Male Teachers.....a rare species

It is reported that out of 100 teachers in Malaysia, only 28 are males. In my school, I think the ratio is even less. Look at the photos I took during a trip to an organic farm with my colleagues. You can hardly find a male teacher in the photos! Why do men shun this profession?
I was quite amused at one TV commentaryon Astro AEC. While discussing the issue of declining ratio of male to female teachers, the newscaster mentioned that nowadays parents warn their children to study hard , otherwise they will end up being teachers! They used to say the children will end up being garbage truck workers! If that is the public's view of the teaching profession, no wonder the young men are frightened away!
After spending 32 years in the profession, I am puzzled as to why people make such a comparison. Looking back, I have no regrets joining this profession. Our pay may not be as high as those in the private sector, but in recent years much have being done to improve the promotional prospects of teachers. Teachers do not complain about their low pay anymore. We do not spend lavishly but our income does make our living comfortable.
How about the job? Other than the documents, reports and files we have to keep, I still find it a joy to teach. Especially when I have carried out a good lesson and I know the students have understood. Seeing them do well in the exam is a joy we can't compare with money. And when they get good places in the university and end up with good jobs, we are so happy for them. That's the joy of teaching. Garbage collectors? Maybe they were referring to the discipline problems and the workload of the teachers. And males? why do they keep away? I wonder.

Visit to Pinang Peranakan Museum and Kek Lok Si

Penang is a popular tourist destination. But when someone comes to visit, you might not know where to bring them to. I guess the best thing is to bring them to the hawker centres. After all , the best thing about Penang is the hawker food. It has a been a long time since I last went to Kek Lok Si so we thought it would be nice to visit again. We were disappointed with what we saw. Other than the ongoing construction of the Pavillion of the Goddess of Mercy, many of the other places were in a deplorable state. The tortoise pool is a disgrace.

On an earlier trip we went to Khoo Kongsi and some heritage sites. But this time we tried the Pinang Peranakan Museum. We were pleasantly surprised with the place. Maybe it's because of the TV series Little Nonya and Iron Lady, it made the visit interesting. I don't mind paying the rm10 entrance because the owners did spend a lot to collect all those exhibits and maintained the place.
The place is also popular among bridal couples for thier photo shoots. I managed to catch a few shots. I don't think they know their lovely shots are in this blog. Anyway my congratulations and best wishes to them. May they have a wonderful life together.

Photo Fun

Go to http://www.photofunia.com/ to try out these fun pics.

Awards and Recognition..the story continues

Maybe it runs in the family...my daughter continues the tradition by receiving the Canada Governor-General Medal for achieving the highest academic standing in the Ontario Secondary School Diploma at Taylors University College. She also received the Chairman's Award, and the prizes for Computer Studies and for Mathematics.

Awards and Recognition

Everyone loves to receive awards. No award is a small award. Each carries a special meaning...the recognition of effort put in. In this post I shall blow my own trumpet and boast about some of the awards I have received.

Excellence service awards:

This year I received the Excellence Service Award for the year 2008. The award comes with a certificate and cash award of RM1000. These awards were introduced in 1993. This is my third award, the last two in 2003 and 1998. The earlier awards came with a bonus of one month's salary. Nevertheless, the awards still carry a significant meaning even though the cash received is less.

St John Ambulance Service Award:

I received this Medal from the National Commander of St John Ambulance Malaysia a few years ago for my voluntary services for St John Ambulance.

Abdul Rahman Talib Award for Best BSc Graduate 1983

This award is named after a well known educationist is awarded to the best BSc graduate from USM each year. I received this award in 1983 from Sultan Azlan Shah. During that year I also received a Graduate Chemistry Medal from the Institut Kimia Malaysia for best performance in Chemistry 1983

Japan 1986

In one of my earlier posts, I put in some old photos of mine. Some of my friends were quite amused when they saw how I looked like back then. Everyone ages, don't we? In this post, I'll put in some old photos which we took way backin 1986, during our holiday in Japan.

Eat your way to a healthier life

I received the following article through email from a friend of mine. I would like to share it with others on my blog..

