Sybreon Ones Nought

This article in TheStar made the most interesting reading today. It is about the final round-table meeting that was held yesterday concerning the use of English in teaching Science and Math in schools. I am actually really curious to find out what language the meeting was conducted in. Regardless, the most revealing information provided by the article were the statistics (I abhor statistics).

From an earlier article, the number of students that opted to answer the papers in English were 159,234 (Science – 31%) and 238,153 (Math – 64%). This is a marked increase compared to last year, which had 1,324 (Science) and 1,075 (Math). At the very least, we can be assured that a very large number of students are comfortable with answering things in English. However, it would have been more interesting to find out the urban/rural breakdown of these numbers.

Yesterday, more statistics were revealed, with the overall results in both urban and rural schools averaging upwards and that the performance of English has gone up by a significant 4.4% while BM remained stable. So, these results show that the students can cope with the subjects in English and it may have had a positive effect on English as a whole. Okay, I am taking some liberties with causality here but it is at least a positive sign, if not a cause.

However, the most telling statistics were those that were released for the SJK schools. In SJKT schools, 62.8% and 89.1% answered the Science and Math papers in English, in contrast with SJKC schools where only 2.9% and 1.3% answered the papers in English. Now, this is very surprising and statistically significant.

Personally, I don’t understand the resistance in SJKC schools. I guess that the teaching quality there must not be as good, with students fearing to take the subjects in English. Alternatively, they was instruction for them to avoid the English papers, which would not surprise me one bit. Otherwise, there is no statistical reason why these SJKC students should buck the national trend of a marked increase in adoption of English as the Science/Math language. To me, this has been to their detriment as we do not have any significant data on how well the SJKC students coped with the subject.

The round-table meeting resulted in 7 potential proposals:

• Stick to Mathematics and Science in English;
• Revert to Bahasa Malaysia;
• Let primary schools teach both subjects in the mother tongue and secondary schools use English;
• Let primary schools decide for themselves;
• Mathematics and Science be taught in Bahasa Malaysia and mother tongue for Years One to Three and in English from Year Four onwards;
• A combination of mother tongue in the first three years and a choice of mother tongue or English after that; and
• The two subjects will not be taught in Years One to Three and instead be integrated into other subjects.

I would like to add an 8th proposal. Personally, I think that the solution is clear. Science and Mathematics should continue to be taught in English for all schools except SJKC schools where there is an apparent resistance. There has even been alleged threats of protests from the Dong Jiao Zong. So, SJKC schools should be allowed to teach these subjects in Mandarin if they so wish to. This will doubly ensure their slow but timely death as their brethren experienced in Singapore. No sane parent would enroll their kids in SJKC schools if they are the only ones resisting this positive move.

To me, this is a win-win-win situation for everyone involved. I’m surprised that nobody came up with this suggestion. They must be quite daft for failing to see the obvious.

** Pic from TheStar article. Not mine.

While many things do not change, some things do. I have been wearing my present pair of spectacles for more than 6 years. Although it cost me a pretty penny when I first bought it (~£300) it has been worth every sen. However, it has started to show its age as the lens coating is coming off and the paint job is peeling off. So, I went off to the previous optical place to make myself a new pair of spectacles.

So, I tried on a huge number of frames before it came down to two options and then I ended up taking an even longer time, wearing both of them before finally deciding on one. Then, I started bargaining on price and was given a good price on the lens with a new set of transition lenses. The new set of transition lenses are better than the old set as they are able to transition faster and to a very dark shade of blue. My present set of transition lenses darken very gradually and only to a light shade of brown. So, I guess that they have improved the technology over the years.

Then, they measured my eyesight and it seems that my power has come down for both my short sightedness and my astigmatism. That must be the reason why I have recently been looking over my spectacles when staring at really close stuff. Subconsciously, I must have realised that my power has changed. Well, this surprised me as I thought that my eye-sight should no longer change, seeing that I am no longer developing. However, I highly suspect that my real power probably lies somewhere between the two measurements and is within the margin of error for each.

Anyhow, I ordered the new pair of spectacles and I should be taking delivery of them shortly.

Today, I dropped by another shopping mall, that is located in a residential area. This shopping mall has a Carrefour in it. Surprisingly, this Carrefour has shrunk by about 20% in size. Where it used to occupy a large part of the ground floor, this space is now home to three cafes and one post office along with an assortment of tiny stalls selling mobile phones. I guess that it must have come under tough times and had to let out the space in order to reduce cost and boost revenues.

