The strangeness of London.

I have been away from the city in which I spent much of my youth, rather too long. A couple of days ago, I was giving a talk and I decided by way of introduction, to write up on the board, where I had come from, before arriving in Asia.

I wrote the word: “London.”

It looked very strange on the board, that word. In fact, I had to wonder whether it was a real word at all. It was a very dislocating feeling. The city of my youth seemed to be fictional, in that moment...not real at all, as if it had never existed and I had somehow dreamt it.

I realized, then, that I had been away from Europe too long. My whole European life had acquired the semblance of fiction. The very name of the city of my youth, now seemed not like a real name at all. I thought of “Londoninium”. It might as well have been a Roman city for all the temporal proximity it had to me, in that moment.

I had paused a little long to reflect on the strangeness of the word, “London” and so I turned back to my audience to continue my presentation. Yet, the feeling remained that behind me, on the board, I had written of a town that was not quite real, to me, anymore.

Perhaps, this feeling comes to all who leave the place of their birth and youth and travel far afield. As one travels, and learns of new places, these memories overlay the ones acquired before emigration, until, eventually the original life seems distant, unreachable and, eventually, as has begun to happen in my case, no longer substantial.

There is another aspect to it, of course. “London”, is a very English word. Every day, for the last twelve years, or thereabouts, I have been surrounded by foreign names, in foreign tongues. So, the familiar names of my youth, now seem exotic to me. An inversion has taken place: the places of my youth, once so familiar, now seem to be the strange ones. My experience of many years, has displaced the earlier sense of familiarity and created a new sense of familiarity: now, Malay names and places are the familiar ones to me. English place names have come to seem strange, unreal and not a little fictional.

All this leads me to understand that, perhaps, I should visit London, and Europe, again, before too many more years pass. I need to reacquaint myself with what was once so familiar, before it becomes utterly “foreign” to me, which would be a curious circumstance, indeed.

Then again, perhaps I should write “London” again, a few more times, so that it might come to seem less strange, through the reacquaintance of usage (if such a word exists...my spellchecker thinks not...however I think it should, so I will use it).

This situation could be summarized in a single thought:

I left London, but now London has left me. It is time to find it once more.

Posted by Valentine Cawley

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)

Ainan's favourite colours.

As anyone who is a regular reader of my blog will know, Ainan has a particularly acute memory for detail – for anything really that captures his interest. Sometimes, this amuses me.

A few days ago, Ainan approached me in the kitchen, as I contemplated matters inaccessible to others, in one of my reveries.

“Daddy,” he began.

I fell out of my reverie and focussed my eyes on my curiously alert son.

“I have found my favourite colours...the perfect colours!”, he announced, in the manner of an explorer returning from a long voyage.

I waited for him to describe them to me. This he then did, in his own inimitable way.

“Blue: 0, 135, 189; Pale blue: 0, 189, 255; Yellow: 255, 211, 0 and Red: 196, 2, 51”.

He said this strangely uninformative string of information in a very rapid patter – it came out almost as one long number, with the names of the colours as a kind of punctuation.

I looked at him intently for a second before speaking.

“Are those RGB numbers?”, I asked, fairly certain of it.

“Yes.”

“Can you show me what they look like?”

He did.

Now for those who don’t know, RGB is a colour coding system used on computers. So Ainan’s numbers were the colour codes for a particular colour displayed on a computer. What struck me about his utterance, was the speed with which he spoke, combined with the certainty with which he recalled the number codes. They seemed to be, to him, distinct objects in his mind, so tangible he could touch them with an inner thought. This was not a difficult task for him. He did it without even realizing that many people would not be able to do the same.

If you want to see his colours, go to a paint programme and check them in its colour palette. These are regarded by Ainan as ideal colours – all for reasons of his own, of course.

The other question this poses is: how long did it take him to find these “perfect colours”...out of all the millions of possibilities...and what made him remember them, when he did out of all the other number combinations he had tried?

It was very like Ainan not to try to describe the colours to me with words. He actually defined them as a computer would, or a scientist might, by giving them a precise definition and reference point. What he gave me was the actual colour – not a description of it. Yet, there was something missing in his description – any sense in me, of what the colour might be, without actually seeing it. However, Ainan achieved his aim, in communication: a precise definition of his thought – even if no-one else would be able to decode it without a computer to hand.

