Where Are We Heading?

One in four Chinese kids drop out from school. In racial Malaysia we like to break things down into familiar bite sizes, and race is one of them. We want to be a first world nation by 2020 but we're lagging behind the Asian powerhouses like tiny Singapore and (tiny) Taiwan and Korea; 3 countries which obtained their independence around the same time as us. In fact, when we gained our independence, we were in a far better position than these 3 countries. Today, our students trail their counterparts in these countries where a Maths and Science are concerned.

My boy tells me that their teacher gave them Maths past year questions from the 80s and they found it exceedingly tough. I give my girl the equivalent of the exercises done by Singaporean kids her age, and she finds it tough too. I use some of their passages with my Form 5 students and they cannot handle it. And those passages I gleaned from their Primary 6 workbooks!

But my girl lucky in the sense that I put in effort to keep her abreast. Most kids her age are already lagging, just going by our national curriculum. Sometime early this year, 400 000 English textbooks for Year 1 had to be recalled because they contained too many errors. They had to do a reprint of it. Before a textbook hits the desks of students, it has to go through a few vetting steps. Whatever happened? Lack of competence among those in the vetting panel?

So what has gone wrong? Racial politics, I guess, is the root to this problem. For too long we've been stoking this 'siege-mentality' among different races. And this siege mentality takes on different forms depending on race. So, we get disunity, suspicion, laziness, complacency, etc, etc - those sort of stuff that causes us to shoot ourselves in our own feet.

Chinese students who attend vernacular schools have poor command of English and Bahasa Malaysia. Despite being Chinese, I also believe that having vernacular schools does not help with national integration. I thought the former Mission Schools (like Convent, ACS) were ideal for national integration but somewhere along the line, everything started to get racial and the quality of instruction dropped. Values began to be eroded. As a result, even parents like us who grew up in the those mission schools flocked to sent our kids to the Chinese schools where we feel that at least, they are taught to be hardworking and diligent.... but Chinese schools don't seem to encourage that sort of inquisitiveness that many of us hope for. It's work and more work for them and most of the time it boils down to how much each of them can retain and regurgitate!

But that does't mean that national schools are doing any better. Nationals or kebangsaan school kids are only mono-lingual too; in BM. Their drop out rates is almost like the Chinese kids. Despite education being free up till the age of 17, kids still drop out.

I teach in a school at the fringe of the city. It's been years I think since I last received any student competent in English. Majority of my students come from national schools. I am usually left with the arduous task of making them understand English. My colleague who teaches Maths is having an equally horrendous time trying to get these kids Math competent too. Simple times table, basic fractions... Questions have been dumbed down so much that it defies logic how students cannot seem to solve the simple equations.

Something seems to be amiss here. Kids who come to us have gone through 6 years of primary schooling. Yet on my first day with my Form 1 kids, they listened to me with blank looks.I've had to go back to the basics. I do really basic stuff with them. I make them copy passages so that they learn to process vocabulary, grammar and structure. I go after them incessantly for their attitude. Many of these kids, especially the boys are not interested to learn. The lack of discipline and the right attitude show. In short I find myself doing the stuff that primary school teachers do with them because anything more would be beyond them.

The quality of English teachers is also on the slide. It is not uncommon to find English teachers themselves unsure of their grammar or groping for the right words. Neither is it uncommon to find English teachers uncomfortable talking in English. You may also find English teachers with postgrad qualifications not able to string correct sentences. And it is also normal to find that English teachers sometimes struggle in attempting to answer the students' questions too. And English teachers today don't read much as well! How then can they improve? I've seen some teachers who have taught English more than 10 years still finding difficulty trying to make sense of the tenses, singular-plural; basic stuff. As a result they make glaring errors when they speak.

