Holidays are here again...

The hols come around every few months and are much welcomed. Exams are over... for my kids and me. I finished grading all my papers! Yay! No extra classes for the school going people in my house this time around - thank God for that! But you can be rest assured that the extra classes are still running in most schools in Alor Setar.

My boy is not having his cos in a 'Chinese' school, the better students will usually balk at the idea as most of them are packed to the brim with their own tuitions. In national schools, like mine, the extras are on for the exam classes - we group them into groups like Gemilang, Terbilang, Cemerlang. Notice the absence of negative words... that's how inept we are at coming to terms with reality. Face it... our school is academic and not every one is academically inclined. A kid who flunks all his subjects is categorized in the Cemerlang group! Last I checked, the word cemerlang meants outstanding. We are using way too much psychology and too little common sense. Similary, you can't be labelling every student in the Science class as Gemilang also. It belittles the word Gemilang, Terbilang.... Words become so cheap!

If you break down the extra classes to individual subjects, it boils down to one or two (at most) classes for the respective subjects. Somehow, the administrators feel that they will do wonders to the results....actually it's more for them to show the Department and parents that they are doing something... they care... which actually they don't.

I am not involved in this hols extra classes cos I refused to have it. But I feel I may not have the option to dictate my wants and wishes too long. I feel that if the teachers can cover the syllabus and give enough exercises, there's no need for these 'show-we-are doing-something' classes. During my time as a student, my teachers hardly gave us extra classes. Extra classes were meant to finish of the syllabus unlike today's extra classes which are meant for question drilling.

The extra classes are actually quite meaningless sometimes as teachers are forced to carry them out. So, grudgingly they do it. Very often, extra class translates to giving out the questions to the students to complete. Teachers would then just give out the answers. It would be much better if the students could do their revision on their own, like my days. But students today need spoon-feeding... on their own, they seem not to be able to move..either that or we are the ones who don't teach them to be independent.

So, guess extra classes will be here to stay..