Not for the first time, I am led to wonder what Ainan will become, as he grows up. I hope I am around to see it – because that is something I would not miss. He still surprises me, and shows me new things about himself, even after all this time. In a way, I think he is a person that no-one will fully know – because there is so much to know about him. I have known him all his life – and yet it is still not enough to fully quantify and qualify, what is going on in his head. Yet, I shall try to know him as fully as I can and understand the curious person he is.

At least, now, I know what his favourite colours are – quite precisely!

Posted by Valentine Cawley

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)

The laziest student in the world.

Today, perhaps, the laziest student in the world, visited my blog. It is not uncommon for people, from University web addresses, or other educational institutions, such as Secondary schools or high schools, to arrive on my blog, with what is clearly an essay question in their search terms. Sometimes, I get dozens of people from the same country, searching with the same essay question, arriving on the same page, of my blog. I can only imagine the consternation of their teacher, when a dozen or more of their students hand in the same copy/pasted essay (mine), as their own!

Plagiarism is very common amongst today’s students. I see other evidence of it too, sometimes. Occasionally, someone searches with an extended quote from one of my essays, and arrives on my blog. I assume this to be a teacher checking whether an essay is plagiarized or not...for how else did they get a hold of an extensive quote from my writing?

Today’s example was a classic. A person searched from Mongolia, in Asia, with the search terms “Mongolian laziness essay”! Just think about the most likely interpretation for what is happening here. This searcher is probably a student, from Mongolian, who had been tasked to write an essay about Mongolian laziness. I assume this to mean that their teacher had identified them as lazy and required them to write an essay on laziness, as it applied to Mongolians, as some kind of punishment. So, it is a stroke of genius order laziness for that student to then search the Internet for an essay on Mongolian laziness, to steal! I mean, how lazy can you get, than getting someone else to write about laziness, when that is your own task?

What is, perhaps, funniest of all, is the page they arrived on. It was an essay on Mongolian laziness. In fact, it was an account of my experience of teaching one of the laziest students I have ever encountered – and the ways he dealt with the tasks I set him. Given these two experiences, I am left to wonder if Mongolia has a problem with laziness, as a cultural issue. If anyone knows more about this, please comment below.

On a more serious note, it is a worry that so many students, these days, are using the Internet to answer their school essays for them. This speaks of a generation too lazy to learn to use their own minds. Any child who grows up doing this, instead of actually writing the set tasks, will never learn to write or express themselves in written form, in any way at all. They will become incapable adults. Not only that, but not having learnt to exercise their minds in disciplined thought – which they will have avoided – they will probably be quite dim, as well. It doesn’t bode well for the future world they shall be tasked with creating – along with the rest of their often ill-equipped generation. It seems likely that people who are now middle aged, will see a real decline in the level of discourse in the world, by the time they reach old age. Quite simply, many people will not be capable of complex discourse in any verbal form, at all. Another thought occurs to me. If the common man, is poor at dealing with words, one might have thought that the few who were truly literate would be prized – but I think it likely that the opposite will be true. When the average man is too verbally dumb to appreciate the output of the verbally bright, the writings of the best writers will be even less appreciated than they are today. It takes an educated and well informed audience, to receive well the thoughts of the best writers. The reader needs to be a sufficiently erudite companion to the writer, for the relationship to work well. Sadly, the younger generation today, in so many parts of the world, are not cultivating high verbal skills. So, they will become people unable to appreciate or enjoy them in those who do so equip themselves. Basically, the future promises to be a philistine one. I wonder whether Mankind will be able to pull itself up from that now seemingly inevitable precipice? The search terms of my innumerable plagiaristic searchers, is not an encouraging sign as to our probable shared future. I suppose this is what the beginning of the ends of Empires and civilizations looks like: a decline in the quality of the people being a first and troubling sign. It won’t be that far in the future, when such people are unable to manage the culture they have inherited. After that, the process of forgetting will begin. Soon, all will be gone.

It all begins with students too lazy to think their own thoughts and write their own essays. The Internet is full of them. In fact, that is what many students think the Internet is for: doing their homework for them. Some advice: if you see signs in your child that they are pilfering off the net, cut them off. Force them to write their work on their own. It will be the best stimulus to their mental growth you could ever invent.

I am left with one final dilemma: do I publish the offending student’s IP address to reveal what he or she has done...or do I not? What do you think?

Posted by Valentine Cawley

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)