Dr David Servan-Schreiber: 'It is up to us to use our body's natural defences'

When Dr David Servan-Schreiber was just 31 a routine MRI scan revealed he had a brain tumour. Following successful treatment, Dr Servan-Schreiber, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, set about learning everything he could to prevent a relapse, scouring medical databases and scientific publications for research on how the body could best protect itself from cancer. The result is Anticancer, a definitive diet and lifestyle book. In our exclusive extract, he explains how you can boost your body’s natural defences against this disease.
Cancer lies dormant in all of us. Like all living organisms, our bodies are making defective cells all the time. That’s how tumours are born. But our bodies are also equipped with a number of mechanisms which detect and keep such cells in check. In the West, one person in four will die of cancer – but three in four will not: their defence mechanisms will hold out.
I had cancer. I was diagnosed for the first time 15 years ago. I received conventional treatment and the cancer went into remission, but I relapsed. After surgery and chemotherapy, I asked my oncologist what I should do to lead a healthy life and avoid another relapse. ‘Lead your life normally. We’ll do Cat scans at regular intervals and if your tumour comes back, we’ll detect it early,’ replied this leading light of modern medicine.
We had used all the drugs and recognised medical practices relevant to my case. As for more theoretical mind-body or nutritional approaches, he clearly lacked the time or interest to explore these avenues.

Beets can help inhibit aggressive forms of cancer

It took me nine months of research to begin to understand how I could help my body protect itself against cancer. This is what I learned: if we all have potential cancer lying dormant in us, each of us also has a body designed to fight the process of tumour development. It is up to us to use our body’s natural defences.
It must be stated at the outset that there is no alternative approach to cancer that can cure the illness. It would be madness not to use the best of conventional Western medicine such as surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, immunotherapy and soon molecular genetics. But at the same time it is also unreasonable to rely only on these more technical approaches and to neglect the natural capacity of our bodies to protect against tumours, when so much research now points to ways in which we can reduce the risk of developing or dying from the disease. It’s a myth that cancer is transmitted primarily through genes. Genetic factors contribute at most to 15 per cent of cancer mortalities.
Cancer cells do not behave like normal cells. They refuse to die after a certain number of divisions, and they poison the tissues around them with chemical substances, creating inflammation, which they need to sustain their growth. Recent research reviewed in the journal Science confirms that the more successful cancers are in provoking inflammation, the more aggressive the tumour and the better it is at spreading over long distances, ultimately reaching lymph nodes and spreading to other organs. Links have been found between several types of cancer and chronic inflammation caused by either a virus such as papillomavirus in the cervix or environmental factors such as asbestos or smoking. Oncologists at the University of Glasgow have been measuring inflammation levels in the blood of patients with various cancers since the 1990s and have found that patients with the lowest levels of inflammation were twice as likely as the others to live for several years.
The pharmaceutical industry is looking for drugs that will inhibit the chemical secreted by cancer cells which causes inflammation. But there are already a number of natural ways
we can boost our immunity and reduce inflammation to help keep those cancer cells
in check. It’s simply a matter of eliminating certain toxins from our environment, adopting an anti-cancer diet, seeking emotional balance and taking enough exercise.

Cancer feeds on sugar

Environmental links

Cancer has been increasing in the West since 1940. Three major factors have drastically disrupted our environment over the same period — the addition of large quantities of highly refined sugar to our diet, changes in farming methods and exposure to a large number of chemical products that didn’t exist before the Second World War. There is every reason to believe that these three phenomena play a major role in the spread of cancer.
The dangers of sugar
Cancer feeds on sugar. The German biologist Otto Heinrich Warburg won a Nobel Prize for his discovery that the metabolism of malignant tumours is largely dependent on glucose consumption. Insulin production triggers inflammation. Those who eat low-sugar Asian diets tend to have five to ten times fewer hormonally driven cancers than those with diets high in sugar and refined foods. People who want to protect themselves from cancer should reduce their consumption of processed sugar and bleached flour. That means getting used to drinking coffee without sugar, avoiding sugary snacks between meals and cutting down on puddings.
Intensive farming
When cows eat grass, their meat and dairy products are perfectly balanced in omega-3 fatty acids (which help to reduce inflammation and cancer cell growth) and omega-6s. But since the 1950s, pastures have been replaced by battery farming; corn, soy and wheat have become the animals’ principal diet. These food sources are rich in omega-6s and contain practically no omega-3s. Omega-6 fats and hormones given to stimulate milk production can trigger the growth of fatty cells and inflammation. The switch from grass to corn-soy combinations has also eliminated another anti-cancer benefit from dairy foods. Conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) helps fight the growth of cancer cells, according to research conducted by the National Institute of Agronomy Research in Tours, France. CLA is found primarily in cheese, but only if the cheese comes from grass-fed animals.
Toxins in the environment
There has been an unprecedented rise in the number of toxic substances in our environment and in our bodies since the Second World War. In the US, researchers at the Center for Disease Control have found the presence of 148 toxic chemicals in the blood and urine of Americans of all ages. In the past 30 years the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer has tested 900 chemicals in the environment and found only one to be categorically non-carcinogenic; 95 have been identified as ‘known carcinogens’, 307 are ‘possible’ and 497 remain ‘unclassified’. Many of these substances continue to be widely used, such as benzene, which is found in petrol, certain plastics, glues, lubricants, dyes and detergents.

