Next Best Thing

Taking a short break from marking exam scripts.

I’ve been to a 3D cinema exactly three times; in all three occasions more for the 3D experience than what was shown. Well, actually they were more of the I’m-already-here-so-why-the-heck-not kind of occasions.

Hopefully, they’ll show U2 3D in KL. If there was to be just one time I’d suffer through the horrible traffic to get to the IMAX Theatre at Berjaya Times Square, this would be it.

Deposits

There are three basic types of deposit accounts – savings, current (or demand or checking), and fixed (or time or term) account. They are common, general knowledge I never thought that I’d ever have to explicitly “teach” to first year undergraduates. Yet, I found out that they were not, in fact, so common knowledge; at least not to the few students I met last week.

Their excuse was that they never “learned” about them in school, which got me wondering for a moment how the rest of us got to know about the deposits.

The group of students basically set camp in my office for three days leading to their final exam paper last Friday. Instead of asking specific questions, the first thing they did when they entered my office on the first day was to ask me to re-teach them some of the topics covered in class during the semester.

“Where were you during the semester, playing hooky?”
“No sir, we attended all your classes!”
“And did what, daydreaming?”
“No, we were paying very close attention, trying very hard to understand your lectures”
“Trying to understand?”

So they had problems with English. Although we are an English (and Arabic)-speaking university, unfortunately a lot of the students (and in actual fact administrative and academic staff too) have serious problems with the English language.

Of course, there was no way I was going to just re-teach them the topics. Instead, I asked them to explain to me whatever they understood, while leading them along the way by asking questions. In the end, interestingly, we found out that they had actually got most of the stuff, requiring me to just fill in some gaps and then summarize the topics.

I hope they did well in the exam.

__________
PS: The question on the types of deposits came about when they asked me what a time deposit was. I refused to tell them and told them that I would not proceed until they figured it out one way or another, so one of them took out her mobile and asked her father.

Just About Time

I’ve finished reading The Chronicles of Narnia (Narnia), YAY! I can’t believe that it’s almost three years since I bought the book during the summer of 2005. That was when I took a one-month trip home from Boston before finishing my last semester at BU. I started reading but didn’t finish the book. My mother said that she’d like to read it, so I left it at home. It turned out she only read a few pages of the book before depositing it onto the bookshelf at the back room.

Narnia is often compared to The Lord of the Rings (LOTR). After all, C S Lewis was a good friend of J R R Tolkien. The comparison was the main reason I picked up the book. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was then coming out as a movie too, so I didn’t want to watch the movie first, as I did with LOTR. However, the two books are actually very different. While LOTR is “adult-friendly”, Narnia was obviously written for children with its overprotective, if not totally condescending, storytelling. Even The Hobbit reads heavier.

So now, what do I read next?

These Walls are Loaded

I like military hardware as artifacts of technology; and that include guns. This does not mean that I’d like to own a gun, though. I don’t think that I’ll buy a gun if private gun ownership is freely allowed in this country. I would want to buy an airsoft replica, though, and a real bow, a real badass compound bow.

Anyway, I just want to put up my current wallpapers, that’s all. They are from FNH USA, the US subsidiary of Fabrique Nationale de Herstal (FN), a well-known Belgian small arms manufacturer. By the way, FNH USA has a well designed website (with downloadable wallpapers!) but the parent company’s website is so terrible it doesn’t even run properly on Firefox. They have quite a few designs available, but the two below are my favorites. You can find them (and the others) here.

The first features the FN P90 personal defence weapon (PDW). Personal defence weapons are a class of weapons between handguns and submachine guns. Primarily, they are meant to provide air and ground vehicle crews with more firepower than that offered by standard military issue handguns. You may find the P90 familiar if you watch Stargate SG-1/Atlantis on television.

The second wallpaper features both the P90 and the FN SCAR, a new generation family of assault rifles developed for the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). SCAR stands for SOF (that’s Special Operations Force) Combat Assault Rifle.

