Audrey Tan | Moolah | The road of exploration and change

Child Finance International | Zanvoort, Netherlands

June 13th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

Like a whirlwind, in a blink of an eye the week has zipped by since Min and I were over at the C hildFinance International Conference – A movement on Child Finance organized by Alfatoun brought together the world’s leading organizations coming to nail down the multi-faceted aspects of Financial literacy education for children. The confluence of experts in the field coming together to address issues that are pertinent in all spectrum to teaching children about money in nations, and all around the world. An exciting movement ahead!

The conference proved to provide some great validations for our navigation into the space of child financial education. The emphasis on research and the effectiveness of teaching children at a young age holds consistent with our strife for teaching children about from a young age and at the same time involving parents in the learning process.

Princess Maxima giving the inaugural address

Met some inspiring people, of which there are too many to list. If I’ve met you at the conference and we have spoke in one way or another, Thank you for being a part of shaping my experience. You would have contributed to molding my thoughts in one way or another and adding to that, the many learning lessons I took with me at this gathering.

Jeroo, amazing pioneer of FI, Founder of Aflatoun

The tour around Haarlem brought some time for great introspection and reflection. Amidst the architecture I stood in awe of, the beautiful windows in Holland, its sheer transparency almost seemed like a metaphor for the freedom and liberation that the country stood for. Significant in the land of the free. Took a quick tour of Haarlem with John Elkington, who shared much about his many years of experience in working on the many genres of ventures. Co-Authored the book, The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets that Chang e the World. Thank you for the inspiration and excitement in Moolah!

The trip was made complete with a visit from my dear brother, Dominic who very excitedly flew in from London to spend the 3 days in Holland.

Carpe Diem!

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Children See, Children do | The Absorbent Mind

May 31st, 2010 § 3 comments § permalink

It’s interesting to peer back into our days of old. The memorable or maybe not so memorable times of our childhood?

Dr Maria Montessori has left an impressionable footprint in my view of child development and learning. Looking at the initial stages of child development, first three years of growth, Montessori calls the absorbent mind, ‘a special mechanisms exists for language.’ Not the possession of language itself, but the possession of this mechanism which enables men to make languages of their own, in what distinguishes human species[1].

As Mario M. Montessori explains in the Education for Human Development: Understanding Montessori, The absorbent stage where learning is mainly influenced by the result of unconscious mechanisms determined by the emotional development of the child and in turn is dependent on the adult who cares for it.

Introjections, imitation, and identification are of particular importance in the formation of behavior patterns and the acquisition of cultural attitudes.

This tells the story, Children See. Children Do.

I find myself almost as a replica of my mother’s way of being. She’d teach, “Others before Self.” And being in the company of children recently surfaced this point, I found myself teaching the little ones almost naturally the concept of sharing and giving before gratifying their needs. And reflecting on what Montessori mentioned, not only were the good results channelled this way, where imitation is concerned. Boy do I scream like my mother when I do

What about your version of replica? How has that changed the way you think about the world?

[1] Montessori, The Abosorbent Mind p.37

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Writing, Thinking | Written as it is.

May 19th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

So, I have been writing, scribbling, sketching and possibly hammering the keyboard as a measure of writing that we have become so used to. Sheets and sheets of paper fill my room, notebook after notebooks. Occasionally, I use Ommwriter, this one’s a pretty interesting tool that helps one concentrate as they write – something that technology has taken away from us (too many tabs maybe?). Then it occurred, why not go back to basics and attempt to manifest the streams of thoughts in words.

Writing becomes a way to solidify thought processes, concretize and make connections of the insane number of thoughts that run through our heads every minute of every day. The National Science Foundation has some interesting statistics. We think a thousand thoughts per hour. When we write, we think twenty-five hundred thoughts in an hour and a half. The average person thinks about twelve thousand thoughts per day. A deeper thinker, according to this report, puts forth fifty thousand thoughts daily.

What are some of the rituals that we have in our lives? The great thinkers have inspiring daily rituals have one thing in common, they all bring forth ideas of their own, novel ones, unique and independent in thought, almost revolutionary in their own ways.

Writing is time consuming – No doubt about that. What isn’t when it requires thought? And they said, time doesn’t come to you. It’s what you make time for that’s different.

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Consumerism, Say What?

May 16th, 2010 § 2 comments § permalink

Going back to tradition and the original meaning of consumerism as defined by the Cambridge Dictionary, Consumerism is, “The state of an advanced industrial society in which a lot of goods are bought and sold.” ”When too much attention is given to buying and owning thing.” We are all living in an era where consumerism is no longer considered a novel thing, it’s penetrated into our every day lives and let alone can we consider this to have too much emphasis and focus.

Do we find ourselves paying attention to these things? Do we forget that consumerism is bombarding us in our faces everywhere we are, in every part of our lives?

In affluent cities, living in a time where access to capital is readily available, the consumer has a myriad of choices, every second, every minute of every day, to make a purchase, either on impulse or through cautious processing.

Delivery of a game through your mobile phone, transacted in a matter of seconds, purchasing your McDonalds delivery online warrants you a $1 discount off your total purchase, all at our finger tips, all in a matter of clicks and seconds. How do you say No to these conveniences in our purchase behaviours?

I was not spared with my trip in Phuket this weekend, almost a sort of aggressive consumerism I’d say. With the salesmen, young, old, child, adult popping by my beach chair, one by one, all selling different commodities. A walking mall that comes to you, bombarding me with purchases after purchases. It came to a point where I chose not to let our eyes meet, for fear of sending the wrong signals of me falsely seeming interested in making a purchase. It was easy to say No, but hard to ignore.

Looking at what we are used to in affluent cities, the malls we patronize today masquerades as a passive consumerism that unconsciously lingers in our midst. One that we actively choose to walk into the moment we decide to make a trip to the shopping malls. The passive consumerism now turns us to subjects of material temptation. “It’s window shopping”, we’d say. Does that make us sit and ponder why we place ourselves in positions where we endlessly seek the latest and the best, when will we ever have enough?

Our outlook to the awareness of the inherent consumerism that exists today should cause us to settle for some introspection in the things we consume and pursue.

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