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01 Smoke

In 2026, the smoke travelled again.1

Over the years it has reached Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines and Vietnam.2

Is this nature's doing, or ours?3

And what if this is nothing compared to what comes next?4

02 The smoke clears

03 The classroom

Everyone is busy.

But who is doing the learning?5

04 The white room

Nothing is hard anymore.

Nothing is built, either.6

05 The first loss

He was never asked to struggle with a problem long enough to solve it.7

Critical-analytical reasoning

06 The second loss

A choice no one has practised is a choice no one can bear.8

Courage to choose and own the consequence

07 The third loss

When everyone has a private oracle, who convenes the room?9

Leadership and human connection

08 The fourth loss

What we owe to people we will never meet is learned, not inherited.10

Care and responsibility for others

09 The burden on education

Exaggerated? I hope so. But each of these capacities is learned through practice, so I believe education carries the largest share of the responsibility.11

And even when it tries, can one teacher, watching a whole room at once, help every child grow in the way that child needs?12

So many of the world's problems are queuing at the few windows able to solve them.13

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.

10 What I can do now

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

Inquiry first: children work at a problem before anyone hands them an answer.14

Two independent stations, where each child chooses a task and owns the result.15

Language for real use: they lead, ask and persuade in the language they are learning.16

Moral and character training runs through every station, rooted in Islamic values.17

Mixed ages and four stations let me teach small groups at the edge of what each child can do.18

And a voice-mode AI app helps me record each student's growth.19

1 2 3 4
Four stations, mixed ages, one rotation.
Read about ILMI Class

11 The honest question

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:

  • Education: Research Design & Methodology
  • Educational Planning, Economics & International Development
Read why on the Education page

12 Five fields

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.

Notes and sources

  1. Since July 2026, fires in Kalimantan and Sumatra have sent haze into Sarawak, Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore; some Malaysian schools closed. These are press reports, not yet peer-reviewed. It is not new: one model links the 2015 haze to about 100,000 excess deaths. ↑

  2. Smoke from Indonesian fires is carried across maritime Southeast Asia. Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei are hit hardest; mainland neighbours such as Vietnam, less often. ↑

  3. Both, but mostly ours. Most fires are set by people to clear land; drained peat and El Niño drought make them burn longer and wider. ↑

  4. Without land-use reform, severe fire seasons are expected to return with future El Niño droughts. A warming climate makes fire weather more frequent in many regions. ↑

  5. Using a tool to save mental effort is called cognitive offloading. In one field experiment, students with unrestricted AI did better in practice but worse on the exam. A survey links heavy AI use with weaker critical thinking, though only as a correlation. ↑

  6. Effort that slows learning down, such as recalling instead of rereading, often makes it last. Removing every difficulty can remove the learning with it. ↑

    • Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. In M. A. Gernsbacher et al. (Eds.), Psychology and the real world (pp. 56–64). Worth Publishers.

  7. In productive-failure studies, students who wrestled with a problem before instruction later understood it more deeply. Critical thinking can be taught, especially through dialogue and real problems. ↑

  8. Self-regulation grows through practice: setting goals, choosing strategies, judging the result. People who lean on automated advice tend to check it less, and miss its errors. ↑

  9. Turkle argues that face-to-face conversation, where empathy is learned, erodes when screens stand in for it. Cooperative-learning research treats leadership and communication as skills to be taught. ↑

  10. Noddings describes caring as cultivated through modelling, dialogue, practice and confirmation. A meta-analysis of 213 school programmes found that social and emotional skills can be taught. ↑

  11. Meta-analyses show that critical thinking and social-emotional skills respond to teaching. That education carries the largest share is my judgement, not a finding. ↑

  12. Bloom reported tutored students far ahead of students taught as a class; later reviews find a smaller but real gap. Class size shapes how much individual attention each child gets. ↑

  13. One concrete queue: UNESCO estimates that the world needs 44 million more primary and secondary teachers by 2030. ↑

  14. Inquiry learning works when it is scaffolded, not left unguided. Productive-failure research suggests that struggling before instruction deepens understanding. ↑

  15. Self-determination theory links a sense of autonomy with motivation and well-being. A meta-analysis found that giving learners real choices tends to raise intrinsic motivation. ↑

  16. Learners develop a language by producing it for real purposes, not only by receiving it. Task-based and cooperative teaching build lessons around such purposes and roles. ↑

    • Swain, M. (1985). Communicative competence: Some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development. In S. Gass & C. Madden (Eds.), Input in second language acquisition (pp. 235–253). Newbury House.
    • Ellis, R. (2003). Task-based language learning and teaching. Oxford University Press.
    • Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. T. (2009). An educational psychology success story: Social interdependence theory and cooperative learning. Educational Researcher, 38(5), 365–379.

  17. In al-Attas's account, education in Islam is ta'dib: instilling adab, right conduct, not knowledge alone. School programmes show that such conduct can be practised and improved. ↑

  18. Vygotsky's zone of proximal development is what a child can do with help but not yet alone. Rotating stations is one way to differentiate teaching within one room. ↑

    • Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.
    • Tomlinson, C. A. (2014). The differentiated classroom: Responding to the needs of all learners (2nd ed.). ASCD.

  19. The study that found unrestricted AI harmed learning also found that a tutor with guardrails largely avoided the harm. The app records progress; it does not do the work. ↑