Tinker, Tailor

Long time ago I blogged about my interactions with Zac, now 8 years old and still loves animals. Read those posts at Me vs Kid part 1 and Me vs Kid part 2 before reading the rest of this.

After a short conversation where he told me about certain species of otters and squirrels and other animals (I can’t remember the exact names) that are endangered in Singapore (which left me feeling a little inadequate), he excitedly asked,

“Do you know what I want to be when I grow up??”

“No idea. Maybe… a fireman?”

I knew it was gonna be some animal-related thing, but I decided to play dumb.

“Nope! I give you ten tries to get it correct!”

“Zookeeper!”

“Nope.”

“Zoologist!”

“No.”

“Dog trainer?”

“No.”

“Butcher!”

“No!!”

“Cook! Cleaner! Garung guni man!”

“All wrong!”

“Uh… I guessed ten already. Give up!”

“One more try!”

“Teacher!”

“No I don’t wanna be a teacher!”

“Okay then what do you want to be?”

“You know the loch ness monster and bigfoot all that? I want to be an investigator to see if they’re real or not.”

“I see, that’s very interesting, “I was careful not to say anything that might discourage him, “I would love to know if they exist or not…”

“You?” he looked straight at me and asked, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”

I stood there for a few moments, blinking, and not quite sure what to say.

If I ever had a kid (assuming that I don’t already have any), and if the kid ever decides to throw a tantrum, I’ll make sure they get a good caning.

I wouldn’t want them to end up in Youtube when they grow older, like this HK woman who missed her flight.

I was at a condo clubhouse reading when a boy and his little sister came in. They started looking at some of the magazines on the shelves, and were generally aggravating each other, like what siblings of that age usually do.

Then I opened my laptop.

The darned kids had to come over to see what I was doing. Since it wasn’t the best time to surf adult websites, I went on to check my mail.

Girl: Gmail!

Boy: My daddy uses Gmail too.

Me: So where’s your daddy?

Girl: In Hong Kong.

Me: What’s he doing in Hong Kong?

Boy: Doing business.

Me: So how old are you?

Girl: I’m 7 and he’s 9.

Boy: She has a boyfriend!

Me: Wow I don’t even have a boyfriend!

Boy: Of course lah! You don’t look like the gay type.

Gee. I don’t think I ever heard of gays when I was 9. At least he didn’t get any gay vibes from me.

Me: So which school do you go to?

They told me.

Me: Hey I used to go there too, when I was 7! And when I was 9 too! They eventually kicked me out.

Boy: That’s because you went to secondary school!

Me: Yeah they didn’t want me to be there anymore that’s why I had to go to secondary school.

Girl: So are you still in secondary school?

I’m beginning to like her.

Boy: Of course not lah you crazy.

Me: What do you wanna be when you grow up?

Boy: A scientist.

Me: Ah a mad scientist with curly hair!

Boy: Hahahah!

Girl: I want to be a scientist and a cook!

Me: I think I prefer cooks. That’s because I like to eat!

Me: Where’s your mommy?

Boy: She’s swimming.

Me: And why aren’t you swimming?

Girl: Mommy only allows us to swim in the morning and the afternoon.

Me: That’s because it’s dark now. If you drown, it’ll be quite hard to find your body.

Me: Anyway I think it’s time for you to go now. I think your mommy’s here.

I think they enjoyed the conversation. They waved and said goodbye when they left.

I just found out that entry to museums will be free this Saturday (31 May), as it’s International Museum Day.

Of course I’ll be at one of them.
Of course I won’t tell you which one I’m visiting.
Sorry stalker

Anyway here’s a photo I took some time back at the Singapore Art Museum. I was totally impressed by this little girl - she was stopping to admire every painting.

She’s gonna be so hot when she grows up.

P.S. Here are the official details of the International Museum Day 2008.

The toddler at the next table kept looking at me.

I grinned at him.

He grinned back.

His mother smiled as well.

Then when the mother wasn’t looking, I stuck out my tongue at him.

He stuck out his tongue as well.

It was a cool February night at a cosy pizzeria.

The mother was with her friend, another mother, also with a son of the same age.

The friendly toddler eventually walked up to me. I shook his hand - it was wet with his saliva, and tickled his tummy a bit. He giggled, and his mother smiled.