Citrus fruits contain anti-inflammatory flavonoids

A significant number of brain tumours such as mine are sensitive to xenoestrogens, such as the pesticide atrazine, which is so powerful that it is capable of changing the sex of fish in the rivers it ends up contaminating. Between 1963 and 1970 from the age of two to nine, I played in cornfields sprayed with atrazine surrounding our country house in Normandy. All my life, until the day I was diagnosed with cancer, I drank milk, ate eggs, yoghurts and meat from animals fed with corn sprayed by pesticides. I ate unpeeled apples that had been sprayed 15 times with pesticides before reaching the grocers’ shelves. I drank tap water drawn from contaminated streams and water tables (atrazine isn’t eliminated by most water purification systems). My two cousins who have had breast cancer played in the same fields, drank the same water and ate the same food. We’ll never know the role atrazine or other agricultural chemicals may have played in our respective cancers.
The organic advantage
At the University of Washington a young researcher, Cynthia Curl, questioned whether the organic food her friends gave their children was really healthier. She organised a study of 42 children aged two to five in which the parents had to write down exactly what the children ate for three days before she measured the traces of organochlorine pesticides in their urine. She found those whose diet was approximately 75 per cent labelled organic was distinctly below the minimum fixed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Levels found in children on conventional diets were four times higher than the official safety limit. A subsequent study conducted at the same university of 23 children, who were first fed a conventional diet and then ate nothing but organic foods, found that all traces of pesticides vanished from their urine after a few days and then returned once they resumed a conventional diet.

Inflammation aggravators (which can lead to cancer)

• Traditional Western diet
• White bread and pasta
• Red meat, raised industrially
• Oils rich in omega-6 fatty acids (corn, sunflower, safflower, soy)
• Dairy products from industrially raised livestock (especially full fat)
• Eggs from industrial farming hens fed corn and soy beans)
• Unmanaged stress, anger and depression
• Less than 20 minutes of physical activity a day
• Cigarette smoke, atmospheric pollution, domestic pollutants

  Inflammation reducers

• Mediterranean, Indian and Asian cuisine
• Wholewheat bread and pasta
• Organic meat from animals fed on grass or with flaxmeal, eaten at most three times a week
• Olive oil
• Dairy products mainly from animals fed on grass
• Eggs of hens raised in a natural environment or fed flaxmeal
• Laughter, lightheartedness, serenity
• A 50-minute walk three times a week or 30 minutes six times a week
• Clean environment Cancer-fighting superfoods
  Some foods contain precious anti-cancer molecules. These include:

  Green tea is a top antioxidant.GREEN TEA
  Rich in polyphenols that reduce the growth of the new blood vessels needed for tumour growth, green tea is also a powerful antioxidant and activates mechanisms in the liver which help to eliminate cancerous toxins from the body more rapidly. In mice it has been shown to block the effects of chemical carcinogens responsible for breast, lung, oesophageal, stomach and colon cancer.
  TURMERIC
  The most powerful natural anti-inflammatory identified today. In the laboratory it enhances the effectiveness of chemotherapy and reduces tumour growth. To be assimilated by the body tumeric needs to be mixed with black pepper and, ideally, it should be dissolved in oil.
  GARLIC, ONIONS, LEEKS, SHALLOTS and CHIVES
  These all help to regulate blood sugar levels, which in turn reduces insulin secretion and thus the growth of cancer cells. They promote the death of cancer cells in colon, breast, lung and prostate cancer.

