Maid in Indonesia

I spent the first half of the day at work, helping Rekha prepare for the finals of the Plain English Speaking Awards, coming this Monday, and rehearsing with the cast of A Battle of Wits. Not too painful all told, given the talent and enthusiasm of those involved. There are aspects of teaching here that can be distinctly headache-generating but dealing directly with students on genuinely educational activities is not one of them.

On the home front Noi has been keeping herself up-dated on the fortunes of Sulis, the maid to the family in Melaka, who has now gone back for a break in Indonesia. As I understand it, she's there primarily to sort out family matters. I get the impression she wasn't keen to go, though she does have a daughter at home, looked after by her brother's family. There are problems, I think, with Sulis's husband who sounds like a bad lot. Noi mentioned the possibility of him being violent towards Sulis, which leaves one feeling frustrated over not being able to do anything to help. It seems also that most of the money Sulis has saved has already been handed over to pay for stuff connected with her daughter. Noi was concerned as to how she's going to get by for the few months she will be there.

The pressures and heartaches many maids face are painful to consider. That Sulis, like so many others, deals with it all cheerfully and uncomplainingly (she was worried about leaving Mak at a time when she felt she was needed in Melaka) is a lesson for the rest of us. And yet so often maids are talked about as if they were somehow not quite as deserving of ordinary respect and dignity as we consider ourselves.

A Lovely Audience, You've Been A

Another striking aspect of the drama presentations yesterday was how good the audience was. For the most part there were students watching, and the majority were from secondary schools, I guess from the five performing schools. Despite it being a fairly long afternoon (it took a little while to effect the transitions between plays) with some demanding material on offer, the level of concentration was high and sustained, and each item drew appreciative, sincere applause generally (not just from its 'own' people.)

One of my core instincts, which has almost reached aphoristic status in my mind, is that good art requires good audiences. I'm not entirely confident of this regarding the more private arts (poetry?) but I'm convinced of its truth regarding the public art forms, with drama and music in the forefront. I can't picture Shakespeare's audience as anything other than highly receptive, despite the cliches people fall into regarding the groundlings. At the very least they had a capacity for enjoying long, complex speeches, with a keen ear for the fine building blocks thereof. I'm not sure you'd find the equivalent in many places today.

Dramatically Speaking

I attended the SYF Drama Presentations this afternoon, well at least the final rehearsal for the real thing. Five schools were involved and it was highly enjoyable stuff, with lots to admire about the work that had been created. And this despite the general silliness of having schools competing for awards, which shows that art survives pretty much anything.

Our preparations for Made in the Middle Kingdom are picking up pace as we head towards the finishing line. I suppose getting shows mounted would be unbearably stressful were it not for the sheer enjoyment of being in the middle of making something happen and seeing others lending their talents to that.

The Magic of Words

The other day I found myself reading several pages of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things aloud to a class. It was the bit describing the khatakali dancers performing for themselves as penance for having demeaned themselves in their truncated version of the dance performed for the tourist audience. It's rare that I read anything at length in the classroom these days - it's not really suitable to do so for the part of the IB course I teach which tends to focus on students' independent reading. In the course of the reading I realised 1) how much I enjoy this kind of reading and 2) how much it felt like this is what doing Literature should be about. Of course, I could simply be rationalising my self-indulgence, but, equally, I could be onto something.

I think the best lesson I have ever given in the course of what is now a pretty long career was one years ago teaching a first year class in Rotherham, reading the chapter from (the wonderful) Stig of the Dump when the bad boys (the Snargets, if I remember rightly) offer innocent caveman Stig a cigarette. I found the sequence so funny I couldn't get to the end of a sentence without bursting into laughter, which, in turn, resulted in the kids laughing at both the book and me, in turn making me laugh even more - a kind of virtuous, but destructive cycle. At one point I was actually crying with laughter, as were several kids. In fact, at least three ended up rolling on the floor. I met one of those kids about six years later in a pub near the school and the first thing he talked about was how funny the book was and what a brilliant time we had. The complete anarchy of that half hour became a kind of shared secret between me and the kids, as if we'd shared some kind of glorious holiday together. Laughter is one of the great, true responses to literature. Another is tears. And no one can assess those.

Islamica

Last time I went to Wardah Books at Bussorah Street I got hold of the last two issues of Islamica Magazine. It's certainly a handsome publication and has maintained high standards (now up to issue 19) in terms of both design (it looks classy) and content. The two issues have been great to dip into, and I've just realised there's an on-line version here, though I've not had much of a look at this yet. The highlight of the latest issue - a wide-ranging interview with Noam Chomsky. As usual he provides refreshing (and frightening) perspectives on just about every major geo-political issue you can think of. For those who are fond of the phrase 'big picture' the professor provides a lesson in terms of realising the scope & depth of such a perspective.