Both mothers were pretty, and about the same age. Around 20.

It was St. Valentine’s Day.

You gotta love em kids.

I can be pretty politically incorrect at times, but I’m still no match to some kids.

Like that kid in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Or, as I recently witnessed, this 4-year old boy who was standing with his mom at the lift lobby of the building I was working at. A lady was pushing a wheelchair-bound man past the kid. The kid stared hard. Then he grabbed his mom’s hand, pointed at the man on the wheelchair, and proclaimed very loudly,

“Mommy! Mommy! That man cannot walk anymore right? Right? Mommy?”

Reading this article, Brain sensor allows mind-control, reminds me of an incident some years ago…

My boss sent me and a colleague to this rather low-profile education-related exhibition to show one of our products.

Because the exhibition was really part of a conference, after we set up our booths, we had a couple of hours to kill because the delegates were still stuck in the conference. So naturally, we abandoned our booths to visit the other booths.

The other booths were mostly from schools showing off some new technology they were using with their students, or from some company promoting their education-related product. Nothing really interesting.

Soon, we exhausted all the booths, and the delegates hadn’t appeared. We were quite bored.

When you have 2 bored jokers feeding off each other’s ideas, things happen.

My colleague created a powerpoint presentation there on our iBooks for our “new product”.
The slide went something like this:

BRAIN CHIP
Implant our new and revolutionary
brain chip into your child’s brain.
Your child will become smarter
and have photographic memory!

Of course, some of the other exhibitors stopped on their tracks when they saw our Powerpoint slide. A good number of them even asked us about it. People can be so gullible.

Soon, that too became boring, so we decided to try something else to have fun.

At a nearby booth were these primary 5 kids who were showing how they used PDAs for learning (PDAs were still somewhat of a novelty then). We asked them over to show them our brain chip presentation.

They were interested (who doesn’t want to be smarter and have better memory?), but the idea of getting a chip implanted in the head was a little discomforting, even for 11-year-olds.

“Any of you interested in the brain chip?” I asked.

Uncomfortable silence, as they looked at one another, waiting for someone to make the first move.

“He already has the chip in his brain,” said my colleague, pointing to me. “That’s why he’s very smart.”

“Yep you can ask me any difficult question, and I’ll know the answer, thanks to the brain chip.”

Silence.

“Why don’t you ask me a difficult question?” I prompted my colleague.

So my colleague asked me a general-knowledge question, and I answered immediately.

Of course, kids these days are smarter than that. Soon, one of them came up with a question I couldn’t answer.

“Hey,” I glared at my colleague accusingly, “you didn’t load in the answer to this question!”

Then I turned to the kids. “Having the brain chip doesn’t mean you’ll know everything,” I explained. “You’ll only know the things that have been loaded onto the chip. This means you won’t have trouble with spelling and biology any more!”

“Can I look at the chip?” one boy asked.

“Sure,” I replied, fishing out a brain chip from my pocket. It was the SD card from my PDA. At that time, most people had never seen an SD card before.

The eyes of the kids widened in wonder. So we were telling the truth all along. One of the boys even decided to let us implant the chip into his brain.

Thankfully, the delegates were released around that time, so we didn’t have to perform the procedure or tell more stories.

But I’m sure gonna miss that colleague in my new job. It’s been great working with him.

I enjoy reading stories to kids. Probably because no one ever pays any attention when I talk, so seeing a kid sit there wide-eyed in rapt attention while I read does wonders for my self-esteem.

The only thing I don’t like is when the kid asks me to read the story again. Punishment for not reading well enough the first time? Actually, young children do need repetition, and they enjoy it. But I’d always ask to read another book - it’s hard for me to read with expression and enthusiasm if I’m reading the same stuff within 5 minutes.

Anyway, some years ago, this dad was showing me the Arthur’s adventure series of interactive stories he bought for his son. The dad was glowing with pride as his son clicked through the interactive features of the story, as if the son was on track to become a Nobel Prize laureate.

I wasn’t impressed, and I felt that the son wasn’t learning very much, but I kept my mouth shut since the dad wasn’t going to listen to me anyway.

What triggered me to write this post was this article - Interactive learning fails reading test (via Slashdot).

“Teachers and parents should be aware that an interactive story book may provide their children with more entertainment than education.”

