Organic-Ally

In my short walk to the Post Office and back I was struck by three family situations. #1: Little blonde toddler running after balding dad who went, "Come on, catch up with your gingerbread Dad." #2: Dad and son had just crossed the road and dad had swooped son into his arms. Both having a lovely chat. #3: Attention drawn to child (about 11-12 years old) stamping and completely destroying a pair of glasses on the ground. It was a family of mother plus three small children plus this lad. They must have just come from the cinema and had been given those pretty sturdy 3-D glasses. Mum was tending to a much younger child when the oldest child stamped on the glasses. Mum: "Any why did you have to do that?" Boy: "Because no one would recognize me." Mum: "Now pick up those bits and put them in the bin." I don't know what transpired before this incident. But the look on the boy's face and his manner suggested to me that he needed some help with an...

Earlier this evening I said to "my boys" how I always enjoyed our meal times together. Son was telling good jokes and giving good reports of life at school. What more do I want? Had to explain how when I was his age meal times were served over two hours. Because of the wide range of our ages and the two-session school system, my siblings and I never seemed to sit down at the same table. Either I came home far too late to eat with any of the family (older siblings would have eaten and gone onto evening classes) or I had to eat way too early before I set off for school. That is why I always made it a point that our family sat down together for meals. No TV. No books. And lately no talk about Lego and computer games. We're at the end of our first half-term. There has been many changes, not least of all that son is walking to and from school by himself. He's supposed to be at a 'silly age'. But he's also getting more and more responsible and I AM NOT COMPLAINI...

Woohoo! And what are they saying? Apparently: "governments need to cut benefits and tackle restrictive practices and regulations in the labour market to boost employment levels". What does this mean? Minimum wage, maximum hours, and everything in between? Right. Original report here . Who would win the Nobel Prize for saying that "ethical" employment practices would benefit all?

Sunday morning and having breakfast with son. Somehow we drifted into a discussion on asking the right questions. My point was as we grow up and are being introduced to new knowledge, knowing the right answers is important. But as we progress up the learning ladder it is not knowing the answers but knowing which questions to ask that matter most. It is the case in research. The whole point of research is finding the answers. What answers we find is directly correlated with the questions we ask. So this report on How Fair is Britain? appears to have the statistics for all sorts of un/fairness. My question to my son is: Were they asking the right questions? Take the issue of gender and how boys do not know how to sit still. Or sitting still – something girls tend to be better at. "So a boy can't sit still, so he gets told off, so he starts to feel like a bad boy, so he starts to behave like a bad boy, so he gets told off some more, so he gets angry, so the teacher gets angry an...

(A shorter, less controversial version of this was published in the Straits Times online section on 11th October. I had assumed that the Editor was not going to run it. Apologies for the overlaps.) The English-Singlish debate has thrown up a vociferous group defending the use of Singlish, largely because they see Singlish as being tied up with a Singapore identity. (I tried to explain how being a good Singaporean should not preclude us from learning to speak good English in a letter to the press .) This group seems to be made up of people who are able to speak (or at least write) excellent English when they choose to. There is a deafening silence, at least in the English cyber-media (and understandably so), from the Singlish-speaking group who could most benefit from learning to speak good English. If I were a Marxian sociologist (not the same as being a Marxist, nota bene ) I would say that this ‘good English’ group own the “means of production” and the ‘Singlish’ group do not. In or...