Of bricks and prayers.

There is a building site not far from where we are living in Malaysia. Now, you may think that there is nothing unusual about building sites - but there is, about this one. You see, I am awake, not long after 5 am, to an unexpected sound. Perhaps you might like to guess what it is. Just think, what noise could a building site be making shortly after 5 am in Malaysia?

Please have a think about it. I, for one, did not expect a building site to make this kind of noise, of a morning. Well, have you got your answer? I will tell you then. I am awake to the sound of prayer. That is right: this building site is praying to the world, on a public address system, pre-dawn, every morning.

I like travel, for one major reason: experiencing the new. For me, it is a new experience to hear the sounds of prayer arising from the rubble of a building site, every morning. It is really quite surreal. It is as if someone had changed the rules of the world, overnight.

The funny thing is, is that the praying is louder than the building. That is, this particular building site is quieter during its work of putting up a rather large structure, than it is in praying over it. The prayer can probably be heard kilometres away...but the building noises don't reach much past a few hundred metres, at the most.

I should point out that the building is NOT a mosque and this is not the call of a muezzin. It is actually just the sounds of amplified prayer. It has been going on, now, for over half an hour...

I have told you the unusual thing that happens in my mornings: how about yours? Comment below, please.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to:http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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The children who never sleep

Singapore is a country where sleep is not much prized.

Why do I say this? Well, I just have to look at the school children wending their way to school - at around 7 am. Yes, you read right. They are on their way to school by 7 am - often earlier - because school often starts at about 7.30 am.

That is hideously early for a young child to be getting to school. Yet, it is not just the school children who have to get up early - the teachers do, too. The result is that an entire profession and about half Singapore's children, suffer from sleep deprivation. I say "half" the children for a reason. Singapore once had too few schools for the children they had to teach. There wasn't space and they hadn't had the time to build them all. So they struck upon an idea: use the same schools twice in a day. The school day was divided into two halves: a "morning session" and an "afternoon session". To fit both sessions into one day, the morning session had to start really early - and the afternoon session had to finish really late. A child on the morning session will finish about lunchtime, or thereabouts. A child on afternoon session will finish in the evening.

So, this system was created for a time when there wasn't enough teaching space to go around. Now, however it is different. There are more schools. There are fewer children - yet many schools persist in this division of the day into morning and afternoon sessions.

The children don't look well on it. They are evidently tired. I have taught such children. Many of them have poor concentration, simply because they haven't slept enough. There is another factor. Many of them are addicted to computer games and play them late into the night - or watch TV to similar hours - then they have to get up before 6 am to get to school. The consequences are not good. These children are too tired to really learn much at school.

It is time that the tradition of an early morning session be phased out. The children would be less tired and could focus better - and the teachers, too, would be less worn out and better able to give their energies to the classroom.

Every nation needs to sleep: even Singapore. I would like to see schools that start at a reasonable hour - say nine am. It would be a relief not to see tired children on their way to school, at an hour when they should really still be asleep.