School girls discover new talents in cooking class

The Jakarta Post, Monday, May 15, 2006

“Do you think I have talent, Bu? I really do, you know, I just need to tease it out,” Anastasia Tota told her teacher, an impish grin on her bespectacled face.

They were in a cooking class at Catholic Senior High School Ricci 2 in Pondok Aren, Tangerang, and 15-year-old Tota had just heard her teacher say that another girl had a gift for cooking.

“You, my girl, have a talent for eating!” cooking teacher Vonny V. Rampengan shot back, to the laughter of her other students.

The 10 girls were making fruit cocktail that day. They used the soft drink Sprite in place of alcohol, and spiced it up with plenty of laughter and girlish banter.

Meanwhile, the group’s cooking talent, 16-year-old Windi, was busy straining small cubes of pineapple and papaya from water infused with lime, and pouring them into the pot of water boiling on the stove.

“The fruit is steeped in lime to make it more chewy,” Ibu Vonny told her class.

There is only one tabletop stove in the school’s kitchen, and the girls took turns stirring the concoction.

Cooking class started out two years ago as an activity to teach what Vonny calls “women skills.” At first the school offered sewing, embroidery, and flower arranging, too.

“But not everybody is patient enough to hold a needle and make their own clothes, so the girls suggested we drop the other activities and just concentrate on the cooking,” Vonny said.

There used to be boys in the cooking class, but they were overpowered by the female majority and eventually dropped out of the class.

“We made doughnuts once and that was great fun because of all the dough-slamming. A girl even broke her batter bowl,” Tota said with her infectious laugh.

Despite the chatter that always threatens to overwhelm the class, the girls work well together. Teriyaki, french fries, bakso (meatball soup), and chocolates have all emerged successfully from the school’s kitchen.

The girls’ new-found talents are also much appreciated at home.

“Papa always asks me what I did in cooking class that week, and gets me to cook it for him,” Bonita Dwi Astarini said proudly.

The most avid fan of Windi’s cooking is her little brother, who eagerly waits for her after class to see what delicacy his cici (elder sister) has brought home that day.

Cooking is fun, but it’s even more rewarding for teacher Vonny to see her girls cooperate and gain self confidence through their culinary efforts.

“I think that’s more important than anything else,” she said.

Teacher takes scissors to school curriculum

The Jakarta Post, Thursday, May 11, 2006

Long hair is a no-no for boys in state schools. But while other schools just send offenders home with a note for their parents, those at State High School No. 86 in Bintaro, South Jakarta, get their tresses trimmed on the spot in the school’s own hair salon.

The hair salon is biology teacher Fredrik Siwabessy’s pet project, and two times a week he teaches a hairstyling and beauty class — an extracurricular activity — in the three-meter-by-two-meter salon at the back of the school.

“It’s different from what other schools are doing, that makes it special,” 16-year-old Sekar Palupi told The Jakarta Post during a practice session Wednesday.

Hair washing, cream baths, basic cutting and facials are certainly not what one would expect to see being taught at a senior high school, but these are things that interest teenagers like Sekar and her nine friends.

“I joined because it teaches me about personal grooming, I’ve got problems with my hair, that’s why I took up hair care,” Ruci Febiana, who is a candidate for head of the school council, said.

With 28 years’ experience, Fredrik, or Pak Eddy to his students, is a master beautician, who claims his years as a biology teacher gave him a deeper understanding of beauty.

“You wouldn’t be much of a beautician if you studied social sciences, you wouldn’t understand how the chemicals in hair products reacted or how certain foods can effect beauty,” he said.

Eddy’s lessons can also be challenging; students need to get through 60 hours of classroom theory before moving on to simulated practice and, eventually, practice on real models. And, although the room is small, it is fitted with a workable hair washing stand, just like in real salons.

“I want my students to be able to do basic hair cutting when they finish here,” he said, nimbly taking a comb to correct a student’s work.

Also teaching beauty and hairstyling at the neighboring Community Learning Center, Eddy said that he was only too happy to help students who wanted to take professional exams.

But with homework and student council meetings often getting in the way of practice, the students may have other things on their minds than hairstyling.

“I tell these kids to practice at home every day, a hairstylist’s hands must be limber enough to handle the scissors, but they’re a lazy lot,”

“I want them to teach younger students next year and take over from me, but I don’t really know how since they’re all so lazy,” Eddy said, walking away.

“Pak Eddy’s a tartar, but he’s really not a bad guy,” his students said, smiling to themselves as they closed up the salon for the day.

Daisy gives the blind access to books

The Jakarta Post, Saturday, April 22, 2006

Most people take reading for granted, but for blind people, people with learning disabilities, and those who cannot hold a book, it is perceived as a distant luxury not a basic need.

Recent advances in technology have made it easier for people with print disabilities to access information. Screen reader technology, such as JAWS, has emancipated many people with visual impairments from isolation by opening up the Internet; and audio books, in digital format or in the form of cassettes, have brought the richness of literature a little closer.

But even with the ease that technology affords, differences in digital formats often bring confusion to the blind. And it’s certainly no fun to navigate through hours of audio recording to find where you left off in a novel, for example.

Recently introduced at a seminar at the State Ministry for Information and Communication in Central Jakarta, was the Digital Accessible Information System (Daisy), a standard that tries to bring order to the world of digital talking books, and make it easier for people to navigate through them.

“Compared to the traditional audio cassette recording, audio books produced with the Daisy standard are navigable by chapter, page, and even searchable through words and phrases,” the seminar’s organizer, Firdaus, who is from non-governmental organization Mitra Netra Foundation, told The Jakarta Post.

The brainchild of a consortium of international nonprofit organizations serving blind and dyslexic people in Switzerland in 1996, the Daisy allows producers the flexibility of mixing text and audio; ranging from audio-only, to full text and audio, to text-only, which can be used for the production of braille books.

