The extent of which a person disagrees that the Invisible creates the Visible in our world reflects the degree of suffering in their life

Many years ago, I was a student that had a very difficult time in school; not because I wasn't good academically but because it made me so sick that the entire system was skewered in a particular way that was mass brainwashing children to induce fear in them and to maintain the status quo in the destructive and damaging world we live in. There is a difference between agression and fearlessness; aggression and violence is a form of fear.

During my primary school days, my friends often envied me because I did well in exams without effort and I tried to console them by saying, "It's because the whole school system is prepared by a particular system that only acknowledges a particular kind of intelligence. You're all good and smart people in your own way, don't let school tell you otherwise." This was circa 1980s, and I was trying to articulate the theory of Multiple Intelligences but my friends thought I was making fun of them for being who they were. The analogy I used most often was, "Look, if Housekeeping, Agriculture and Cooking were used as benchmarks to do well in school and in life, I would drop to the bottom of the poverty line in real life." They thought I was making fun of their mothers or rural folk like farmers and fishermen. I was merely trying to illustrate that a false idea of what intelligence is allows our esteem to be manipulated by the prevailing notion driving current economy. 

They thought I was a show-off, and that I just didn't want to let them in on some 'secret of learning'. I remember this classmate I had, she lived at Phee Choon road, not far from my childhood home in Kinta Lane. Her parents asked me to spend afternoons in their rented room sometimes, so I could help her to excel, the way I was. Since we took the same trishaw together, I sometimes get off at her house, spend afternoons there and then walk home in the evenings. Her father was an odd-job labourer, her mother a housewife. I was fascinated by the idea that they could convert a balcony into an open-air kitchen and that 4 different families can live together in one pre-war house. Her parents asked me a lot of questions about my parents, my family, what I eat, my early childhood, what happens in my house, what I do during free time, etc. Upon retrospect, it seemed that the invitation to spend afternoons at their room was a scientific approach to figure out "How this girl can do so well in school." After a few months and not being able to 'get' anything out of me, I was dropped from this girl's "friend list".; she was no longer allowed to talk to me in school because I was a "bad influence". 

During that time, I tried to explain to Choy Har's parents that academic excellence is an illussion; the secret of doing well in life is to know who you are and to understand the rules in place that keep people poor and unthinking. It still pains me today, to think of the many rejections I had to face as a child. Just because people didn't understand what they cannot see, they call you a liar for saying it's there. I suppose now you can understand why I was rejected by most children's parents as a "bad influence". I learned very early in life that telling people the truth pisses people off and that I have to be willing to lose friends if I'm ever going to be true to myself. The only way people will ever listen is if I became rich and famous; then suddenly, my 'lies' become 'nuggets of wisdom'. 

I was often embarassed when people find out my father was a high ranking Bank officer - they thought that must somehow have something to do with my test scores. I wished I could tell everyone the truth : "My dad is so miserable. My dad is such a failure in life that I had to grow up apart from him and my brothers and my mother because my dad's inability to reconcile his intellectual, spiritual, moral and career life affects his judgments when it comes to his relationship with my mother - and me.  Making more money did not get my dad out of the prison everyone else was finding themselves in."

This was how school was like for me : I broke rules that were put in place to repress and went out of my way to defend rules that were meant to preserve harmony. I got into trouble for that. I went up against authority : You want my respect, first show me some first. When they ran out of ways to scare me, they tried rewarding me. What did I learn in life? That if you're radical enough, you always get your way. Politicians parlay this tactic well.

I took the carrots they sometimes dangle in front of me, which made it seem unfair to others that they work hard, obey the rules but it's the people like me who get the carrots. My 'carrots' included :  being allowed to sleep in sickbay just because I didn't feel like being in class, eating in class, being nominated for sports captain, class monitor, librarian, prefect, etc. I even had a teacher that said to my classmates, "Do not disturb a sleeping beast." Honestly, I hated the fact that there were double-standards. I don't think there should be 2 sets of rules : One for those you can bully, and another for those you can't. I guess that's why we still need ISA; because there are some people who are born with a psychological mindset that cannot be easily broken. 

A less morally conscious person would've been gratified to find that 'Crime does pay'. However, I don't like people giving me things just to show me who I have to be grateful to. I'm not a dog, I don't have a Master. I developed a line of thinking back then, that the most dangerous people are the ones you cannot predict what incentives make them tick and what punishments can put fear in them. From then on, trying to figure out what makes people tick became a fascination with me. Morality means different things to different people.  I also learned that if you're never desperate or afraid, you ALWAYS win the war even if you lose the battles. 

I tried so hard explaining to my friends that the only way to beat the system is to not do what it is asking you to. I quoted Buddha and said that we must only do something if we think it is rational. I said OBEDIENCE is bad because it weakens our sense of free-will. We shouldn't obey our parents or teachers; we should respect all living beings. If we learn to respect Life, appreciating our parents and teachers becomes a natural extension of Love and Learning. There is no need for 'Obedience', we live in a democracy, neither in a Communist  nor still ruled by the Catholic Church. I had said that CONFORMITY 'sucks' because we would lose the sense of who we are, why we came to this Earth.

We can just imagine how much MORE trouble I got into. I eventually got labelled, "Fearless". In Hokkien, the equivalent is "Beng". I was made to feel like being Fearless is a morally bad thing. - Peer-pressure was being levelled on me to 'medicate' my 'rebellion'. I told them that it is not I who is being a rebel but them who are being infidels! Non-believers! Since I didn't even believe in competition nor could ever be shamed into conformity, that didn't really have a real effect on me, but it did cause me severe emotional damage, that the same people I'm trying to save are the ones ostracizing me. I think there came a point where my ideas started sounding so radical that people started calling me, "Siao". I believed I developed a wildness in my nature; that's what you get for caging and tormenting a perfectly normal creature of God!

