First Day of School

So today was the first day of the 2015 school year. I’m still teaching 3 Standard 3 classes, but this years brings with it the new experience of being able to teach a so-called “A” class. That was an experience I was looking forward to. Because they’re considered the most academically competent children among their peers in the school, I was expecting a certain degree of English proficiency from them. I was looking forward to not having to think about translating words and phrases for full lesson lengths anymore.

I was also intrigued by how it would feel to teach a class from the very beginning of the schooling year. Up until now, I had only taken over other people’s classes, so that was another new experience in school that I was anticipating.

Getting to enter the “A” class just now, I realised how misplaced my expectations were. Sure, the children understood me for the most part, but when I required them to speak (it was a listening & speaking activity), most of them couldn’t speak in complete sentences, with a few not even bothering to speak in English at all. And even when they did speak in full English sentences, some even got the pronouns wrong, calling Zarif that you find at the beginning of the textbook a “she”. This isn’t to say that the students are bad or anything, but it certainly made me rethink my approach to the class and at what level I should pitch my lessons to the students.

As for the second thing I was looking forward to, the feel is somewhat the same from previous experiences of entering classes for the first time. The students are still in their shy-shy phase, seemingly very well behaved, good listeners, on-task for the most part. But even I know by now that this is just a honeymoon phase. Once the year really kicks in, then the real challenges start emerging. When the students start exploring what they can and cannot do while the teacher is in class, what they can and cannot get away with, when conflicts between classmates start to form and escalate, that’s where the real teaching is at.

For now, I can only try my best to let the students understand what I expect from them, and be very specific about it. I don’t like being serious a lot, which is why I like goofing about in class, but if the situation calls for it, being firm is something that has to be done and I need to convey to the students well enough so that they understand what I’m saying and why I’m saying it.

I guess at the end of the day it’s about being able to adapt. Good teachers are good at adapting to the situation at hand. Of course they come in with a lesson plan at hand, but when the circumstances call for it, they need to think on their feet and improvise with what they have to deliver what they need to and ensure that the students come away from that class having learned something.

I’m in that business now, and I can admit that it’s not easy. In fact, it’s far from easy. But nobody said it would be. And at the end of the day, it is definitely worth it.

Ambitions

One of the most common questions to ask kids, no matter what the setting is, is “what is your ambition?” and it was a pretty big deal back then. There were your typical answers such as “doctor” or “engineer” or even “pilot” (that was me). Nothing wrong with wanting to be those things, but as a teacher, when you go around the class and ask them their ambitions, and the same answers come up again and again and again, it gets kinda boring (which is why you gotta spice things up a little bit in the classroom when up against “boring” activities).

There were also your less than typical responses. Some of those responses that I’ve gotten throughout my short career so far are “national archer”, “comedian” and “fashion designer”. The children that gave those responses certainly got me intrigued and led me to ask even further question about how that particular ambition came about, but that’s for another post.

Like I said, it was quite a big deal to have an ambition. Everyone had to want to be something, to do something, that one thing, for the rest of their lives. My usual reply to the question was “pilot” up until 14. I always liked the idea of getting to travel the world. But then I didn’t like the idea so much anymore, since I discovered that being a pilot entailed having to frequently leave your family behind for long periods of time, and I just wasn’t raised that way. Then I floated around, not really knowing what to be anymore for a couple of years. Luckily, no teacher asked that question to us 15-year-olds anymore. 

But then Form 4 came and we were asked to really consider what we wanted to do in the future, so that we could either be separated into the technical sciences or the pure sciences (?), or whether or not we wanted to take up accounting as a subject. This pressed me to really hunker down and have a think about what I wanted to do, and I ended up with “teacher”. The thinking behind this was that I observed that I was only good at two things, rugby (but I couldn’t make a lasting career out of it since I wasn’t THAT good) and English. So I chose the latter. Plus, being a teacher also meant that I could spend time with my family, so that was definitely a factor as well.

I ended up signing up for the class in which most of my friends agreed to go, since any stream I chose wouldn’t really affect my ambitions. All of the classes had English as a subject, and that was all that mattered to my ambitions. Later on though, because of some reason, my group of friends was split up anyway, so we could only hang out as a group during recess. Boohoo.

I stayed with the same ambition for quite a while. Throughout college, I maintained that being a teacher was the right thing for me. That is, up until my final year. Then things started to go awry. Well, maybe awry’s not the right word. It was more like, things didn’t go according to plan.

I went for practicum and started doubting my intention of being a teacher. It’s not like I didn’t like the children or my fellow teachers. I loved them. But I just felt like I wanted to do something else too. Up to that point, I wanted to write, I wanted to sing, I wanted to make videos and stuff.