However, what surprised me even more was the number of rumah urut (massage houses) in the building. By rough estimation, about 40% of the tenants are rumah urut. While I was exploring the place, trying to reacquaint myself with the shops there, I was constantly bugged by the workers sitting outside who kept asking me if I wanted a foot massage. I guess that I must’ve looked like I wanted a foot massage, since I was busy looking at all the shop signs to see what they were selling.

What was even more surprising was when I stopped for dinner at the Nam Heong restaurant there (purveyors of the best chicken rice in town since 1938). I was actually attended to by a Malay male waiter. First of all, it is less common to find males working as waiters in a restaurant in Malaysia. Secondly, it is downright difficult to find a Malay working at a non-halal food joint. One section of their menu is dedicated to pork dishes. I guess that the tough times must really be affecting everyone.

As I did not want to presume anything, I spoke to the waiter in English and ordered the standard set. He asked me pak kai or siew kai in such a monotonous manner that I didn’t understand what it was he said. Then, he repeated the question in English and asked me what soup I wanted. So, I said the chicken feet soup and he promptly asked me kai kiok fa shang and I said yes. After that, I saw him serving other people and was fairly amazed at his command of Cantonese.

I guess that he must be a local boy, one who grew up in KL and mixed around a lot with the local Chinese. It is not so difficult to find these people around but it is still surprising to see them working at a non-halal food joint. Yes, there were two – the other one was actually working in the kitchen!

So, some things do change.

I was feeling a little sien today and decided to go run out somewhere. After all, I’ve got a new set of wheels and there is no reason for me to stay at home all the time now. So, I made the suicidal decision to go to 1Utama this afternoon – suicidal because anyone who knows 1U, knows that you should never go there on a weekend. However, I made the decision to go because the last time that I was there, the new wing had barely just opened and there were two MPHs in 1U (meaning that it was an awfully long time ago).

So, I drove down from my place onto Old Klang Road and took the normal route I used to take in the past – i.e. down OKR all the way to the end, slipping into the LDP highway thru the Federal Highway and then straight on until Bandar Utama and 1U. Okay, my first surprise was that they actually placed a toll-booth at the end of Old Klang Road. It’s called the PJS2 gate or something like that. I got my first hint that something wasn’t quite right when I passed the Jalan Templar junction and saw the Lebuhraya Bermula (Highway Begins) sign. Shortly after paying the toll, I saw the Lebuhraya Tamat (Highway Ends) sign. I had to pay RM1.60 for the privilege of using barely a 1km stretch of highway. Note to self – avoid this toll by cutting down Templar Road onto the Federal Highway.

Then, after I got onto the LDP, it was slow traffic almost all the way until it reached the Sprint Highway interchange. I remembered that I used to speed down the LDP on my way up to Ipoh (via the Damansara toll-gate) at much higher speeds than this. So, it was kind of sad that traffic was so slow these days. You cannot really call the LDP a highway anymore if the traffic slows down to 60kmph. I used to be able to reach 1U within 30 mins of leaving my home but I spent almost just as long, trudging along the LDP today. In addition, I must have made a mistake somewhere as I ended up reaching the PLUS toll-gate instead of Bandar Utama, and had to use the back-route of getting into 1U (passing Centrepoint). Note to self – avoid the LDP at all costs!

Anyway, I finally arrived at 1U and proceeded into the parking. Some things never change. It took me almost 40 minutes of driving around the multiple levels of parking until I finally found a space. At least this didn’t break a previous record I had of driving around for 45 minutes before finding a parking space there. Good thing that 1U charges a token fee for the first 6 hours of parking. There would be riots if they charged by the hour. Finally, I was there and I proceeded to have a look around the place.

I immediately went off shopping. Those of you who know me will know that there are very few things that I actually bother to buy – DVDs, CDs, electronic gadgets and books. In the end, I spent some money on more Korean DVDs and one music CD. I had actually managed to track down 2 copies of Suki’s Akhirnya album. This is surprising because she is practically sold out everywhere else – in both large and small record stores. However, it was very sad for me to see Tower Records reduced to selling Japanese Anime in order to survive. The bulk of the shelf-space seems to be taken up by nothing but Japanese Anime. So, I got to listen to a lot of Suki on my drive back through Section 16.

For dinner, I was a little tempted by laksa as I have not had any for quite some time. So, I proceeded to my regular laksa shack and ordered my favourite Laksam Kelantan. This was when I noticed that their selection of laksa has shrunk considerably since I was last there. They used to have every conceivable kind of laksa from each state in Malaysia (including those from Borneo). However, it’s now become fairly limited to the more commercial varieties only. Thankfully they still had my favourite and so I had it for dinner.

