Engage brain first

My granddaughter is currently on holidays from school. She started in January at a private school that shall remain unnamed. On her final day of school, she received her report and a copy of the school's yearbook. Nothing unusual about that. A closer look at the yearbook however, shows photos of all the children, their full names and the names of their mothers and fathers, the children's dates of birth, complete addresses and telephone numbers (handwritten by the children themselves).

Now this is a country where kidnappings of students for ransom money is on the increase and initiatives like this just make the kidnapper's job easier. It could be argued that the yearbook only goes to the students and their parents but the reality is that it would have gone off to the printer first where many people would have had an opportunity to peruse the contents. In addition, yearbooks are often just put down somewhere and can easily go missing. As far as I know, there was no consultation with parents about whether they wanted these details disclosed in the yearbook. The privacy issue here is that the information originally supplied by the parents to the school should have been used for administrative purposes only and not serve as content for a yearbook.

What were the staff at the school thinking when they got these children (four years old and upwards) to handwrite this personal information onto a sheet of lined paper that was then scanned and attached to their photographs? Clearly they weren't thinking at all. Amazingly, I don't think any of the parents have complained about the issue. The culture here is to just accept these things and not make trouble. Educational commonsense is not in plentiful supply in Indonesian schools and that's not going to change anytime soon because NOBODY COMPLAINS!

Gengsi

One of the things that sets Indonesians apart from Westerners is the concept of "gengsi". It was well explained in an article that appeared in The Jakarta Post this morning. Here is a quote from it:

Maintaining gengsi (pride, prestige and appearance) is of the utmost importance for many people in Indonesia. People, especially in the big cities, try to maintain their gengsi in order to keep in with their peers, and please the people around them. They are status and power oriented, with a strong need for external and social affirmation. Indonesian society is often described as collectivist, as compared to individualist. This is maintained in a close long-term commitment to the "group". The "group" could be a family, extended family or extended relationships. Acceptance from the whole group is extremely important.

It's hard to capture the full implications of the word with the translation "pride, prestige and appearance", although that's certainly a part of it. The phrase "keeping up with the Joneses" also conveys a sense of it. Indonesians who can afford it love to buy homes beside busy roads where more people are able to admire the house's facade. The more impressive the facade the better. What's inside doesn't matter nearly as much as the external appearance. Shade trees that impede the view of the house from the street are brutally lopped or cut down entirely, replaced by palms that are less obtrusive and cost a hell of a lot of money. As many cars as possible need to be stacked in the driveway of course. As an individualistic westerner I prefer an outwardly modest-looking home hidden behind trees and located in a quiet street.

As quoted, commitment to the group is also a strong part of gengsi. The family is the most important group followed by religious grouping, ethnicity and nationality. In a country as diverse as Indonesia, there are many ethnic groups. The Javanese are the most populous but other prominent groups include Sundanese, Betawi (native Jakartans) and Batak. Most of these ethnic groups have their own language and that strengthens the sense of belonging. Curiously, Indonesians must declare their religous affiliation and can only choose from amongst Islam, Christianity, Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism. To a non-religious westerner with loose family ties, no strong sense of ethnic identity and only a vague sense of nationality, Indonesia can seem "foreign" at times but remembering the importance of gengsi helps make it more understandable.

Miss Mary

Let it be known that I am not really all that comfortable on social networking sites. I was invited to join Friendster by a work colleague and thought that I ought to accept because, after all, I'm teaching Information Technology to students who all belong to one or more social networking sites. So far I have three friends (all work colleagues) and 512 so-called second degree friends. I'm afraid I'm almost totally inactive on Friendster but so far I've received two emails from random persons who have viewed my profile. The last one, received yesterday, went like this:

Hello My Dearest One,



Dear how are you today? and how is things moving with you? hope fine and you are in good health. My name is Miss Mary, I am looking for a very nice man of love, caring, sincere, easy going, matured, and understanding, then after going through your profile now on this site ( www.friendster.com) i pick interest in you, so i will like you to write me via my email address which is as follow (mary4u_babyreal@yahoo.com ) so that i will give you my picture for further discussion, because i am really looking forward for a serious friendship with you,



Yours New Friend Mary

That's how easy it is to find new friends on Friendster. I like the phrase "how is things moving with you?" It has a Rastafarian ring to it as in "how is things moving with you, man?" but with "man" really drawn out and sounding like "marn". "Miss Mary" has a nice ring to it as well and I'm definitely "matured" but I'll let someone else run with that one. Feel free to pretend you're me.

