Notice Boards...

Every year the students get chased to 'do-up' their papan kenyataan (notice board). All classes have their own boards these days. But some how I think we've gone sesat yet again the reason for these boards. It's only been less than a month, and the notice board has taught me a lesson or two about the state of the people whom we entrust the education of our children to... plentifool of lessons for me too.

Start of the year... a flurry of activities. New year, new class.. changes. Enter a class on the first day and we get down to the needful. One that never fails to top the list these days is keceriaan. It is important but I think we're overdoing it.

Curtains; they are a must these days. So, these are distributed and duly hung up... I can never agree to curtains, unless they aircon the classroom. It's way too dusty, hot and humid in the open classroom. And having so much tarred surfaces just don't help. I get flustered just sitting in those classes.... especially when the humid mid-year descends on us. And we'd sweat like horses and the smell..... *go figure*

Then the notice boards. The students are told to doll-up the notice boards. Cloths are introduced as bases for the boards. Must look flawless. Yup! Gone are the days where brown or mahjung paper will suffice. Paper bases leave trails of polka dotted holes. Very often laces and ribbons are used as borders and delineation lines. Students cut, write, print, draw stuff and paste them on cardboards, coloured papers.... finally they're staple-gunned to the board.

All that would be well and good except nobody wants to take out those labouriously created 'crafted' masterpieces... so they stay, 'gunned' to the board, from the time they are put up, till the following year... and in some cases, recycled again by the following year's inhabitants of the class, and the year after... until someone comes along and orders it to be removed. But the kids are smart, they do some retouching and pass the work of those by the then ancient 'turun-temurun warisan (art)' as theirs.... The trick is to know how to apply touch-ups. I never knew that notice board pin-ups have such long shelf life. Perhaps we should rename them Deco Board.... Class with the best deco board wins the competition...

All they want apparently is, that these notice boards be showcases...tayang, tunjuk. Who cares about the contents of the notice boards? You can put garbage there and deck it up nicely and accolades will still keep rolling in, provided you hide all those garbage with the right amount of laces and ribbons. You might even earn yourself some prizes.. I supposed their value goes up with age, like paintings from long gone artists (only here it's the long gone seniors)!

Notice boards... they too are an indicator of how we've veered from the real meaning of education... We continue to imbue them with this... nampak elok adalah lebih penting dari isi... actually, it's easier to decorate than to look for stuff that can arouse interest of the viewer.... so we menghias to menyenangkan mata, not mencari maklumat to mencabar minda.

Not so very long ago... I remember my teachers telling us to put up interesting articles, news, cartoon strips on the boards.... These days we tell our students to make them pretty.... Vanity, Vanity, Thy name is in all... I tried to do that, and my students got yelled at... *sigh*