After dinner, I visited the Science Fiction section of MPH to see if they could qualify as Science Fiction. Personally, I do not consider a bookstore as having a SciFi section unless they at least carried books by William Gibson or Neal Stephenson. The good news is that the MPH at 1U carries both these authors but the bad news is that they only had one book from each. How sad! Maybe I should pay Kinokuniya a visit one of these days to check out its SciFi section. I have a recollection of it being fairly big and extensive.

Then, while strolling around the place, I noticed that there was a ‘free wifi’ area that was sponsored by Maybank2U. When I was in Malaysia a few years ago, broadband and wifi was very difficult to come by. Everyone was trying to sell you hotspot packages from different telcos. However, you are able to get free wifi everywhere these days, even at the local fast food joint. I have never actually tried any of them but I think that I will pay my local Kopitiam a visit one of these days to see if it is any fun blogging while having lunch.

This was our last full day in ChiangMai and one that was not on the official tour. However, our guide was so nice and came to bring us around on his own anyway. We wanted to go to a local morning market to buy some Thai rice and other sundries such as dried longan. Since we did not have the tour company minivan, we went about on local transport (i.e. songthaew). It was during this ride that I noticed a PETRONAS petrol station in Thailand! I have always known that they had operations in Thailand but it was still a surprise to see a familiar petrol station there. So, I took a snap of the local pump prices. At the time of this photo, our pump prices for RON97 was RM1.90/L (about 18.64 baht/L). So, as you can see, we’re not paying less for petrol than our Thai neighbours and we are an oil & gas exporter! I would certainly like to hear our government explain this away, seeing that they loved comparing our pump prices with Thai pump prices during the oil inflation.

Anyway, I do not want to sully this entry with my political ramblings. Let’s talk about something related to local Thai politics instead. Another thing that our guide informed us was about dress. According to him, there were two political factions in Thailand, the ‘reds’ and ‘yellows’. Seeing that northern Thailand is a red base, he said that if you wore red, the local people will like you more. As a result, you can get a better price at the market. If you wore yellow, the local market people may not even want to sell you anything. Seeing that we were tourists, it probably wouldn’t affect us one way or the other. However, our tour guide was curiously dressed in a red shirt that morning, when he took us around to the local market. Well, there are a curious number of red dressed people in the random photo. So, maybe he was right!

Something else piqued my interest at the market – Thai motorcycle parks. You read that right – motorcycle parks. There were designated zones for motorcyclists to park their bikes and these zones were manned by a parking attendant or two. When a motorcycle pulls up, the motorcyclist would park his or her bike and then wait for the attendant to come along and give them a parking coupon, which was affixed to the brake handle of the bike. The cost of parking is 2 baht per entry and you could park for as long as you want. How terribly entrepreneurial! We need the same system in this country to prevent motorcyclists from just dumping their bikes randomly on the streets, constantly causing traffic problems for everyone else.

It also occurred to me that the Thai people were extremely honest folk. Well, according to our guide, Thai people are “always happy with big smile on face”. This can be visibly seen from the way that they behaved. When a Thai motorcyclist parks, he/she would actually wait for the parking attendant to issue a ticket while their Malaysian counterpart would probably take-off. Furthermore, they leave all kinds of things lying in the baskets of their motorcycles while our Malaysian cyclists cannot even leave their helmets behind without it being stolen. I guess it comes from the fact that the Thai people are not poor-poor and are not driven to desperation. We sorely need some sort of social welfare system to help the poor in this country.

Oh I give up, let me go off on a short socio-economic rant. The main difference in our social-economic situation is probably due to income disparity. The GINI index for Thailand is about half of ours. You can see this clearly in the kinds of entreprises that I have quoted in the last few blog entries. While the average Thai may be poorer than the average Malaysian, there is a better spread of wealth so people do not become desperate. You can see all sorts of little entrepreneurial things in Thailand that wouldn’t work in Malaysia. Although these people may not earn very much, they will at least make enough to feed themselves. At the very least, they have the monasteries and missionaries to help them. Our NEP needs to go back to its original roots and fix itself to make this work!

Anyway, this was effectively the end of the trip for me as I fell ill later that day. I vomited quite a bit and spent most of the day lying in bed. It was probably something I ate. The next day, we caught our flight back to KL and had to go through the whole debacle of poor LCCT service again. It was chaos in there!

