For years, letters have been popping up in the press about what’s labelled “noise nuisance”. And that’s part of the problem, innit?? From the description of what poor, beleaguered citizens have to endure it’s nothing less than sheer, unadulterated torture inflicted on even children, the sick and infirm. Your Eyewitness remembers several cries from the heart out of Kitty where some rumshop or other would be blasting their speakers as if trying to rival the Grateful Dead’s famous “Wall of Sound”!
That, of course, had “604 total speakers, powered by 89 300-watt solid-state and three 350-watt vacuum tube amplifiers generating a total of 26,400 watts of power. 586 JBL speakers and 54 Electro-Voice tweeters, powered by 48 600-watt McIntosh MC-2300 amplifiers generating a total of 28,800 watts of continuous (RMS) power”!!! But the Grateful Dead was playing to 50,000 of their totally stoned fans – while the Kitty Rumshops were located in an area where students had to go to school in the morning; parents had to go to work, and the sick had to nurse their ailments.
But the Kitty letter writers were just a handful of the thousands in communities across the coast who have to endure the same agonies. The latter just don’t have the skills or confidence to write “letters to the press”. But in the last few weeks, we were made aware of the same phenomenon occurring in the village of Leonora, on the West Coast of Demerara – from where the President of the country hails and where he resides when not hanging his hat in State House. Your Eyewitness himself has written about one particularly raucous Venezuelan re-migrant family celebrating a birthday with their own Wall of Sound from 6pm one evening to 8 am the following morning!!
Now, even as a “nuisance”, the GPF has been mandated to deal with the problem – but from the clear evidence – just as they’ve failed to deal with the phenomenon in minibuses – they’ve failed our householders. In the case of the Leonora auditory onslaught, the Police Station is close enough to the offending bar to have their windows vibrating like out-of-control dildos!! The sounds would’ve also carried to the President’s home two streets behind!! How come they didn’t do their duty??
But more importantly, how come they weren’t disciplined?? This is where the intervention to alleviate the bombardment on the eardrums of the citizenry must come. We can’t keep passing the buck. The Ministry of Home Affairs must establish a hotline for citizens to pass on their cries for relief; these should be logged; passed on to the nearest Police Station and the Response (if any) noted.
A weekly summary of responses should be published.
…Maths challenge
The Maths challenge in our schools ain’t a new one. That it’s a global challenge doesn’t make it acceptable. Since Maths is essential in so many areas of modern successful economies, we should look at how the top economies are coping with the conundrum. America performs notoriously poorly in Maths and nowadays their school systems don’t even require it for graduating!! They can do that because immigrants with math skills flood their shores!! It’s ain’t coincidental that most of their scientists are Indian and Chinese!!
Anyhow, what have successful countries done on Maths that can assist our MoE to hark to Prezzie’s exhortation that we gotta do better?? On the whole, it’s not just tinkering with incentives for teachers. “It’s the story of a battle: a long and far-reaching fight for dominance between a mathematics education that focuses on the procedural and one that focuses on the conceptual.”
Countries like Finland and their “Phenomenon Based Learning” have set new benchmarks in fusing the conceptual and procedural that we’d do well to emulate!!
…speeding??
Your Eyewitness was quite discomfited when he drove on the Mandela-Eccles bypass – and now the Schoonord-Crane bypass – to experience the shuddering of his vehicle over the washboard surfaces. Was it to restrict speeding and deaths?
