Broken?

Education in doldrums... An already broken education system given a really hard whack by Covid-19. 

I used to read about pandemics, that a big one should be coming soon. For years, I would teach about the 1918 Spanish Flu. There were a few close scares along the way, SARS, Nipah Virus closer to home but I think most of us felt that the big one won't come. After all, we have all the science... we know all the science.

Yet, it did hit. And its name is Covid-19. Going to be a year since the virus was announced to the world.

In January this year, I read about the Wuhan virus. It had no name yet but I started teaching about it to my students. I hashed up my own materials, scour the net for stuff which I could use. I told my students that what was happening in Wuhan was going to blow up. I felt it will not pass us by and for a couple of weeks starting from end of January, many of my lessons evolved around the pandemic which was raging in Wuhan. 

The virus reached our shores shortly. However, at school everything was running as usual. The Principal never seemed to pay much heed to the dangers. As a matter of fact, just a day before the MCO students were still gathered in closed rooms for programmes. I tried saying that it wasn't in the kids' best interest. It was just brushed off. This same callous response to the ongoing pandemic would be seen repeatedly throughout the year. We just seem to think and feel that it will not affect us. 

11 months on, one Movement Control Order and 2 CMCOs down the road, with an end seemingly in sight because vaccines are on the way. However, it has been a year of disruptions in schools. Out of the usual 40 plus weeks of school that we usually have, the physical school has been off for more than half that time. Going online has laid open our incredible shortcomings. Billions of dollars spent and still reports say about 40% of students do not have proper gadgets/access for online education.

How can we be ready for online learning? I think it is an uphill struggle. The reason? Many of our heads belong to that era where chalk and talk seems to be the only rule of the day. Soon after the MCO ended and school resumed, I asked permission for students to be allowed to bring their mobiles so that I could continue to work on the online platform that I had been working on during the MCO. The answer was no. In fact, the whole school went back to doing things the old way. As the weeks wore on, more 'normal' programs were cooked up. 

Extra classes made their returns. Never mind that a pandemic was still raging. I have never seen such silliness. Extra hours when we are supposed to mitigate the exposure. I have seen also how labelling of such classes kept evolving to escape the SOPs. It is as if the school too was playing a cat and mouse game. When Extra Classes were not allowed, they changed the name to Bengkel. When that too was disallowed, they changed it further to Kelas Lanjutan PdP. Yet they were all the same.... in the face of a pandemic, even the ones who supposed to be leading were scheming and plotting. Makes me wonder what we are teaching kids cos I don't think the kids don't see it. 

The extra classes above have peculiar purposes. Students were made to stay back for an hour after school. All the kids did was this...  they were to complete the work their subject teachers mete out, in other words, homework. They were instructed to complete those work under the watchful eyes of teachers who were assigned to watch them like hawks. It was the most unproductive sessions I have seen and yet, they continued it. What made it rather irrational was amidst it all, there was a raging pandemic. I often wondered what good would all the seemingly extra cramming do when all the kids did was just to do their homework when the same could be achieved at home. Such is the state of the minds of those who head our schools these days.

So, a year on... I have learned a lot also during this pandemic. I made my first teaching video for the first time in my life. As much as I hated to hear my own voice and see myself in a screen, I did it. I picked up more editing know-hows in the process too. Played a bit with emojis and bitmojis. Turns out the learning curve isn't so steep this round. However, with age catching on and up, sitting too long in one position can be kind of a torture these days too. 

I have also learned that online teaching is actually like a truth serum. Lessons on WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, Google Classroom.. the list is very long. And when the reports start rolling in, it seems like they are working fine. Yet around me, from the kids I know, online lessons feel like a sham at times. There are some really good 'reviews' but those are far and few... 

It is going to be one year of disruptions and it looks like it might spill over to 2021. But this seems to hold true... for a good online teaching/learning session, you need a really good teacher. But these days, they define good teachers as ones who 'borrow' videos from the net and send them as the lesson for the day for their students... Whatever happened to teaching....

2020... they year teachers repost videos (not theirs)... great isn't it?

that teach for them.