Oh, there was one other curious thing though. My family randomly met another family that we had known donkey years ago. They were holidaying in ChiangMai and took the standard package tour. So, we spent a while catching up with each other. We were checked into the same hotel and met each other during meal hours. Their eldest child studied mathematics and is now working in Bank Negara. This surprised me as most of my other Bank Negara friends seemed to be terribly busy (you know who you are!) and would probably have a tough time trying to take a 1 week leave to go holidaying in ChiangMai! However, it was nice to catch up with some old acquaintances you’ve not met in ages. I seemed to be doing a lot of this lately!

We started our day by visiting the tribal people – Karens. These are those famous long-necked women that depress their collar bones for beauty. The thing that interested me more during our visit was their use of local engineering and technology. I observed that their roofs were made with regular dried leaves and they used water power for their machines. Such things interest me because I’m a hardcore engineer but it will probably bore most of you to death. So, I’ll just skip it. However, it’s still interesting to note that these people are, by themselves, a tourist attraction. When they see me coming with my DSLR, they all move into position for me to take snap shots. How quaint – not having to get people to pose or ask them for permission.

After that, we went off to a few other tourist attractions including, a petting zoo for tigers (!!!), a snake show and an umbrella factory. It is at this umbrella factory that I witnessed more skilled craftsmanship. I told my family that if these artistes set up shop in Central Market, KL and charged between RM10 to RM20 for each drawing, they would make a fortune. Most of the teenage girls in KL would love to have these artistes customise their clothes and accessories for them. RM10 is nothing much to spend on getting some quality artwork rendered on your favourite bag, for example. Furthermore, these artistes worked so fast, it hardly took them 5 minutes to render this drawing on our clothes. Since they’re meant for umbrellas to begin with, it’s all water-proof!

At this point, I had grown rather weary of factories. We were of course, brought to a few others – leather, cotton and what nots. Since this was the end of our official tour, we asked that our tour guide drop us off at a local shopping mall so that we could pick up a few other items at local prices as opposed to tourist prices. Our guide told us that there were only two malls in ChiangMai, an older small one and a newer big one. So, we went to the big one. While exploring the big one, I learned a few more things. The cost of goods in ChiangMai is pretty much similar to that in Malaysia. Of course, this was limited to the things that I’m interested to buy – i.e. DVDs, books, electronic gadgets. The only cheap stuff in ChiangMai are the local crafts and of course sundries like rice and vegetables.

PS: As you can tell, I’ve grown rather weary of writing as well! But, I shall press on!

This day was our only day in ChiangRai. So, we began with a trip up to Doi Tung Palace, which is where the King’s mother used to live. According to our guide, the entire mountain used to be poppy fields. However, the Queen decided to fix the problem by turning the whole place into her private villa and gardens, employing all the poppy planters as her gardeners instead. Let me just say that the photo doesn’t quite do it justice. The gardens are extremely impressive and well kept, even for tourist standards. I’ve been to some royal gardens in Europe and they don’t quite compare as the amounts and types of foliage are very different. We sorely lack this type of monarchs in Malaysia, who actually come up with real solutions to real problems.

After the tour around the gardens and palace, we drove off towards the Golden Triangle. It was at this point that I realised why there were so many roadblocks along the way – to check on drug smuggling. Although the photo looks like I had to sneakily take the shot, that was not the case at all. It’s merely because our driver drove very quickly through the roadblocks and I was seated right at the back of the minivan. So, I had a matter of seconds to compose the shot in a moving minivan. However, it turned out to be a rather ‘ominous’ kind of look, which is neat! Anyway, our tour guide kept telling us all kinds of legends about the Golden Triangle and the business that goes on there. It was all fun to listen to in anticipation of our journey there.

One of the first stops we made was at the Thai-Myanmar border. According to our guide, it is not worth crossing over to Myanmar because it would cost about 1000 baht per head and there wasn’t really much to do over on the other side. So, he brought us to a jade factory instead. Myanmar is currently flooding the world market with jade, which is the reason why the prices have gone down in recent years. So, we did not step into that country, which was not on our agenda anyway. Instead we decided to cross the Mekong into another country instead – Laos.

