Have we gone 'sesat'??

A beautiful school... is what many of us would like to work in. But in the last decade or so, schools in Alor Setar seem to be in a frenzy of sorts going overboard beautifying their premises.

We always teach our kids that resources must be used wisely.Our resources are limited and it is our job to see to it that they are properly managed to benefit everyone. There are only that many hours we spend in schools. And each of us can only do so much... add that to our teaching duties, I think our minds will get rather frayed if we have to diverge our attention to other matters in school. Spending too much time and money on plants, paints, wrapping papers divert us from our main task. And the paperwork.... going paperless is a fallacy. There seems to be more paperwork now then when I first entered the profession almost 2 decades ago.

Any teacher will tell you, facing 30-40 students in the class is no easy task. If you really want them to turn out well, it takes a lot of your patience..... making sure you go through each kid's work, that they don't get away with not doing any work... in short it saps you. Think parenting! This is parenting on a lesser and greater scale. Lesser in the sense you don't see them 365 days a year. Greater in the sense there're 30 odd of them with different characters. You need to deal with each one in a different way sometimes. If you think parenting teenagers is exhausting, think how the teachers who really put in the effort with the students feel at the end of the day.

Then the administrators come up with all the plans of grandiose. Mini gardens, 'house-like' environment in the classrooms, endless nice looking filings.. projects that make the school look really good on the outside. And who do they entrust these projects to?? Yup! The teachers! Us poor sods!

Hence a dilemma, not the making of the teacher, but of school heads. To concentrate on classroom teaching or beautifying the school? The latter is always more attractive cos it requires less of everything else but rewards handsomely. If 'your' garden is the nicest, then praises and accolades are heaped on you, unlike the 'unseen' results of educating children. In fact, it might even land you your next APC! LOL! Some may argue that you can do both... but I think we can only do so much. Something else must give. And usually after all the hours at school are exhausted, it eats into your personal.

I think programmes to beautify a school is okay as long as it doesn't go overboard. A school should be presentable. But a school should have right priorities in place and it should be priorities on the right things; not those which serves like a make-up. Remove it and you'll find ugly stuff down there.

The rot in our education system... it's such a sad affairs of the state. One, of our own making...

Recently Ministry Officials were in town to check out the schools to be redesignated as cluster schools. Those schools on the list went on a frenzy - filing, putting on skirts to all the furniture with legs, painting, mowing the grass...

It should be an easy thing to do, awarding the cluster school thingy - look at the results the schools produce - academic and non. Not all those pseudo files. I was at Keat Hwa 1 last week and was shocked at how its appearance had changed. It seemed to have put in much time and effort in upgrading its appearance. Skirts were everywhere! Monkey see, monkey do - in a land where awards and promotion are based on appearance than substance! And like the swine flu, it's spreading like an epidemic.

This is just one of many ails of our schools....