, the rest of Friday and a fair hunk of Saturday was a bust. Just when you think you can take a breather … Oh well, at least we now have the best sealed storeroom floor in the neighbourhood.

Little Dinosaur sidled up to me this morning, perching herself on my lap and nonchalantly draping an arm around my shoulders. “So, Mama,” she says in a casual voice, “my teacher told me that I don’t have to go to school in uniform today.”

I raise my eyebrows.

She nods. “All the kids will not be in uniform. A friend of mine is coming as a princess! With a big dress. And a crown. We can wear whatever we want.”

“Today?”

“Uh-huh.” She starts looking hopeful.

“And do you have a note from school to say that you don’t have to wear a uniform?”

I’ll give her that much, she thinks quickly on her feet and can already see the trap set for her. Deciding that even false legitimacy is better than none, she says falteringly, “Y-es.”

“Then could I have that note?”

She laughs. “Oh, Mama. I lost it.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie, but I need a note from school. If I can’t see the note, then I can’t do what it says.”

If I’m already having these kinds of conversations with her when she’s six, can you imagine what it’s going to be like in seven years’ time?

(J dropped the kids off at school and confirmed that every single child was in uniform. To be honest, I did have a wavering doubt. I see I’m going to have to do something about that.)

Because (a) we live in Lotus Street, and (b) we have a pond, I kinda got the idea that it would be great to put some lotus plants in our pond. Little did I know how incredibly stupid lotus plants are.

Like this. Don’t plant lotuses in square-edged containers. If you do that, the roots may end up in one corner, go round and round in that corner without finding the rest of the container, and the rootbound plant will die. Solution: plant lotuses in circular containers.

Or this. Never cut off dead leaves. The stems of lotuses are hollow, and if you cut away the discoloured leaves, water will get into the stems and — how ironic is this? — the plant will drown. Solution: don’t cut the dead leaves. If you hate the look of black/brown mottled and dead biological matter, hide those leaves under healthy ones.

And then there’s the koi who love lotus tubers and roots the way I love me some porky goodness. Koi have such a hard-on for subterranean lotusy bits, that they will excavate a lotus plant and eat its roots. The result? You guessed it, the lotus plant dies. Solution: Either don’t put lotuses and koi in the same pond (too late), or “mulch” the lotus container with sharp little lava rocks to deter industrious fish.

Now, believe it or not, I did a stupid thing. I cut the dead leaves off the lotus plants. Then I decided to go and read up on how to maintain lotuses. This is not exactly the correct order of things. Can you say p-a-n-i-c? Lotus plants are not cheap, no matter where in the world you live, and I was facing three examples of terminal cases right there. You can’t get some string and tie the stems shut because the stems are not really pliable like that. What I needed was something waterproof and pliable that I could use like a paste, to close off the holes in the stems (and they’re really obvious when you’re looking at them, scant centimetres under the killing water). What I also had were still a couple of hundred boxes with great stuff in them … still unpacked.

Well, people, if you’re ever stuck in that situation, I’ve found a solution. Lipstick. Using the tip of a metal nail file as a tiny spatula, I scraped off little mounds of lipstick and pressed them into the stem, making sure the lipstick covered all the tubules. I did that two weeks ago, and the plants don’t seem to be dying on me. In fact, I’m seeing new leaves emerge every few days. And some of the fish seem to like the taste of lipstick. While I’m currently breathing a sigh of relief over saving three expensive plants from my own stupidity, I’m trying hard not to think about lipstick and koi diets. One crisis at a time.

Yes, we’re finally back in the land of the virtually connected. With three machines up and buzzing around the Intertubes, life can finally start getting back on an even keel. In the meantime, lots has happened and I’m just sorry I missed out on commenting on so many great articles from people like Liane (congrats on your new Dorchester profile, Liane!) and Maria (and on your revamped website and always great ideas, M!), just to name two. With lots of additional links to follow, I’m going to be busy for the next few weeks.