If we are to study the education systems in the 3 countries above, we'll find that they pay close attention to the quality of their teaching staff. It affects the quality of instruction. Our system here does not seem to award scholarships to the best and brightest to pursue a career in education. Our best and brightest always seem to end up in medicine, law and those careers with glamourous sounding names. Ask a good student whether he wants to be a teacher and you'll get this horrified look on their faces! So we get a mismatch of talent. We are now getting the mediocre to train the future generations of our country. And we expect to be of world class using mediocre instruction.

Leadership is also another area. We lack leaders who can lead by examples. School heads on the whole seem more interested in the title and of course higher pay that comes with the title. Many bosses today are more interested to be tuan than of service and maybe that's part of the problem. I was talking to a colleague today and she said that bosses shouldn't busy themselves with the nitty gritty stuff. I disagree because the nitty gritty, the mundane are the things that we need to tackle in order to move forward.

And so after beating round the bush, we come back to its root. Racial politics... the creation of this siege mentality that pits one race with another. And its offsprings, Suspicion, Jealousy, Greed, Laziness, Incompetence, Pride, Injustice are sucking our nation dry.

Mother's Day...

Mother's Day was yesterday... this year I sent a bouquet of flowers to my mom... and it made her day. I can tell cos she called me immediately, which is so unlike her. 8) Mom loves flowers!

Mom is not a very educated person, denied that opportunity by the era that she was in, when education was thought to be wasted on girls. But she's smart cos I have observed over the years, the way she does her things and think things through..... and she was a good mother above all. It's mainly because of her that my siblings and I are where we are today.

Mothers are the glue of a family... it's true that in her days, most fathers brought back the dough... but it's the mundane tasks that mothers do that give the sort of stability in our lives. You can count on going home and things would be ready for you. It was unimaginable that fathers would run a home doing those things moms did...the routinely mundane. Yet I think the mundane sums up what makes a house a home.... clean floor, kitchen table with real food, someone to holler to "I'm home" when we get home from school or anywhere, clean clothes - nicely folded and smelling comfortably familiar, always having someone to ask where things are..... mothers seem to be always there. It's a comforting presence and company.

No matter how liberated my world is today, I think most men would find those household tasks mundane. A young man I know once told me that he cannot understand why his mom wants the floor to be mopped everyday. I really don't know too... except that it's to keep the house clean for everyone, clean enough just in case the kids want to roll on the floor. My son often argues with me over such mundane tasks... Yup, sometimes the answer may not seem logical but somewhere along the way, not too long ago, right about the time when the first kid came along... many mundane tasks began to become routine cos that routine seems to be required of what is called home. Mom did that for us, for so long and so many years. I know I cannot expect Dad to be doing that...

Mothers... they give warmth to a home. Today, they're expected to wear many hats. I wonder how the menfolk would react in the same situation.... juggling the home and career; the incessant going after the kids - physically and verbally.... the never ending objects which we seem to keep finding on the floors, etc, etc.

As for me, I owe lots to my mom, I know. As I grow older, I carry with me, many age old wisdom and perhaps too the illogical practices. But somehow they feel so right and seem to be fitting into my life too. And I wonder too whether I'd be able to be that comforting presence in her twilight years too.

A Typical Day...

I don't really know what qualifies as a typical day these days cos it can change... but for now this is how a typical work day for me is like.

I've to be up by 6 a.m. And it's straight to the kitchen from the bed. My kitchen will be abuzz with activity once the light comes on. Depending on the menu of the day, there'll usually be either some blending, steaming, frying or boiling. I've 40 minutes to finish preparing breakfast, then pack them for my kids. Cups of drinks (they're usually Milo with milk, or just plain milk or freshly blended juice) will be there for everyone to gulp down before they leave home.

Then the washing and clearing up... so that I'd not get overly 'mang-chan' when I get home from work later. Coming home to a messed up can be a rather stressful event. Once that's done, a quick shower (real quickie) and then change into my work clothes. No time for all those make up thingy. Then I'd lug my bags into my car.... and if I can steal some more time, water my plants before I leave the house. My keladi plant is thriving and needs to drink a lot.. 8) And while I am at it, might as well do the rest of the plants too. But I am glad for the water timer that Other Half has fixed up. It at least keeps the plants watered on those really harried days.