  Mushrooms stimulate the reproduction of immune cellsMUSHROOMS
  Shiitake, crimini, portabello and oyster mushrooms stimulate the reproduction and activity of immune cells. They are often used in Japan as a complement to chemotherapy to support the immune system.
  CRUCIFEROUS VEGETABLES
  Cabbages, sprouts, broccoli and cauliflower contain powerful anti-cancer molecules. But boiling will destroy them — steam briefly or stir-fry rapidly in a little olive oil.
  
  FRUITS AND VEGETABLES RICH IN CAROTENOIDS
  Carrots, yams, sweet potatoes, squash, tomatoes, apricots, beets and all the brightly coloured fruits and vegetables contain vitamin A and lycopene, which have the proven capacity to inhibit the growth of particularly aggressive cancers.

  Herbs can help reduce the spread of cancer cellsHERBS AND SPICES
  Rosemary, thyme, oregano, basil and mint are rich in essential oils of the tarpene family which reduce the spread of cancer cells by blocking the enzymes they need to invade neighbouring tissues.
  
  CITRUS FRUIT
  Oranges, tangerines, lemons and grapefruit contain anti-infammatory flavonoids which are also present in the skin. So buy organic, unwaxed citrus fruit and add the zest to salad dressing or steep the skins in hot water or tea.
  
  The mind-body connection
  It usually takes anywhere from ten to 40 years for the ‘seed’ of cancer in the form of a cellular anomaly to become a detectable cancerous tumour. No psychological factor has been identified as being capable of creating that cancer seed. However, stress profoundly influences the soil in which that seed develops. Most patients I’ve known remember a period of particular stress in the months or years preceding the diagnosis of their cancer. These situations don’t spark off cancer, but, as an article published in Nature in 2006 observes, they can give it an opportunity to grow faster. Stress causes the release of hormones which trigger inflammation and slows down digestion, tissue repair and the immune system. A study of more than 10,000 women at the University of Helsinki in Finland has shown that the loss of an important emotional relationship doubles the risk of breast cancer.
  The factors contributing to cancer are so varied that no one should blame themselves for developing the disease. But anyone who has been diagnosed with cancer can learn to live differently. After my relapse and a year of chemotherapy, I had to stop working. My wife Anna and I couldn’t agree on our son’s upbringing and we were having problems in our marriage. I was losing my wife, my family, my work and my health. I could feel my life slipping through my hands. Then I met Michael Lerner, a sociologist and psychotherapist. He helped me to focus on what gave me the most satisfaction rather than what was going wrong.
  Health does not depend on any one organ or function but on relations between them. Everyone can learn how to foster that balance. All of the great medical and spiritual traditions in the East – yoga, meditation, t’ai chi, qigong – teach people how to take over the reins of their inner being, concentrating the mind and focusing on the breath. This mastery is one of the best ways to reduce the impact of stress and helps re-establish harmony in a person’s physiology and stimulate the body’s natural defences.
  The body is a huge system in equilibrium. Alter just one thing – diet, exercise, stress – and the whole is affected. Each small step we take makes the next one seem easier – we can lose the taste for an unbalanced diet or smoking or alcohol because we are more able to detect its impact on our wellbeing.
  

  ‘I have more energy than before I had cancer’

  ‘The idea of natural healing just wasn’t part of my world as a doctor before I had cancer,’ says Dr David Servan-Schreiber. ‘I remember discouraging patients, telling them it could harm them, and being irritated by the ones who refused conventional treatment.’ But when David himself became a cancer patient with limited life expectancy and began researching lifestyle factors which help the body to resist cancer, his attitude changed: ‘There is an enormous amount of scientific data which shows that natural healing mechanisms can be more effective than any drug when it comes to controlling cancer.’
  He doesn’t deny the importance of Western medicine when it comes to treating cancer, ‘but there is no magical recipe. Even chemotherapy isn’t foolproof. It’s not a question of fighting the illness, more about nourishing life by choosing to eat and live in healthier ways, and you don’t need to have cancer to do that.’
  David still lectures in psychiatry in America and in France, where he now lives with his wife and son, and has set up a centre for integrated medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. But perhaps most importantly he lives by the practices he preaches. By coming close to death he has understood that the point of life is to live it to the full. ‘I live with cancer cells and who knows how long I have, but I have more energy, better concentration and I enjoy myself more than before I had cancer'.