What happened, you may ask? Before I continue, you need to know something. J is the reasonable, calm one in our relationship. I’m the person you probably wouldn’t like too much if you met me, especially if you annoyed me over something. After running through what little patience I had on the whole connection thing, I wrote a pithy email to whatever Time dot Com managers I could find suggesting, among other things, that their golf games were obviously more important than something as trite as “customer service”, and suggesting an alternative motto for their company. Within one and a half hours of that email being sent to the capital, Kuala Lumpur, four people were at our Johor house (a few hundred kilometres away), trying to correctly set up our connection. In the end, it didn’t come good till the following night but, while I still consider the upper management of Time to be gross incompetents (for reasons other than what’s detailed here), their people on the ground have, without a doubt, been courteous, friendly and helpful beyond measure. Thanks to the technicians who pulled significantly more cable than anticipated, and still completed the job on time, and to the Project Officer, Tahawi, who has to bear the brunt of customer complaints, in person, more than he should. Having said that, we still don’t have a phone (don’t ask), but at least we have the internet and Skype, so all’s not lost.

I also read about the launch of Apple’s iPhone, content to be an amused bystander watching the Apple lemmings rush their way to the store, and never thinking that we would get caught up in the iPocalypse ourselves. (We detest Apple, for Steve Jobs’ management style, for their arrogance, their closed architecture, their exploitative pricing policies, and other things that will come to me once I have another coffee inside me.)  You see, there’s some poor lady floating around Malaysia somewhere who somehow got J’s Malaysian mobile number and was under the mistaken impression that we were the local Apple store. She called, she sent SMSs, all to help with her iPhone, and didn’t quite believe us when we told her we were just private people and not part of the hospital-antiseptic-white brigade. We’re half-expecting another call from her later today, judging by the scepticism in her voice when she rang off last time.

And, just to finish, I know I’m behind with the Radio Free Bliss podcasts and will be initiating a more aggressive schedule and start sending out schedules and interview questions to all June and July participants this week. I’m baaaaaack!

We made an overnight trip to Kuala Lumpur on the weekend, thus providing enough material for a few blogs. While we were away, MIL babysat Lotus Street, looking forward to two days of peace, serenity and contemplating the pond. Poor poor woman. This is what happened.

On our first day away, she was busy catching up on her letter-writing, when she noticed Fluff and Squeak jumping around an extension cable near the front door. Curious, she rose to find out what the problem was and, as she neared the door, realised that it wasn’t a cable the cats were jumping around. After all, extension cables aren’t brown, a metre long, half upright, and hissing.

With the cats keeping the snake penned to the area just by the front door, she rushed off, returning with a walking stick … and a can of mosquito repellent. While she was relating this story, I commented to J that, if I was that snake, getting mosquito spray in my eyes would have probably pissed me off even more. Anyway, between the three of them, they killed the snake. MIL bagged it and threw it away in the rubbish bin. Even two hours later, when talking to J over the phone, she was still (understandably) shaken, and looking around desperately for some chamomile tea/valerian/industrial-strength morphine to calm her down.

This is what we figured happened. After much haranguing and gnashing of teeth, the telecommunications guys finally fronted up to our place late last week and began laying cable. In the process, they discovered blocked ducts, indicating infrastructure that had been laid years ago, but left untouched since then. In our carport is a small pit for the connection of said cable. Usually, it’s covered with a solid concrete lid, but it was askew to assist the telecommunications guys with their work. And it’s about two metres from our front door. So, all three of us figure that the cable-laying disturbed the poor snake and it decided to go looking for another place to live. And guess where it ended up?

There are no winners in this story. I like snakes. I like their “you don’t bother me, and I won’t bother you” philosophy, which I think the rest of the world could do well to emulate more. I doubt there are more serene animals in the world. I think the one that met its unfortunate fate in our house was probably a Bronzeback, which is not venomous, are very common in this region, and mostly go after frogs and small mammals.

And as for my MIL … well, imo, the woman deserves a medal at the very least. Here’s a Polish grandmother who’s travelled halfway around the world to a foreign-language, tropical country and is alone in the only inhabited house in the area. She is confronted face-to-face, for the first time in her life, by a majorly annoyed, loudly hissing snake in classic threatening posture, with her son and family hundreds of kilometres away. She said that Fluff and Squeak were on that snake in an instant, and provided invaluable help despatching the reptile. (The next day, Squeak undid part of his goodwill bonus points by eating one of our pond fish. I think he thinks he’s invincible now.)