Then it's off to work. Work used to be therapeutic... I get out of the house, meet friends but lately there are lots of things that defy sensibilities. Sometimes I wonder whether I should be a stay-at-home mom, maybe there won't be all these mad rushes. But I enjoy my financial independence too....

Once I get back from work, it's back to the grind of housework. Dinners (thank God for the catered food on certain days), clothes to hang (and fold sometimes), plants to water, cleaning up.... the same mundane tasks cos I can never win this battle against the dust (and cobwebs).

Nights.... nights are mostly occupied. Lessons, sit downs with my gal, badminton (yay! I still have my own night out) and sometimes dinner with friends. Kids cannot be left alone to do their own work while they are still marginal people. Even those coming out from the marginal world still requires lots of reminders...

Weekends (and holidays) mean I'll have more time to potter around and do my stuff. And that's when I do my grocery shopping. Free time is a luxury. I do have free time but most of the time, I don't feel like going out after work...

But I am thankful for my day help who comes in and do the general cleaning, and also all those household gadgets that make my life more manageable... robot vacuum cleaner, washing machine (I don't know what I'd do without it), water boiler with timer, pressure pump, etc, etc. They make my work less strenuous... I've been watching my friends and neighbours with maids... notice that many of them hand wash their clothes and I wonder why they don't use the washing machine.

When I first got married, life was harried but not as harried as today. Maybe in a decade or so, a typical day might one that involves us just cruising along slowly....

A time for everything... and this happens to be a busier juncture.

Books on iPad...

There are so many apps for reading on the iPad and iPod. My 2 favourites are Stanza and iBooks.

Stanza because I can transfer books on the fly from my computers. It's a 'Look Ma! No Hands!' kind of transfer. All you need to is to grab the book via wi-fi. Downloading it into the iPad (or iPod) is effortless. But you need to install the desktop version into your computer. And while you are at it, you might want to also take a look at Calibre for ebook conversions.... yup, ebooks come in many formats and sometimes they need to be converted. 8)

This is how the booklist looks like. I use Stanza mostly on my iPod. I think I've more than 100 books in it at last count. And to make easy for me to locate the books I have not read, I categorize my books into 2 collections - 'Read' and 'Not Read'.

iBooks is another apps that I use a lot, mainly on my iPad as many of my reference books are in pdf format. Reading pdf(s) on the iPod takes lots of effort as you need to scale and move the page around a lot. With the iPad, reading is comfortable enough.

My most recent preoccupation... 'chopping up' my books and scanning them so that I can put them into my iPad for easy reference. This is one of the books which I bought last month. It is now in my iPad. These days my iPad comes in very handy when I need quick exercises in class.... grammar, comprehensions (short and long), ideas, etc, etc...

This is another book which I recently chopped up. As you can see, it's a comfortable enough size for the eyes. At the bottom of the screen you have all the pages of the books. Touch on any and it'll bring you to the respective page. At home, I can just print direct from my iPad straight to my HP Laserjet 1536 dnf. With the right connection kits, it can even be projected; and that is one of the things that I plan to get when I get my iPad 2.

iBook library is really quaint cos one has the option of choosing the view of shelves with books on it; just like a real library. This page is my English Reference pdf collection. I've lost count of the number of books cos I keep adding on to them.

But for both iBooks and Stanza, books can also be added via email. You can email yourself books and open them in the apps. Easy and hassle free. There are many other readers out there, some of them really good from what I have read but for now, these 2 will suffice.

And At the End of the Tunnel...

... indeed it wasn't light that awaited. It was the light from the oncoming train, not chugging, mind you, but zooming in at breakneck speed; literally knocking the breath out of me.

