Saturday Replacement School again! Yesterday's was to replace the holidays we are about to take for Hari Raya Puasa. We've been having lots of these.... the replacement school days on Saturdays. We had 2 (I think) to replace the extended holidays taken for Chinese New Year earlier. You see when the Ministry accommodates one group, they have to start accommodating all. In this increasingly more open and connected society of ours, it's hard not to be consistent cos everyone will bising... and then they start digging in the closet when they are unhappy...
So, there I was, stuck in school on a morning.... when I'd rather be elsewhere. I could name a few; my comfy bed, the paddy fields, the market, breakfast in town... anywhere except school. But I had to drag myself up from my bed in the morning.... 8(
So, how was school? First thing in the morning, the Muslim students were herded to the open hall for a ceramah. I pity them cos they had to sit through more than 2 hours of 'ear-bombing'. The few non-Muslim students sat in the Moral Room... presumably thinking through their moral values. It's usually like this... separate 'programmes'.. No! I mean programme for one group, sit-around for another. You tell, me, how can we ever integrate when the school consciously 'dis-integrate'.
Two hours and a recess later, the Form 3(s) and Form 5(s) were herded to different places again... for more ceramahs.. this time academic-related ones... the integrated type. You tell me, why have Saturday school when classes don't quite run? My son always tells me that they are bored to death whenever they have to sit through a ceramah... can be on issues like drugs, smoking, how to study smart. But after a certain time, no amount of talking actually registers. The mind gets saturated. Studies show we can concentrate for about 40 minutes. Studies also show that boys find it difficult to sit still for so long cos biologically they are not made to do that. Once upon a time, the menfolks were hunters.. and hunters don't sit down. They run around chasing their hunt for the day... go read up about the corpus callosum and the role it plays in the differences between the male and female traits.
We talk about churning out 'smart' students but I wonder whether what we're doing is working smart (for ourselves) or dumbing down our students.
The Forms 1, 2 and 4, classes were supposed to run as usual after recess. Here lies another problem, more than half the school is absent.... Saturday school! Might as well work our term holidays around the festivals rather than have all this. A waste of time and resources....
So, there I was, stuck in school on a morning.... when I'd rather be elsewhere. I could name a few; my comfy bed, the paddy fields, the market, breakfast in town... anywhere except school. But I had to drag myself up from my bed in the morning.... 8(
So, how was school? First thing in the morning, the Muslim students were herded to the open hall for a ceramah. I pity them cos they had to sit through more than 2 hours of 'ear-bombing'. The few non-Muslim students sat in the Moral Room... presumably thinking through their moral values. It's usually like this... separate 'programmes'.. No! I mean programme for one group, sit-around for another. You tell, me, how can we ever integrate when the school consciously 'dis-integrate'.
Two hours and a recess later, the Form 3(s) and Form 5(s) were herded to different places again... for more ceramahs.. this time academic-related ones... the integrated type. You tell me, why have Saturday school when classes don't quite run? My son always tells me that they are bored to death whenever they have to sit through a ceramah... can be on issues like drugs, smoking, how to study smart. But after a certain time, no amount of talking actually registers. The mind gets saturated. Studies show we can concentrate for about 40 minutes. Studies also show that boys find it difficult to sit still for so long cos biologically they are not made to do that. Once upon a time, the menfolks were hunters.. and hunters don't sit down. They run around chasing their hunt for the day... go read up about the corpus callosum and the role it plays in the differences between the male and female traits.
We talk about churning out 'smart' students but I wonder whether what we're doing is working smart (for ourselves) or dumbing down our students.
The Forms 1, 2 and 4, classes were supposed to run as usual after recess. Here lies another problem, more than half the school is absent.... Saturday school! Might as well work our term holidays around the festivals rather than have all this. A waste of time and resources....
1 comment:
Random Shots, teachers in a certain school use to have "rojak pot luck" on Saturday replacements and leave a big mess in the staffroom. Saturdays have been programmed as weekends, so it is hard to get both the teachers and pupils to reprogramme. Ai yo, why so "susah" include all the long festival hols into the school calender, disguise and embed then in the school terms. Lay off the Saturdays!
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