There was a piece of advice that I gave a bunch of people when we were discussing this topic a couple of years back. I told them not to put something concrete as their ambitions. Because then when you achieve your ambitions, whether it be “doctor”, “engineer” or “teacher”, then when you finally get there, you will be prone to get into a comfort zone and say to yourself “I’ve achieved what I want out of life. Now what?” It puts one in a bit of a pickle, so I advised them to pick something that can never be achieved, and I gave them my newly-formed ambition at the time: I want to make the world a better place. Then there can never be a “now what?” because there are so many things that can be done to make the world a better place, I wouldn’t run out of things to do, thus keeping my distance from the dreaded comfort zone.

And right now, I don’t want to limit myself to just teaching in order to achieve that ambition of mine. I want to do more. I want to write, regularly, and get people to read and respond to my writing. I want to write songs, regularly, so as to get people to listen to what I have to say and bring them an experience they’re not getting through listening to other songs. I want to act, and help scriptwriters and directors to materialise their visions. 

I just want to do a lot more stuff, but my biggest enemy in being able to do all that stuff is myself. My own lazy, unproductive, untalented, unmotivated self. I need to push myself to get things done, but pushing myself is one of the things that I’m least capable of.

Having said that, I am doing things right now. I am writing. I am making songs. I’m also teaching. I’m not really acting, but hey, can’t win them all, I guess? 

I suppose the big point is that I now have one psuedo-ambition that has led to me having several other traditional ambitions. And I think that’s just fine by me. 

And if any of my students say that they want to be more than one thing, I’d say more power to them.

Sustainability and Spirituality

So I attended a talk about sustainability and spirituality earlier today. These are the notes that I were able to jot down during the whole talk:

- the planet is slowly but surely being pushed to its limits; some aspects have even already been exceeded such as biodiversity loss and the nitrogen cycle. (how was this measured? Who or what determines where that limit is? How is that limit determined?)

- Earth Overshoot Day 2014 – marks the day we’ve used up all the natural resources Earth can produce that year, and it was only August.

- Every 40 seconds, a species dies out (according to Bund).

- 29.8 million people are in slavery today (World Slavery Index).

- So many studies have been looking at climate change, yet where are the practical solutions?

- The paradigm of profit-making was never changed in sustainable development discourse. It’s always a discussion of “how do we still make money while impacting the environment less?”

- Encik Anwar Fazal –> awesome dude.

- Our ideology on/of growth is so proliferated, we have lost touch with the notion of limits, or the sense of “enough-ness”.

- Indigenous cultures have an understanding of limits/ They understand how much can be taken from the forests and the rivers, reinforcing a culture of sustainability.

*

After the talk, I had a discussion with another attendee about how the speaker outlined the relationship between sustainability and spirituality. He didn’t. This is probably due to him trying to sell his book, so if he gave the answers in the talk, people might not have to buy the book anymore to get to that discussion. Thus is the nature of profit-driven ecosystems.

So we went ahead and tried our hand at doing that ourselves. What we came up with was “the only way to lead a meaningful a way of life that is sustainable to the environment was to be able to tap into our spirituality, our sense of interconnectedness with the rest of the world and feel a certain association with the other living things on Earth, both in the now and in the future. When we manoeuvre life in such a fashion, it is hard not to be lead an environmentally sustainable life, for that sense of kinship and bond we have with the things around us do not allow us to treat them badly.”

That was probably what he was getting at. I don’t know.

Monthly Resolutions

You know that feeling you get whenever a new year arrives? That feeling of that you’re invigorated, motivated, ready to punch life in the face and say “world, I’m coming out to get you!”

And with that feeling, you start doing stuff. Those stuff may be things you’ve always wanted to do, or may have already been doing in the past but due to some reason or other, you slowly (or suddenly) stopped doing it. Then a new year comes along and you’re like “that’s it! I’m gonna get this done!” or something along those lines.

New years are typically when people reset their goals, saying things like “in 2015, I’m gonna read more books!” or “in 2015, I’ll shed 15 kilos!” These sayings or objectives go by the name of “new year’s resolutions”, and, for a lot of people it seems, these things are an annual ritual.

And people usually do start doing those things they said they’d do. We’d suddenly start picking up more books, make more of an effort to get in shape, start writing more, all that hoopla. It’s that magical sense of invigoration and motivation that I mentioned earlier that drives us to do more of those things because those goals and resolutions are still on the back of the mind, so we pick ourselves up and go.

But of course, very rarely do these resolutions stick or get achieved. Usually by February, one would be hard-pressed to retell another person what their new year’s resolution was. And then we go about our daily lives, doing things we’ve always been doing, and not doing things that we’ve always been ignoring. Things go back to normal, one would say.