Which all sounds great. Except, I wouldn’t subject most people I know to the kind of stress involved in confronting a pissed-off snake. And, of course, it would have to happen on the one night we were away from the house. When we got home, J also checked under the hood of our car (we took public transport to and from KL), in case there was another snake that took refuge in another favourite snake spot, but it looks like there was just the one hapless animal.

And that’s our most recent snake story.

CONNECTIVITY UPDATE: All cables are connected on our side, but we’re still not getting access. The telecommunications guys (Time dot Com, in case you were wondering) are going to have “a meeting” to “discuss the situation”. The sound you hear is my head hitting a solid surface. Repeatedly.

So you already know about J and myself. And our two kids, The Wast and Little Dinosaur. But we have two other well-loved family members, nicknamed Fluff and Squeak.

Fluff is a blue-point Ragdoll, a grumpy and morose cat with an unhealthy attachment to J. Despite his lack of any sense of humour, Fluff has earnt his place in the family by rescuing The Wast from morning after morning of screaming fits when our son was three years old. Driven to distraction, we introduced the Ragdoll kitten and The Wast was transformed. Fluff let himself be dragged from place to place, hoisted onto bunk beds, buried under blankets at night, all with incredible good grace. The Wast settled down and the screaming fits ended.

Squeak is the Maine Coon we introduced to keep Fluff company. We called him that because he couldn’t meow properly as a kitten. Now, however, he can Maine Coon trill with the best of them. If Fluff is the grumpy one that prefers to fall asleep on J’s feet, Squeak is the life of the party, carrying his favourite toy in his mouth as he moves from room to room, and noisily and enthusiastically playing with it when he reaches a spot he likes. For all his overt cockiness, however, he’s a shy and surprisingly timid 7-kg ball of fluff. He loves the kids, often sitting on a bed and keeping them company while they play, and they love him. The idea of him keeping Fluff company didn’t work out so well (Fluff being a sullen bastard at the best of times), but Squeak’s an entertaining and intelligent cat and we’re happy we got him.

We keep both cats indoors and are lucky enough to have a walled courtyard garden here at Lotus Street, so they can get some fresh air and munch on leaves (then throw up on the tiled floors * sigh *) while still remaining safe and not harming any of the local squirrels or bird life. I’ve read that, here in Malaysia, keeping smaller cats indoors is also recommended due to monkey kidnapping! It appears that, if you live near a tract of established trees, monkeys have been known to drop into a garden and make off with the family pet. Knowing monkeys for the deliberately ill-mannered and implacable animals that they are (I’d much rather keep a pet snake than a pet monkey), I can imagine what fate await the poor, stolen felines.

And there’s some human-initiated kidnapping of pets that I’ve heard also happens, although I don’t know what happens to the victims in such cases. (I know what you’re thinking. As a riposte, I can relate an anecdote about my (Eurasian) mother, after coming back from her first grocery shopping trip in Australia. “These people eat cats!” she wailed. “I saw them skinned in the butcher’s shop!” Further investigation led to the conclusion of rabbits rather than cats, but she never went back to that shop again.)

So, Fusion Despatches would like to extend a warm acknowledgement to the existences of Fluff and Squeak, as I join the legion of authors who keep cats instead of dogs.

I know, I was supposed to be back online by Wednesday past, but it just didn’t happen. And it’s still not happening. At the moment, I’m on a borrowed machine on a borrowed connection, after J had some interesting conversations with the General Manager of a nationwide telecommunications company. He promises us a solid connection … but only in two weeks’ time. So, if anybody out there has sent me an email, you’re out of luck. Our borrowed wireless internet connection client only works on Windows and, with a few tweaks, on Mac and I am — of course — on Linux. Curses.

Still, I should have Chapter Seven of War Games up on my site by the end of today and Chapter Eight will appear the day after tomorrow, with much apologies and bowing and scraping.

With the exception of dozens of boxes still littering every room of the house, life in Lotus Street is starting to look … well, let’s just say that if you could see to the horizon of a forseeable future, it would look kinda nice. Apologies are also due to JoSelle and Maria for running so late with the June Radio Free Bliss interviews that it won’t be June any more by the time I get to them. So much for having boundless faith in human resources and high technology.

Gotta go but will probably drop by with a quick entry on Wednesday, just to let you know that I’m still alive and that War Games is still serialising.