Pictures

I. Drones

SOURCE: Drones for Chavez

The comic is by Matt Bors. Hugo Chavez is the anti-America dictator President of Venezuela. He wants to develop drones, or remote controlled planes, with help from Iran. The three people in the lower panels are US President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and UK Prime Minister David Cameron. America routinely uses drones to assassinate “terrorists” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and God-knows-where else in the world. So now Chavez wants to catch up.

II. Billionaires

SOURCE: The billionaires list

Total net worth of nine billionaires in Malaysia equals 18.3 percent of the country’s total output (GDP. Note though that total net worth (wealth) is a stock while GDP is a flow measure.

III. Television

SOURCE: The Old and Uneducated Watch the Most TV

So much about children watching TV all the time. At least in the US, old people actually watch more TV than young people. However, I imagine our senior citizens having more active lifestyles than their US counterparts. Ours spend time taking care of their homes and gardens and pets or grandchildren. Then, they go to the mosque every night to pray and listen to the ceramah.

Exams

I invigilated three examinations recently. The first paper, I was only there to satisfy the required staff-student ratio. I filled in for a colleague for the second, and was asked to do the same for another for the third paper. The first examination was uneventful while the second and third were more “interesting”, particularly the second.

It was a three-hour paper on a Sunday afternoon. Previously, all our papers were at most two-and-a-half hours long. Now they are three hours long. Apparently, they decided that all papers should last the same (three hours) so not to disturb students sitting for examinations for different papers in big venues. Accounting typically had three-hour papers.

Anyway, with less than an hour left on the clock on, we had a suspected cheating case. I’ll spare you the details. The student, as only to be expected, profusely swore that he was not cheating. Regardless, in such situations we were bound by procedures, so we followed them as best as we could. The student was from one of the sections I was responsible for, so I had to fill up some forms for the legal unit and might later be called to a hearing.

It was obvious from the confiscated answer script that the student was failing the paper. Less than half of the multiple choice questions were answered while the answer booklet only had three partially written pages. Perhaps it was an act of desperation, which in no way justifies trying to cheat through an examination.

Later I learned that the student, an international, was taking the course for the third and final attempt. I feel sorry for him. It troubles me that we could admit a student from halfway across the globe, make him sit through two years of pre-sessional language preparation, and let him fail on the first year. It just doesn’t seem right. I think we failed him at least as much as he failed himself. Either he should not have been admitted in the first place or we should have done a better job, our job, at preparing him.

During the third examination on a Saturday, a student walked into the examination hall at 0940 when the paper started at 0900. The rule says that a student cannot come later than 30 minutes after the start of an exam, so we had to ask her to leave. We also turned away another student who came at 1015. The first student claimed that she was not aware of the rule. The second owned up that he overslept.

11 months

My baby turned 11 months old last Monday, alhamdulillah! We’re left with less than one month to mark our first year of parenthood.

Since the moment I held him in my arms, I have been looking forward to each day watching him grow. He’s now obsessed with the flash cards I bought for him. He’s more keen in books rather than the TV (alhamdulillah, hope it lasts!). He makes some funny head movements when listening to any catchy music, which can be as simple as TV Alhijrah’s montage.

Oh my son, may you continue to develop a strong personality like Saiyidina Umar and Umar Abdul Aziz. Ibu and Ayah will do our best to raise you to become an asset for Ummah. Like Prof Muhaya said, we are raising a syurga potential. Amin.