I may be a geek and I may be in love with technology, but if I have kids of my own, they won’t be touching the computer very much. And none of these interactive story crap.

In fact, when parents come to me on advice for their kids, one of the first things I say is “read to your kid.” It’s not just educational, it’s emotionally bonding. (The other advice I give is “let them go out and play.”)

A related book to check out is The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved. I borrowed it from the library once, but I didn’t get around reading it. I suspect that it’s worth a look.

I should add some thoughts to my recent post, Dogs, Teddy Bears, and Airconditioners, the part about talking to babies who are too young to understand language.

I was observing a lady cradling a baby in her arms, looking into his eyes, and talking to him. Just talking and talking to him.

Of course she knew that the baby couldn’t understand a word, but that didn’t deter her from acting like he did.

And that isn’t an uncommon scene - I’ve often witnessed women carry on conversations with babies. Some men do that too, but that seems more uncommon.

Admittedly, I’ve tried to do that myself. I enjoy carrying babies (provided they don’t puke or pee on me), and there was a time when I tried to talk to that adorable little thing, but, I found it really awkward, and it was only marginally easier than talking to, say, a dog or teddy bear or maybe an airconditioner.

I didn’t explain why I tried to talk to babies.

No, I wasn’t trying to be like a woman.

The only reason was that I believed that speaking to babies is important for their language development, that babies learn the sounds of language very early. I owe these ideas to Steve Pinker in The Language Instinct, a very important book on language. I read it quite a while ago, so I don’t remember a lot of details, but go read it if you’re into language/linguistics - some parts are quite technical, but at least two-thirds of it is quite readable.

Abecedaria has some information on Chinese dyslexia:

Dyslexia is often associated with an inability to either percieve or create the correct orientation in a letter or character. The classic visual image of dyslexic writing showed frequent reversals between the letters ‘b’ and ‘d’. In this view it would be difficult to impossible to be dyslexic in the Chinese writing system. However, this view is outdated, perhaps by 20-30 years according to this article.

[…]

In fact, it is not neccesary for the actual symbols to represent reflected sets like ‘b’ and ‘d’ for children to have this confusion. The component parts of a Chinese character offer as much opportunity for difficulty to Chinese children as the various letter shapes, and irregular spellings offer English children. There is also a difference in phonological processing at a certain level. However, that is one component of the problem, not all.

If you’re incredibly interested in the topic, check out this very long article.

Addendum: Gary Feng has more bibliographic information, and includes an interesting image of Chinese dyslexia.

* * * * *

Anyway, this reminds me of an old (and short) post where I observed that it’s easier to read the mirror image of Chinese text than English text.

Maybe it’s just me, since I find it quite easy to recognise reversed text. For instance, in Dan Brown’s hyperpopular Da Vinci Code, one of the puzzles given was reversed English text. Because I recognised it instantly, that part of the novel drove me insane because I had to plough through 2 pages of silly discussions between the 2 male characters (forgot their names) trying to figure out what script it was. Felt like ripping out those pages. Okay, many of the anagrams in the book were easy too, but that’s another post…

Maybe it’s just me, because I have this habit of writing reversed English text when I’m bored. Come to think of it, I’ve never tried doing that for Chinese. I’ll do it later.

If you’re starting to think that there’s no value in writing reverse, here are some good uses I have found:

If you’re outside a room that has condensation (due to aircon) on its glass partition, it’s fun to write silly messages reversed on the glass so the people inside can read. Fine, I know it’s show-off, but it’s still fun.

Or write a reversed message on a piece of paper, and hand it to a primary school kid, and tell her to decode the secret message by holding the paper against the light and viewing it from the other side. The look of admiration is priceless.

Conclusion: it is fun and useful to write in reverse.

A mother was complaining to me about her teenage son.

“He’s not the study type - he hates to study.”

“How come? Is it because he’s lazy, or because he just can’t.”

“He’s just lazy. All he wants to do is to make money.”

The son appeared around that time.

“Well, you don’t need to study to make a living,” I offered my honest opinion.

I’m not sure if the mother was more shocked or horrified.

“Can always be a hawker,” I quickly added.

The mother laughed.

“Son, did you hear that? You can become a hawker if you don’t study!”