A contentious question - for myself: Does Islam provide the only really major intellectual position from which to launch a thorough-going critique of capitalism? (I'm sure Chomsky would disagree, but it sometimes seems that way to me.)

Paying Attention

Reading something from Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life (actually a tasty excerpt in Nick Alchin's excellent textbook for Theory of Knowledge) and listening to Copeland's third symphony (closely, over ear-phones) put this idea in my mind: the quality of attention we bring to a work of art, be it a poem, a novel, a song, a painting, a garden, a meal, is vital to the very nature of the work. What we regard as obviously artistic demands such attention so effortlessly we know we should lend it that level of attention, and trust it will repay us through the intensity of the experience rendered. But the world is so remarkable at its core that anything is worth a second look, a closer listen, a finer discrimination in taste, simply on account of its sheer unlikeliness, its simple beauty of being. When it isn't being remarkable it's because we have drained it of significance by taking it for granted, a kind of lack of gratitude. In that sense anything is capable of being seen as a work of art, if we are prepared to regard it as such. (This position being very close to the definition of what makes a work of art in John Carey's What Good Are The Arts?)

This begs many difficult questions, not the least of which is whether one work of art is better than another, and on what grounds, but it helps explain the splendid democratization of the arts we've seen over the last hundred years or so.

And on a more practical note, it's the time of year for the Singapore Food Festival and Noi and I will be heading to our favourite haunt of Bussorah Street, and its abundance of eating places, this afternoon. I'm sure they'll be opportunities to devote my full attention to the delights we are likely to encounter there.

Keeping Informed

There's a kind of awful fascination in watching what the stress of being overworked can do to the people you work with, and being grimly aware of what it can do to oneself. Schools in Singapore make good places for such observation. Why they have decided it's a good thing to make their inhabitants impossibly busy I'm not sure, but presumably somehow someone somewhere has decreed such. Or maybe it's just the inevitable product the whole machine of education throws up without anybody being really quite in control?

Simply keeping some sort of grasp of the information that is piled upon one each day (without necessarily doing anything with it) is a Herculean task, except that lucky Hercules usually got to grips with material that was not so staggeringly banal. Happiness is an empty Inbox, not that mine ever is. And even then there's the stuff that gets said at meetings and briefings, sometimes meetings and briefings you can't actually attend but are expected to find out about, or the stuff that comes at you in the classrooms, on the corridors, in morning announcements, in announcements over the PA system, in your letter slot, or the stuff that everybody is mysteriously supposed to know and soak in through a species of informational osmosis.

When I first started teaching it was pretty easy to remember what you needed to remember. Most of this had to do with the classes you were teaching and the stuff you were teaching them. I suppose then that constituted about 90% of the information you had to process. My guess is that the quantity of that core of information has remained pretty much the same over the years, but now constitutes about 5% of what you need to deal with. In those days I managed with a simple diary. Around 1993 I began to back this up with a notebook. Over the last few years the amount I need to write in said notebook on a daily basis has increased exponentially, and I now have to back this up with odd bits of post-it notes as part of an increasingly sophisticated, increasingly crazy methodology for surviving each day without a major cock-up. This is not to mention bulging files of various documents, handouts, printouts of e-mails, and bulging virtual files of same, which I will now mention.

The odd thing is that I find almost all the various modes my paymasters instruct me to use for handling information - the record book, work review, records of training - almost entirely useless as a day-to-day way of coping with stuff.

One strategy I've notice one or two colleagues employ as a way of coping: as far as possible ignore it all until someone demands something from you. I admire the simplicity of this approach but lack the guts to try it.

Decrepitude

One other thing I might have mentioned about Night Birds in Nantucket: my copy smells great. I bought it back in 1986 so it's a little bit more than twenty years old now and it's aged well. It wouldn't have done quite so well if I'd shipped it over here back in 1988. The humid tropical climate has a way of rapidly aging books, especially Penguin paperbacks, oddly enough. But it's only been in these parts for three years or so, and most of its time in England was spent in a nice cold attic - perfect conditions for the preservation of bibliographical youthfulness. So it'll probably maintain its present mustily-sweet maturity for another couple of years.