We took a boat ride down the Mekong river and were shown the reason why this place turned out to be a haven for the drug trade. The river is huge – it is the 3rd largest river in Asia. At this particular point, it forms the border between 3 countries – Laos, Myanmar and Thailand. Our guide even showed us a little island within the central point of the river, that serves as an open market for drugs. The reason that enforcement is difficult is simply because it is too easy to escape. If the Thai police storm the little island, all the people need to do is run off towards Myanmar or Laos and vice versa. So, that is how drugs came to be openly traded on the river Mekong. I do not know how much of the story is true, but it is certainly logical and plausible.

Another interesting story at that particular junction in the river is the casinos. On the Myanmar side, there was a visible casino called ‘Win & Win Paradise’, which is opened by the Chinese from HongKong-Macau and on the Laos side, we could see another big casino complex under construction, which is being developed by the Chinese from PRC. I guess that the very reasons that attract the drug trade to this region, is also attracting the gambling businesses there. The casinos are being built right along the river and can be approached by boat. In case you did not know, this very same river flows all the way from southern China. So, I’m sure that there is an easy market for these casinos.

On our way back to ChiangMai, we stopped by this rather modern looking white temple just outside ChiangRai. It is at this point that I realised that ChiangMai is very Buddhist as random temples were strewn all over the streets. However, the situation is ChiangRai was quite different as there were a lot of churches all over. I think that it is because ChiangRai is a smaller place and according to our guide, a lot of missionaries went in there to help the people there. This made a lot of sense as even until today, Christian missionaries still flock to the third world and try their best to do some good in the poorest parts of the nation.

This day began with a visit to an elephant camp, where we went on three separate rides – elephant, bullock cart and raft. It was mainly a trip meant for the kids as they loved elephants (influenced by Horton Hears a Whoo). In my case, it was also an interesting experience as I cannot remember when it was that I went on one, last. While on the elephants, I had to rely a lot on luck to get any good shots off. It was extremely difficult to compose any photographs with such a bumpy ride. No amount of image stabilisation is going to help when an elephant takes a step! However, I still managed to get a large number of good photos in the end, particularly ones with the children in it.

Now, what particularly impressed me about these elephants was their drawing skills. When we first arrived at the camp, I saw lots of ‘artwork’ being sold for about 800 baht each. My first thought was that these things were tourist traps and the art was probably drawn by some person and peddled off as elephant-art for a premium. However, during the ensuing elephant show, a pair of elephants were given a blank sheet of paper and a white t-shirt to draw on and they took about 15 minutes to finish their works of art. So, my initial cynicism was wrong. According to the narrator, Asian elephants are smarter than their Indian cousins because they have a bigger head/brain, which is visible as they’ve got bumps on the forehead. So, they are capable of remembering procedures and steps even if they are colour blind. For that problem, they have a human assistant who hands out brushes to them with the right colour on it.

We went rafting down the river on bamboo rafts. I took this time to explain to my 7 year old nephew, why bamboo was chosen to build the raft (evil me, trying to incite some spark of engineering interest in him) – air pockets, structural strength, light weight. It was a 45 minute raft ride and mid-way, we were greeted by a small sampan floating on the river selling refreshments. How wonderfully entrepreneurial again! I guess that such things probably happen on the Rejang river as well, but it is certainly something strange to us peninsular folk. There were of course other sights to see along the way, but nothing was quite as interesting as this one. At the end of the trip, we were all hustled into our minivan for our journey to ChiangRai.

The journey itself was rather uneventful as I ended up sleeping most of the 4-5 hour drive up. However, our tour guide once more, told us about how different the northern Thai people were to their southern brethren. Seems that northern Thailand was once part of a different kingdom and they were only annexed by Siam from Burma at a much later point, around WWII. He also mentioned to us that because the northern people loved Thaksin so much (incidentally, he is from ChiangMai), they would have no problems seceding from Thailand, forming their own nation and installing Thaksin as their new president. However, they still love their king though. So, I think that if such a thing were to happen, they would still keep the Thai King as their constitutional monarch.

We arrived in ChiangRai in the evening and we requested to be taken to a local night market. It was much smaller than the one in ChiangMai but it was still interesting nonetheless. At one point, I was caught in the packed crowd and felt some hands groping me. I immediately shoved my hands into my pockets to make sure that my valuables were not stolen and then quickly exited the area. At this night market, I decided to buy everyone some ‘rotee’, which is what we call roti canai over here. The best one seems to be the one filled with egg and banana (roti telur pisang). However, the biggest difference is the amount of banana that actually goes in – it was densely packed with bananas and you could taste them in every slice, unlike the kind you get at the local mamak. The price of it was similar to that in Malaysia though, 25 baht each – but it tastes really good!