I was recently struck by this phenomenon. Why am I SO motivated to do things at the beginning of the year? And I’ve noticed that I’ve been getting a lot of stuff that I’ve always wanted to do done within these past couple of weeks. I’ve been writing more, reading more, even recorded a new song (you can catch that at www.soundcloud.com/inianwarhadi ) because, as my argument stated earlier, there’s just this feeling that takes over me that makes it feel possible to do all these things.

And I’m actually scared. Scared that this feeling will fizzle out by the end of the month, and I’ll be plain old unmotivated, unproductive Anwar again and not do anything noteworthy for the rest of the year. Because, looking back, that’s what happens, every single year without fail. Why can’t that feeling be present at the beginning of every month, or even of every week, or even of every day?

Maybe it’s because we don’t have resolutions every day or every week or every month. We only have them every year, and we are jolted into remembering that time is passing by whenever the final number of the date changes. We forget that we get a month older every month, a week older every week, and a day older every passing day. Thus is the human, ever forgetful.

In an effort to solve this predicament, I propose that we do resolutions more often, like monthly resolutions. And we be specific about them. We say to ourselves “In January 2015, I’m going to write a piece for my blog every damn day!” and no matter how sucky or writer’s-blocked you feel about it, you get on the computer and you write some stuff up. Only for that month. Then move on to the next month and say “In February 2015, I’m going to write a piece for my blog every damn day!” again, so that you’ll always have something to prove, to yourself more than anyone.

Of course, I’m writing this for myself, mostly. I know that if I made weekly resolution, I’d be too lazy to think of that stuff up so often, apatah lagi kalau daily. I think this is going to be what works for me, and I’m going to try and roll with it.

So resolutions for January 2015:

- write a piece for the blog every damn day

- make music as often as you can, like, one song every two-three days

- read every damn day, and lift a quote from whatever you’re reading and post that on your Facebook page.

p/s - if you don’t have time for it, MAKE time for it.

Self-love > Self-esteem

I am currently doing a short-story project (that’s actually long overdue). If you had a chance to catch the tweet I made a couple of weeks ago, you’d know I asked for story suggestions from whoever was reading at the time. They could give me any story they wanted told and I would write it out for them. I tweeted that tweet because I had a sudden urge to write a short story, but I didn’t know what to write about. I initially only wanted to do one, since I wasn’t expecting more than one person to respond to the tweet. Fortunately, several people ended up tweeting me their story suggestions. I am grateful to all of them, so I screen-capped the suggestions and kept them on my desktop to remind myself of the stories that I can write about.

I ended up postponing the project because procrastination, and by the time I finally made time to choose one to get started on and get some words down, I came down with a fever. Then when I got better, again, procrastination.

Just a few minutes ago I tried picking up where I left off, but admittedly, I am finding it difficult to put words into writing at the moment. Classic human, I point the finger outwards, to a certain blog a friend of mine brought to my attention, sinkandfloat.wordpress.com . This blog is run by one of the most amazing local writers to put words on paper (or screen, whatever), and reading her stuff, I can’t help but feel like my own writing now seems a lot like the scribblings of some dude fresh out of school and is still only writing at SPM-level, like, cukup-cukup nak bagi dapat A dalam SPM level, whereas she on the other hand is like way up there (imagine me gesturing with my hand up above my head in a salute-like motion), the big leagues, the pros, where one has got to be to be considered worthy.

And I guess I’m second guessing myself, feeling like anything I write on that story sounds just, ugh, bad, and tasteless, and bland, and hollow, and just, ugh.

But, yeah, I came across a tweet the other day, from Miss @arlinabanana who, upon being told on ask.fm that she “got high self-esteem”, said:

I don’t think I have high self esteem. I am my biggest critic. Like…literally big. Ha ha. Anyway, a great psychiatrist did a research on this and he said self-esteem is not important. In fact, it’s even better if you don’t have it. What matters most is self love. It’s not about whether you can do something or not but it’s more to, if you can’t do it, will you still love and accept yourself? This way you can always try and fail and try again without feeling like a sore loser. That’s how you become a winner love.

She captioned this screen-cap with “self-love > self-esteem”. She later joked that she should open an advice column one day. I wouldn’t mind if that actually came true.

The point she raised about being able to love yourself, even with the realisation that you suck at what you are doing, that totally hit me. It’s been on my mind now for several days (or maybe just two? I don’t remember when she first tweeted that) and I feel that it’s a very important part of staying positive; and that's being accepting of who you are.

A lot of times, we tell other people and ourselves to accept others the way they are, flaws and all. Love them anyway, and that can only lead to good/better things. But we rarely apply that when it comes to ourselves. At least I don’t. I’m super critical about myself and what I expect from myself. I have a certain standard for myself and the stuff I do, so when I’m not up to par, I can be very unforgiving of myself.