“In this way a person who is totally blind can access the books using audio-only, while those with low vision can read the enlarged text of the books using a computer,” Firdaus said, adding that Mitra Netra had used the standard for the production of its digital talking books since 2000.

The standard also allows digital talking books to be used in a range of digital multimedia players, including CD and DVD players, as well as the PC.

“But portable players that can fully utilize the Daisy talking book are still rare in Indonesia, at most you can use the Bomba DVD player to play audio but without navigation tools,” Mitra Netra’s digital talking book editor Nasihah said, adding that as yet people who needed the talking books could use the computers at the foundation’s library in Lebak Bulus, South Jakarta.

Thursday’s seminar was aimed at introducing the Daisy standard to a wider audience, particularly publishers, so that the digital books can be widely produced, and help those with visual impairments.

School helps children pay attention

The Jakarta Post, Wednesday April 12, 2006

Audio skills, visual-motor skills and the ability to concentrate all have a significant impact on a child’s performance at school.

Moreover, children who display a deficiency in any of these skills may also be lacking in confidence.

“Children who show a dislike of learning and reading might not actually hate them. Perhaps it’s because they find it difficult due to various problems,” the director of learning center KidzGrow Indonesia, Utomo Njoto, said during the grand opening last week.

Singapore-based KidzGrow addresses these problems through three programs: Play Attention for children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Fast ForWord for those with Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) and Revamp for children with Developmental Coordination Disorder.

A boy wearing a bicycle helmet concentrates on a computer monitor showing images of a condor flying over mountain tops. Sensors inside the helmet pick up the child’s brain waves, and as the boy’s concentration lowers, so too does the bird’s position.

“The ability to concentrate is abstract, and difficult to teach. With Play Attention children know exactly what paying attention means,” KidzGrow founder Cheryl Chia Li Chin said, explaining the program helps children concentrate for longer.

It may seem like child’s play, but the technology behind it has been used by NASA and the U.S. Air Force to increase the attention span of astronauts and pilots, she said.

Another U.S.-imported program used at KidzGrow is Fast ForWord, which focuses on sounds and helps correct problems related to discriminating between, understanding and paying attention to auditory information.

“The sounds ‘b’ and ‘d’ are very short to make, only 40 milliseconds to voice, and children with APD sometimes can’t differentiate between the two sounds,” Chia said, explaining that through games Fast ForWord stretches the sounds so that APD children can eventually tell the difference.

When a child first enters KidzGrow they are evaluated to determine the kind of problem they are experiencing, after which a program is tailored especially for the child.

“Usually we can see a difference in performance after six to eight weeks,” Chia said.

After 12 sessions of Revamp, Carl Hunter, a student at the Australian International School in Kemang, South Jakarta, had furthered his motor skills.

“His handwriting is tidier, nicer, and he even got a certificate from the school for the improvement in his handwriting,” Carl’s mother, Ligny Hunter, said.

Since its soft opening in January, KidzGrow Indonesia has helped 10 children with Revamp and another 10 with Fast ForWord.

Children’s library abuzz with activity

The Jakarta Post, Tuesday, March 28, 2006

For many young people, a library, as perfectly put by one author, is nothing more than a tomb for books.

“I even know some university students who are library-phobic — believe it or not — so much so that they go with whatever their lecturers tell them and never look for further references,” said Gola Gong, the pen name of Heri Hendrayana Haris, who is noted for his work of fiction Balada Si Roy (The Ballad of Roy).

“Enliven the library with activities,” he told a recent seminar.

A librarian at a state senior high school in Cilegon, West Java, commented that her efforts — putting comfortable sofas and beanbags in the school library — did not have the desired effect.

“Students just used them to take a nap between lessons,” she told the seminar.

It is not enough for a library to have comfortable chairs, Kompas Information Center manager Sintha Ratnawati responded, it was more important to have literary-based activities to encourage interest in the library.

“Depending on the target audience, various activities can be created based on the available material, such as storytelling, watching documentaries and other films, book discussions, ‘meet the author’, and writing courses,” she said.

Activities based on articles taken from daily newspapers and tabloids, for example, range from sentence-making exercises to spotting new vocabulary. The news can be used as a starting place in storytelling, a geography lesson or a crossword puzzle.

“Newspapers and tabloids are good sources of activity because they present a wide range of subjects — crime, education, health, food — that are up to date, and presented in a variety of formats such as articles, photos and tables,” Sintha explained.

At Gola Gong’s Rumah Dunia (House of the World) activity center in Serang, Banten, children are not only invited to come and enjoy its more than 4,000 books, but to engage in a number of activities.

“Rumah Dunia started out as my own private library, but now I like to call it a community activity center, where reading is but one of many activities,” Gola Gong said.

On Mondays, Rumah Dunia invites visitors to explore the world of books and storytelling, while on Tuesdays, it holds an outdoor drawing class, which is called a tour to increase its appeal to children.

“Drawing tours are one of our most popular activities for children, we get about 50 to 60 children a week,” Gola Gong said.

Wednesdays and Thursdays are set aside for composing stories or poems about daily activities, parents, the home, school, or anything else that interests the child.

The seven-by-five-square-meter stage at Rumah Dunia — located on a one-square-kilometer orchard — is the place to be on Fridays, with children and visitors exploring the theater, while on Saturdays they are invited to express themselves through words or dance.

“Every Sunday, we organize a writing workshop for students, teaching them about journalistic writing, fiction writing, and writing for television,” Gola Gong said, adding that some of the workshop’s graduates were now published authors.

“Librarians often forget their library is just a small part of society, and there are many other activities out there for children.

“They should be more creative by embracing these other activities and organizations, to help children take an interest in books and the library,” he said.