At one time I found the whole business of textual decay rather depressing. I suppose if I've ever collected anything it's been books, and no collector enjoys seeing his prize pieces showing distinct signs of decrepitude, if not outright senile collapse. (There's a wonderful lament over Singapore's climate and what it does to the written word in Philip Jeyaretnam's Abraham's Promise - my copy of which is printed on really nice paper.) But I think I've come to terms with it. A book is only really a book if it's being read, and reading is a thing of the mind, which can always be kept fresh (I hope.)

And now it's time to contradict myself: is there any smell more satisfying than that of a well printed brand new book? And isn't the experience of reading a finely designed, handsome volume made the more pleasurable as a result of said design? When I did Jane Austen's Emma for 'A' level the school gave us a little hardback of the text, printed on very thin paper. Somehow it was just right for that apparently frail but most wise of all novels. I can still remember reading the opening pages, the look of the text on the page and, even though I've read it twice since then, no other edition has quite worked for me in the same way in terms of the sensual experience of the reading.

Holiday in Nantucket

The last three days have been exceptionally busy ones in terms of work. (Exceptionally busy = impossible, in teacher-speak.) Simply keeping going and hoping to get through to the end of the day and sleep has been the order of things. But I did manage to finish Joan Aiken's terrifically entertaining Night Birds on Nantucket, and I'm rather pleased with myself for having the good sense to do so. I claim good sense as I've tended in the past to shut myself off from sustained reading when work gets unbearably tough on the grounds that there's no time for it, but by easing up on filling time by mulling over matters of concern at the workplace it's possible to hack out an hour here and there, and that's all you need to find the time to make real progress in fairly short texts.

The magic of Aiken's children's fiction guarantees a break from the tedium of earning a living, and life on board the Sarah Casket followed by a sojourn in Nantucket in the delightful company of the feisty Dido Twite (surely a precursor of Pullman's Lyra) proved peculiarly relaxing. In terms of plot I can't claim the novel was particularly gripping (you just can't take any of the action particularly seriously, perhaps the reason why Aiken never achieved real fame for her work in the genre) but that's not really the point. The satisfaction lies in character, situation, atmosphere, the oddly poetic quality of the splendidly mangled dialogue. And another layer of enjoyment in Night Birds lies in the sly parody of Melville's Moby Dick.

Unfortunately I've run out of children's books (I brought Night Birds back from KL, where I've still got a few titles to get through) and it looks like I'll have to address myself to something a bit more worthy in terms of so-called literary merit. It seems the vacation is over.

Entrepreneurial

Today's a welcome holiday, for Youth Day no less. Having said that, I've spent most of it marking, as was the case with Saturday and Sunday. In addition to the marking I also kept busy with other school-related matters. On Saturday morning (and early-afternoon, as the event over-ran) I accompanied our entry for the Junior College section of the Plain English Speaking competition. Rekha's a very talented girl who put in a solid, if slightly nervous (and who can blame her), performance and duly was moved on to the final. We've got a bit of time now to prepare for the final and, with a bit of work, I can see her being in contention for a top award, possibly the very top. I sort of enjoyed all the speakers, though one or two visibly struggled. It's good to see youngsters giving it their best shot, especially in an event that calls for so much courage in terms of having to deliver unscripted material at short notice (as they do for the 'impromptu' round) before an audience. I noticed one guy who looked a bit miserable at not having made it to the final and felt sad for him - actually I thought he'd deserved to get through. But that's the thing about competitions, you're going to get losers, like you're going to get in life, and sometimes, often, pretty much always, it's not going to feel quite fair. It's good to be philosophical about such things, and remarkably easy when you're not the one who didn't make it.

Yesterday we went to a wedding in the early afternoon (my quota for marking having been duly completed) followed by three or so hours at the Young Entrepreneurs' Fair held at the HDB Hub Hougang. It wasn't that ACS(I) were doing anything for the fair though. Rather we were there to support Admiralty Primary's stall at which Fi Fi was one of the six-girl team. Not that we restricted ourselves to buying from them - we circulated heroically and found ourselves persuaded to part with the readies for quite a number of items. The various stalls were competing against each other to see who could make the most, Singapore's way of inculcating the entrepreneurial spirit in its young. ('Enterprise' and 'entrepreneurial' are powerful buzz-words in the curious language of Singapore's education system.) I suspect that quite a few of the participants may have come to the conclusion that it's so hard to sell anything in the real world that it'd probably be best to get a job with a steady salary not tied to sales quotas. But I got the impression that the kids were finding ways to have a good time, which is what really counts.

Our best buy: the bunny in the rocking chair, as pictured above, now occupying a place of honour on the shelf above the computer.