Inevitability

I
Science fiction grand master Arthur C Clarke died on Wednesday. Honestly, I have not read any of his works though quite a few of them, like Childhood’s End, have been high on my to-read list for a long time. I moved on to contemporary science fiction after I was finished with Isaac Asimov. Beyond science fiction, Clarke was renowned as a proponent of satellite communications as wells as the space elevator.

II
Semester 2, 2007/2008 is now over but for the coming final examinations. Among the students who came to see during the week was one who was worried about his grades. Unless he manages to score at least 78% in the final examination, which is very unlikely, he has already flunked the course. I didn’t even recognize his face. He asked if I could do something to help him pass. What, now?

When I asked him to explain himself missing classes and quizzes during the semester, which explained why I didn’t recognize him from my class, he was evasive. I should just take his word on it, is it?

“I had a personal problem” he said.
“What was the problem?”
“It was, well, personal, sir”

I said no. I told him that he had had the whole semester to come to see me for help; I told him that on principle it would be grossly unfair to others who would also have use for some extra marks. It is time that he faces the consequences of his actions, or rather inactions.

He left, and I felt terrible. I felt terrible because I realized then that though I definitely wouldn’t give him any extra assignments, I might have considered offering him to take the quizzes he missed, if only he told me what his problem was. Never mind that I still think that he will fail the course.

On the other hand, I suppose I should have learned to expect this sort of thing at the end of every semester.

A Little Behind

It’s already March and I’ve only finished reading one small book so far this year, a little behind my at-least-one-book-per-month target. I also only managed a measly ten books last year. As it is, I’m not even halfway through The Chronicles of Narnia, currently reading the third book, The Horse and His Boy.

Hopefully I’ll be able to finish the book by the end of the month so I can move on to The Children of Hurin and that Gundam novel. In the meantime, there are already a few books I’m eyeing to order soon; like David Weber’s sequel to Off Armageddon Reef, By Schism Rent Asunder that is coming out in July, as well as John Scalzi’s latest Zoe’s Tale due to be released in August.

:P

I’m also a little behind with my classes. There are only two weeks left in the semester. I’m current with the teaching, but no thanks to the many public holidays falling on either Tuesday or Thursday during the semester, I wasn’t able to give the students the number of quizzes I wanted to.

At the same time, they are worried about their standing grades – the average score for the mid-semester test was just below the passing mark. I didn’t think that the test was too difficult. Alas, I think I better come up with something to help them improve their grades over this weekend.

:P

Apparently, many of the students who want to do practical training during the coming long holiday didn’t write their own letters to the organizations they apply to. Instead, they just sent my reference letter – just my reference letter – along with their résumé. No wonder I keep getting all those replies. Our practical training program is optional, so students are supposed to find and arrange their own placements. But many claimed not to know how to write their own letters.

“How do I write the application letter?”

“What should I put in the letter?”

Come on, weren’t there enough letter-writing exercises in high school? I guess between format-less emails and abbreviated text messages nobody remembers how to write a proper letter anymore.

By the way, some of the letters I received from the companies and organizations also contained the same glaring grammatical mistakes our students typically make. I guess that means that our students aren’t all that bad.

:P

The Replacement

So I bought myself a new mobile last Saturday. It was an SE W660i just like the one my brother picked up in January.

Actually buying a new mobile wasn’t half as much fun as just thinking about buying a new mobile. For one thing, you have to shell out some real hard cash or swipe your plastic. There was the W960i I had been thinking about over the last few weeks with its 8GB internal memory. I was mighty tempting, but it was [1] a tad too expensive and [2] might not be what I need. Apart from the obvious making and receiving voice calls and text messages, which I actually don’t do much, I use the mobile primarily as a substitute MP3 player, hence the Walkman phone.

I was happy with the old W800i. The W660i is pretty much the same phone, but with 3G.