This qualifies as an "out of the blue" experience. Today I went to get my revamped timetable. Not suspecting anything amiss, I happily went back to the Staff Room. There, I nearly flipped when I saw my new timetable. They had taken out 3 of my Form 1 classes and replaced it with 3 Form 4 classes.... 4 months into the school year! So out goes my Kontrak Latihan, the silly Headcount, Rancangan Pengajaran Tahunan, name lists, and what other things which I may have missed out. Just like that! And on top of it, I am told to take it as a challenge. LOL!

So I did what I had to do. Saw the boss, and I am told that it's because I am more experienced. Now I don't buy such kind of excuse after being repeatedly reminded that all teachers are the same. There is a teacher available to fill the vacancy and now I am told that I am supposed to be 'better' suited to teach the students. Does that mean that I am more competent too? I am going to sound like a sour grape but I can't help it cos these days we are all supposed to be same! Never mind that this sameness goes out the window when they give out the APC every year. Or am I to understand that APC is not meant for teachers competent in their subject matter but those who excel in buttering up? Sameness!!!! LOL!!!!

Into the 5th month of the year. The school year is already midway! I know my students well enough to know which one is more likely not to do his work or corrections. I know which one is more likely to be disruptive or sleep in class. The students also know what I expect of them. There is a rapport now which is supposed to help in my teaching and their learning. And now they have to get used to another teacher and I have to get used to another set of students; all in the middle of the year! Disruption! Whose welfare are they actually watching out for? I feel it's definitely not mine or the students for that matter.

Musyawarah? These days the style of management is more of you-do-as-I-say. Many bosses these days pandai cakap but cannot buat their own cakap..... read as cannot walk their talk. And because they want it easy, things are more likely done with strokes of pen than actual real ground work. Ground work requires real effort. Abuses are common.... by the heads and the people assigned to do the heads' biddings. It's easier to just take the easiest path so that you can continue to eat your bowl of whatever in peace (in the office).... Ever wonder why many people grow fat in their jobs these days? They don't cover the grounds themselves.

Comments given by well meaning colleagues.... it shouldn't be a problem for you, take it as a challenge, never mind, etc, etc..... Yeah! The change is not a problem for me. I am competent enough to handle any level and basically I can also choose not to care, hence never mind. But the thing is, I did care. I cared that I have to start midway when it can be avoided. I think it's not good for the students, to have to adapt to another teacher. Everyone has their own style and they need time to adjust too. Instead of upsetting one group, we're now doing it to 2 sets of students. I mind that I won't know my new sets of students well enough to identify them by name, cos now I have to start all over again, at a time when I am supposed to be preoccupied by other more pressing needs that come at this time of the year. I mind that students don't do enough written work.... and I am bothered that my time has to be wasted redoing all the mundane stuff again. I mind that my bosses don't care two hoots that I have to feel flustered with the already silly paperwork. And it could have been avoided had they taken the trouble and sit down to discuss with us... collectively!

The way this is done? It tells me my bosses don't care about my input. That they twist and turn their words to their convenience, that they don't really care about the students either, whatever is done, it's more to facilitate their own programs. It also tells me there is no passion in our work. If you care and are passionate about something, you will say something when it is taken from you. I just learned that many don't feel anything.... they don't care. I've also learned that many people can say 'kesian' many times, but those are more mere than real. Kesians are actually excuses to be incompetent.

And what else? I'll survive this headlong crash. Bosses and tunnels? I just learned too that bosses are the trains and not the light.... LOL!!!

Light At The End of the Tunnel?

You'd think that you'd see the light at the end of the tunnel that you are in if you keep walking it.

Entering the 5th month of school and I find myself still 'chasing' the students for the same thing - bad writing, mindless copying, untidy work... the list though is slightly shorter is still made up of the same thing.

I am still amazed that kids today have bad, no, let me rephrase, extremely bad handwriting. Makes me wonder whether they learned how to write at all. Read somewhere that the keyboard is slowly nudging handwriting out, making it obsolete. Today I found myself teaching a girl how to write her 'e' so that it doesn't make her words even more difficult to read. And I thought handwriting is something they work at in primary school. For those teaching in schools where compliance and a sense of responsibility among students is present, such problems are not common. But in normal day schools like mine, often it's hard to go beyond the kids' attitude. They are just not bothered!