Poor kid. And what’s wrong with being a hawker anyway?

Claire, a 9 year old girl got her dad to give her a piggyback.

“My legs are sleeping!” she explained after my friend asked her about it. We all had been standing for more than an hour.

“Well,” I commented with mock disapproval, “soon your dad’s legs will be asleep as well!”

“Then you’ll have to carry my dad!”

Darn. Some kids are just too witty.

Update:

My friend who knows Claire much better tells me “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Now that’s very scary.

This happened some time after the incident described in part 1. By then, I had heard that Zac didn’t love all animals - he was terrified of lizards (he once ran out of the bathroom naked and screaming because there was one on the wall)…

“Zac, do you have some paper? I wanna draw something for you!”

He didn’t have any paper, but he was certainly going to find some!

He somehow managed to convince someone to spare him a piece of paper, which he promptly handed to me.

Zac was so excited that when I placed the paper on my lap ready to draw, his head was already blocking my view.

“I tell you what - you stand over there. No peeping. Let me finish the drawing, then I’ll show it to you.” That’ll teach him a bit of discipline.

The poor kid was so excited that he could not contain his grin, and was actually writhing as he tried to stand still (he was really walking towards me without realising it).

“Eh, you’re coming too close. Stand further away, or I won’t let you see!”

He had no choice, so he moved away again.

Seeing him barely able to contain his delight made me feel a little guilty.

“Ok it’s finished!”

Bang. He shot over to inspect the masterpiece.

And his grin disappeared as soon as he saw my drawing of a lizard.

“Do you like it?”

Pause.

“Shall I draw you riding on the lizard?”

Evil. Pure evil.

Sometimes, I can’t help but admire the outlook of kids, who know something about positive thinking.

“Can you draw a horse?”

Since I’m really a good person deep down, I turned over the leaf and started on the horse.

The head. The neck. The body.

“Shall I draw you riding on the horse?”

“Yes!”

He’s so going to forgive me for that lizard drawing.

The head of the rider. The body. The legs. The horse legs. Added the rest of the details - eyes, ears, reins, and so on.

“Do you notice something about this horse? This is a very special horse.”

He didn’t seem to notice.

“How many legs does this horse have?”

“One, two, three, four, five. HEY!!!”

“Yup. This horse has five legs. It’s a very special horse!”

“Horse have four legs!”

“I know. But this is a special horse. It has five legs.”

I started drawing a row of 4 small circles under each leg.

“And you know what? This five-legged horse is on rollerblades!”

“NO!!”

“It’s a very special horse!”

“No! It’s a crazy horse!”

I must have offended his sensitivities and sensibilities quite seriously. When I handed him the paper, he promptly crushed it and threw it on the floor before storming off.

I must have crossed a line.

* * * * *

That incident happened a few months ago, and I was reminded of it recently when I saw Zac again.

“Hey Zac, do you remember the horse I drew for you?”

“Yes! It had five legs, and it had rollerblades!”

He was smiling when he replied. Ah, I’ve been forgiven.

Zac, a 5 year old boy, who loves animals.

Zac, staring straight into my eyes: Kor kor, what is your favourite animal?

Me: Hmmmmm….. I don’t know! What is your favourite animal?

Zac: I like lion, and I like horse!

Me: Ahh… lion and horse! I know what animal I like!

Zac, coming even closer with wide-open eyes: What?

Me: I like beef!

Zac, scratching his little head: Beef?

Me: Yes - beef!

Zac looks confounded. The animal encyclopedia that he memorised did not have any animal called “beef”.

Zac: How do you draw beef?

Me, caught mildly off-guard: Ermmm….. have you seen a hamburger?

Zac nods.

Me: You know the the hamburger has two pieces of bread? The brown piece of meat in between the two pieces of bread is beef!

Zac furrows his brow.

Me: I like chicken too. Do you like to eat chicken?

Zac nods a little slowly.

Me: But… but how do you know you like lion and horse? Have you eaten them before?

Zac, looking disturbed: No!

Me: Then how do you know you like horse and lion?

Zac looks perplexed.

Me: You know what? Lions like to eat horses!

Zac, very disturbed: No!!!

Me: They let lions eat horse meat in the zoo!

Zac, about to cry: Noo!!!

Me: Okay, okay….

Keep me away from your kids.