Smoke, and what comes next

01 Smoke

Every year, the smoke travels.

From Kalimantan to Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Is this nature's doing, or ours?

And what if this is nothing compared to what comes next?

Everyone is busy.

But who is doing the learning?

Nothing is hard anymore.

Nothing is built, either.

He was never asked to struggle with a problem long enough to solve it.

Critical-analytical reasoning

A choice no one has practised is a choice no one can bear.

Courage to choose and own the consequence

When everyone has a private oracle, who convenes the room?

Leadership and human connection

What we owe to people we will never meet is learned, not inherited.

Care and responsibility for others

If this is where we are heading, I believe education carries the largest share of the responsibility.

And even when it tries, can one teacher, watching a whole room at once, help every child grow in the way that child needs?

So many of the world's problems are queuing at the few windows able to solve them.

I know my limits. But I don't want to only watch. I want to become one of those windows, and work alongside people far better than me.

Here is what I can do today, for the small number of students I teach: ILMI Class.

Children of different ages learn together, rotating across four stations.

Language learning is woven together with leadership and character training.

And a voice-mode app with AI built in helps me record each student's growth.

Four stations, mixed ages, one rotation.

With the gaps in what I know, am I going to do the world good, or quietly make things worse?

That question is why I am seeking a scholarship.

The two programmes I am applying to:

I have spread myself across five fields, and it has kept me far from real expertise.

So I am now focusing my intellectual journey on Education.

I don't count the earlier years as wasted: each field turns out to be tied to the others.