When I think back of myself as a student, I was really compliant.... compared to my own students. Though my teachers used to complain of my squiggly writing, my work was generally neat and complete. Today, majority of my students hand in half completed work. And if I don't punish those recalcitrant ones, I'd end up with a big number not doing any work at all. If at all I give homework, I can count on at least a third not completing it, if I don't check it there and then in class.

Checking for work done these days involve flipping through individual exercise books cos some have learned the art of handing in empty exercise books. They expect to get away by the sheer presence of their exercise books in the pile of books! What I do these days is to immediately correct their books... and for it to be possible, I've had to tailor my lesson for the day to ensure that I have adequate time to go through each student's work. The students have 'wizened' up to the constant 'punishment' that I mete out instantly and quite a few prefer to do their work now, though completing them is still an issue. Who says punishment doesn't work? All those psychologists who keep saying that we need to engage them verbally only should go into the classrooms and teach!

I've given up trying to give them any homework for now because I find instant and immediate action much more effective. And if they can complete their work in class it's far better than them taking it home and not doing anything about it. And completing it also means that they can't feign forgetfulness of the previous lesson. I've learned that it's quite impossible to engage a student who does not want to assume responsibility or take pride in his work. But you still can get compliance if you are really strict with him cos the aversion for punishment will make him do his work. So, no matter how hard I try to make sure that I engage them, discipline and its enforcement is still necessary if not, a must. Kids when given a choice would choose the path of least resistance. Life is way too good for them and they don't feel that sense of hunger that seemed to spur us, the earlier gen, to do well. So if discipline becomes the path of least resistance (because of the more 'pain') they'll prefer to do their work than face the 'pain'.

One comforting thought though is that the people on the list is getting less... but those who remain there are totally hardcore! There's an old saying... spare the rod, spoil the child.... I think it still holds very true.

Weddings...

There has been a flurry of wedding activities these past 12 months or so; with many of our church kids, now grown up, getting married. And so it was with great joy that we witnessed yet another one over the weekend, this one particularly even so.

And this is also the first time Other Half and I actually attended dinners from both the bride and groom. 8) Started off with dinner on Friday from the bride's side. Both Other Half and I felt like 'ancients' at a table of young adults... how time has flown. But we enjoyed ourselves. Dinner conversation was relaxed, fun and we had lots of laughs, basically with the kind of energy that one can expect when one is with the young people! Karyn gave a heartwarming speech to the bride... and of course the groom too.

This was followed by the church wedding and dinner from the groom's side the next day. Am happy for both MY and BP; MY especially since I've more or less watched her blossom into the person she is today; though she is her own person, I still see bits of her mom in her. Eow Sim would be very happy.

Weddings, I think are one of those few events in life which I feel have a way of profoundly affecting me; I think probably on many of us generally. The joining of 2 lives, the journey that they'll make, the commitment, friendship, patches of highs and lows, kids, pain, joy...; it generally sums up a good many parts of life's facets.

When you see the soon-to-be minted couple making their vows, it will always somehow remind you your own vows, or perhaps even remind you of those days, long ago, or even if not that long, that warm feeling that you feel yourself or seeing the glow in the faces of the bride and groom. Sharing a wedding is also a reminder of the greater possibilities, with someone there rooting for us.

In days of old, marriage was used as a tool to form alliance. The Bible refers to the Church as the bride and Christ's sacrifice on the Cross for the Church. I've begun to understand this allegory better. A good marriage is I think the closest thing on this side of the divide where it is possible to see an almost complete willingness to sacrifice oneself for one's spouse; an alliance to something better, hope of better things to come.

A weekend filled with reminders that life is about the people around us... no matter what shortcomings we each might have; life is more meaningful when shared.