The Timeless Land

The Timeless Land is a place in time, a four week period in which the school bell falls silent and timetables no longer dominate the day. Any day can be a sleep-in day, if I want it to be, and I can stay up after midnight, any night I want. I can read books. I've already read one called "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time" by mark haddon. The reading of it, completed only a few minutes ago, has affected my writing style, but only temporarily I hope. It's written from the point of view of a fifteen year old autistic boy and the style is similar to the text that I've italicised. The boy has a fascination with prime numbers and loves Mathematics and puzzles.

One of the puzzles that he discusses in the book is the so-called Monty Hall problem about a game show host who asks a contestant to choose one of three doors. Behind one door is a car and behind each of the other two is a goat. The game show host knows what's behind what door and before opening the door that the contestant has chosen, he opens one of the other two doors and reveals a goat. The car must then be behind one of the remaining two doors. The game show host then offers the contestant the chance to change his original selection. Should the contestant stick with his original choice of door or change doors? Intuition suggests it doesn't make any difference: the chances would still be 50-50. A careful analysis however, reveals that if the contestant changes his original selection, the chance of choosing the car is 2/3 while sticking with his original choice offers odds of only 1/3. There is a very good explanation of why this is so at www.answers.com.

This problem does not relate directly to the story however, and the novel is not about Mathematics or problems in logic. It's a story about a "curious incident" that befell a "dog in the night-time" and it is related in the first person by the autistic boy. I found the book quite enjoyable and I intend to go out and about tomorrow and purchase another book, because that's what I can do on holidays. I can also choose to not go out at all and postpone buying a new book until another day. I could stay at home and read an old book, or watch a video, or I could do neither of those two things but instead practise guitar because one day I might have to busk for a living. OK, "enough already" as they say in Yiddish. Suffice to say that tomorrow is full of possibilities and free of school bells and timetables.

The cyber-mice are running a little faster this year

After marking examinations, correcting practical work and writing about one hundred reports, I'm ready for a holiday and finally I have time to blog again. I'm reverting to blogging from Word because I find that I like the output that it creates in Blogger. The ScribeFire that I used last time gives the text a cramped look, the same as what you get by simply editing within Blogger itself. Why this should be so I've no idea.

In reference to an earlier post, the IT article did get published in The Jakarta Post last Sunday but without my name displayed. That's standard practice I think for what is termed an "advertorial" which is presumably a cross between an advertisement and an editorial. Maybe I should try for another letter to the editor. Maybe my blacklisting period has expired. I'll have to choose my topic carefully in case I offend again.

It doesn't look as if there will be much travel these holidays. Home renovations and car upgrading will see to that. So I'll have four weeks or so to do much as I please. I'll certainly be spending a lot of time upgrading my computer skills because lately I feel like I'm slipping behind. It was nearly twenty years ago, in January of 1988, that I taught my first computer lesson and in those pre-Internet times, the pace of change was a lot slower.

In terms of experience, I guess I'm qualified to teach about the History of Computing. Hopefully it will be made a formal academic subject one day and when those cyber-mice start running just a little too fast for me, perhaps I can take up the teaching of it. I would be a living fossil who could talk of the dreamtime before the coming of the silicon ships ... oops, I mean chips.

Just in case that scenario doesn't pan out however, I intend to work on my musical skills over the holidays in an effort to boost my busking credentials. It may well be that, for an old IT teacher who couldn't handle the pace of change, the only livelihood will be to provide musical entertainment on the footpath to passers-by. It wouldn't be such a bad life, at least there would be no more reports to write.