2nd LDP....

... and what a waste of time, yet again. This round of LDP is to teach teachers how to make brochures, as though that is going to help us in our classroom teaching. It's not that we don't know how to build a brochure... and I think they've made all those softwares so easy to manipulate that we no longer also need all those Idiot's Guide kinda instructions.... anyway if you get stuck, there's always the Help button. And if that doesn't work, there's the Internet.... just need to perah a little of your otak.

But the thing is it became a talk on Headcount by the boss for one half hour. The last round of LDP also had a Headcount slot. The reason given for the switch was there was no internet connection. For MS Publisher?? You can build stuff with their little library. But the Headcount talk seemed very well prepared; with printed handouts and slides... as if an ambush planned in advance. Headcount seems to be an obsession, the current flavour, if the rearing of its multiple heads in the last 2 LDPs were to be taken into considerations...

And it's a Saturday morning, some more, 3rd Saturday morning.... supposed to be off??? There were many subtle and veiled innuendos which were intended to burn ears... The chase for a complete paperwork to detail that work is carried out is at full blast is on. The bottom line is, the squeeze is on.... I guess next one might be hearing teachers going nutty... LOL! Plus, it never fail to amaze me how Heads seem to think they are immune to their own words. We are told to follow the Takwim Sekolah. But today's LDP is a deviation from the calling letter... which clearly stated it was a kursus for brochure making but in the end, the total time spent on Headcount and the veiled and subtle was one half hour. We must follow they are free to bend at will....

I may sound like I beh-kam-buan to attend this LDP... which I am. But it's only so because it's such a waste of time. I don't want to learn how to make a brochure. I already know how to make them. I think I can make them better than the facilitator. Even my 10 year old with no prior knowledge of brochure production can probably pick it up after half an hour of fiddling. And the letter states 5 hours. For people like me who have been willing enough to experiment with the various publishing softwares over the last 15 years, I probably have a few other tricks up my sleeve. Anyway, with YouTube and the Net, I've a teacher on-call for 24 hours. And many of them are pros..... so I'm not very dissimilar from those students who get agitated when their time is wasted at school.... another Saturday morning wasted. That's 2 LDPs in a row..... so you see, we teachers are a subservient lot, not very creative nor independent.... how to produce movers and shakers to rock the world???

Automation, mechanization, digitalization, etc, etc.... despite all the modernities which are supposed to lighten our load, it has become heavier. Instead of simplifying work, it adds more work... all those postulation based on projected data... hello!!!! This is teaching kids-lah. If you don't get down to the real teaching, all the data in the world will not change anything. Kids are not statistics to put a TOV, OTI and what have you not. Fiddling with just the TOVs and OTIs will not make any difference if our attitude and heart are not there... and the management has done a marvelous job at agitating many of us.... most of us would work our hearts out, if only minus the subtle and veiled.... the constant reminder of a hanging sword over our heads via KPM says this, JPN says that... we might as well start singing the same tune too... and throw the book back at them....