This inability to forgive myself, in the end, cripples me and prevents me from moving forward, since I think and tell myself “you suck anyway, why bother doing it if you’re gonna suck so hard at it?” After that I just sit there doing nothing but feeling sorry for myself, which in turn makes me feel guilty because I’m not doing anything productive, not doing anything I love doing, which makes me feel worse because I am aware that I am in no way improving the situation and am only turning myself into a suckier person than I previously was, and thus the vicious cycle goes.

Now I see that the key to breaking that unhealthy cycle is self-love. I need to have the willingness to love myself enough to say “Yeah, I know I suck. But what’s important is that I’m okay with it.”

Being able to be okay with yourself, even when you’ve admitted to sucking can only bring positive results, because then you won’t shy away from doing the thing anyway, and by doing the thing, over and over again, you will surely get better at it, and you’ll suck less, and even your inner-voice will start to notice this and start saying “hey, you’re not so bad after all.” That will encourage and motivate you to do even more, becoming even better as you practice it more and more.

To conclude, yes, I suck. I know. And it’s not wrong to admit it. But I have to be able to say, hey, I still love me, no matter how good or how bad I am. So go ahead, do what I want to do, I won’t love me any less just because I’m not good (yet) at something. Do what I love and I will love me anyway. As long as I do things that make me happy.

Okay that last part got a little weird, even for my standards.

Post-Flood Clean Up

I have some relatives who live in Kuala Krai, Kelantan. As you might have known, the district, alongside a lot of others on the Malaysian East Coast were affected by the worst floods to hit the country in five decades. My family and I were able to go there for three days to help with cleaning up both my grandparents’ and my aunt’s house. They live opposite each other, so both of them were quite affected by the floods.

We spent three whole days trying to clean up two houses, and alhamdulillah, we succeeded in clearing those houses from broken furniture as well as the mud (oh my goodness, the mud) from the houses.

The interior of the houses were in bad shape. You could safely say that 90% of my grandparents’ possessions had to be thrown away. Furniture had to be discarded, because the water had made them soggy, so they broke so very easily. You could say that all of the floors were covered in at least two inches of mud. With broken mirrors and glass scattered around, going in without safety boots was taking a big risk.

The only things that could be salvaged were some gold, cash that were not made of paper, some plates, pots and pans, and that’s basically it. The rest had to be scooped up or carried outside of the house and put into several big piles of junk that will no longer be used anytime soon. Even their cars were swept away by the water.

We went and did what we could. We carried the broken furniture out, scooped mud from the floor, and cleaned the walls. But most of all, I think, our presence there was the most valuable thing we could have given them. Just being there, showing them that we cared, surely put a smile to their faces. I was glad I could be a part of that.

Having said all that, my grandparents and my aunt were actually the lucky ones. At the end of the floods, they still had a place to call their homes, with roofs over their heads. Along the way to my grandparents’ kampung area, we could see houses torn down by the floods, with people having to make do with makeshift shelters by propping up tarps in sticks to cover their heads from the sun and the rain as well as to become their walls for privacy.

At night they had to settle with crowding around candles, whole families just sitting in a circle around a single candle. Of course, help in the form of food that people were giving as charity were in their possession, but one can’t help but think about how they are to get their lives back together in the conditions that fate has left them in.

One wonders how we would cope with that situation, had that hand be dealt our way.

In this piece, I would like to implore anyone who has the time and freedom to, please go over there and help to clean up whatever you can. Most settlements have enough stocked food to last quite a while. What they need now are hands to help with cleaning up the affected areas. And staying over there, sharing some sweat and laughs with them is, in my view, also good for the soul.

Publishing A Book

So as you might have guessed from the highly literal title up there, yours truly shall be publishing a book next February. Here's an announcement poster: 

With extra cheese pleese.

It'll be joint-launched with a book from one of the most talented local singer-songwriters to grace the land, Miss Takahara Suiko. My talent is micro-sized compared to hers, so do yourselves a favour and check her songs out either on Youtube or on Youtube!

As you might be able to see from the poster there, my book will be a double book, so you'll have two covers to not judge. Not an easy feat, but I know you'll be able to handle it. I BELIEVE IN YOU!

Why the double book? Well, I thought it'd be cool to divide the book into two parts, the non-fictional part (Whatever You Say I Am) and the fictional part (I'm OK). Poyo ja, kan? Tapi aku memang poyo pun, so takpa la. Hahaha k

The contents of the book mostly consist of the things I've written here, on the blog, with a few extra things, such as the final parts of my 2011 project "By The Water", so if you want to know how I ended that thing, you can find out in the book! Hooray!

Okay, you might be able to detect that I'm writing this in a more-excited-than-usual tone, and it should be getting annoying by now, so I'll just leave it at that.

May peace be upon you.

Cheers.