At around the same time I was thrashing around inside the school system, a philosopher called Jiddu Krishnamurthi was telling people that schools should be about cultivating the Intelligence of the Soul and not aboug competition, exams, and constant fear-mongering about 'the future'. Howard Gardner would soon publish his Theory of Multiple Intelligences. John Taylor Gatto, a New York State Teacher of the Year, quit the teaching profession and in 1991, in an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, said, "I can't teach this way any longer. If you hear of a job where I don't have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know." He told Robert T. Kiyosaki recently, "The school system was not designed to teach children to think for themselves. Nor was it developed to just support the present-day notion that we can all be free." Robert T. Kiyosaki, famed author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, criticizes the school system repeatedly and calls it a conspiracy of keeping people poor.

Well, most of you realized that, like the Time-Space continuum, I found myself BACK IN SCHOOL after I travelled the entire length of  my protracted adolescence. Right after I started healing from the damages that school inflicted on my soul, I found myself back in the system; this time as a school teacher. About a year into the job,(circa 2006) I told my friend, Cheng, that I suspect there is a conspiracy in the entire schooling system to keep the Chinese-community poor by robbing them of both the national and international languages. Well, in spite of the fact that she said I'm just being one of those conspiracy theorists, I held on to that belief and I hope, like Kiyosaki and Gatto, I would soon be able to demonstrate why I believe this is so. 

The reason why I'm sharing all this with you today is because I've stopped denying the fact that I am the same girl that had so much trouble during school being who I was sent to Earth to be. I don't want to feel ashamed anymore for who I was, because, as more and more research shows, I am not wrong. School, and the society it has produced, punishes people who come to this world with a more perfect vision of how learning and society should be. I have not yet met a single person I have known from my childhood, who excelled in school and is right now, excelling in life. Most of my friends are either broke, unemployed or worrried about their financial security. They have played into the trappings of Life school has prepared them for. They do not have a fulfilling, happy life where they are both financially free and DOING EXACTLY WHAT THEY LOVE. Some people I know who are my father's age are having the same problems my father had : Not being able to retire financially free and doing all the things they had wanted to do with their life. 

"The degree of which a person does not understand and disagrees that the Invisible creates the Visible things in our world is the degree to which they are suffering in life." - T.Harv Ecker.  When I apply this to what I was trying to tell my friends, that there are different types of intelligences, and one has to discover what one's gifts are and apply them to the benefit of the world, I see now that most people suffer so much trying to be who they are not meant to be. Everyone is settling for mediocrity. After they settle for mediocrity, they start making excuses for their lives : "I can't afford it", "It's the government's fault", "Life's like that", "I'm not like you." What do all these sentences have in common? It's about  feeling of disempowerment, isn't it? 

The Boy who punched his teacher

If you haven't read the story, read it here :

http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/NST/Saturday/National/2540844/Article/index_html

Poor boy had to go to jail and suffer a blemish on his record as a 'convict'. All the newspaper articles are reporting things from a purely judgmental view of 'pesalah', giving a brief, overgeneralizing account of the 'crime' and the court verdict.

New Era College is the extended medium to keep Independent Schools students in school for a few more years....long enough for them to realize that the education that they had obtained after slaving years in Chinese Independent schools are actually worth virtually nothing. In terms of educational objectives, DJZ and New Era College is one big con job.

I do have an agenda against DJZ and New Era College because as an adult, I see them for exactly who and what they are. They are a political unit, no more, no less and they are responsible for destroying the thousands and thousands of lives of young Chinese Malaysians by preaching an unhelpful political ideology.

I knew it was just a matter of time before one SMART student who has been damaged and repressed became a walking ticking bomb. I knew one of those old geezers were going to get it one day.

Anyway, what happened to him is seriously unfair. Someone ought to interview him and get his side of the story. It could not possibly have been a one-off, impulsive decision. It must have been from a long time of repressed anger.

BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD.

Update to "Can THOUGHT alone kill?"

I was mistaken when I thought the boy lived with his Mom. Lucky for me! I wouldn't want to be that prophetic. I'd be hunted down as a bomoh. There hasn't been much update on that report in The Star but a reliable Chinese-paper-reading little bird told me the boy was being taken care after by his grandmother.

Well, I betcha there are more insensitive/disgruntled Chinese grandma-s than there are Maria Montessori grandmas in Malaysia. In fact, for me, 'The Grandmother Card' was really, a motivating force for me to quit my Content Editor job in KL and turn-away from an interview even though I had received an email that I had been shortlisted by a publication - as a food reviewer! (You have no idea how much I make up for my unexpressed creativity by indulging in Penang's cheap, fantastic, 24/7 hawker food.)

I didn't trust the woman who raised me to raise my daughter - I knew I was dysfunctional and damaged on many levels and I knew my upbringing style had quite a lot to do with it. The responsible thing to do as an Adult, is to stop running away from your past and to deal with the "Serpent" head on and re-live your childhood, as painful as it is.

I know I'm not the only Chinese woman who has been tempted to seek greener pastures and leave the young child in the care of the woman we've been trying to avoid ever since we achieved some form of financial independence. Leaving a child with the in-laws is already tempting if you're a DIWK (double-income-with-kids!), what more if you're a SIWK.

I have my skeletons in the closet; and one big one is how I have been trying to run away from the conditions I grew up in; my childhood and adolescence. The last thing I wanted was to live under the same roof of the very same person who made me grow up feeling that Life is not worth living. But somehow, in my early 20s, I had an epiphany that the only way I was truly going to grow up is to face things all over again, to understand things, and to grow bigger than the sum of what I had termed, "my past".

Many big fights later, I've gained some ground in my stand against, what my daughter nicknamed, "The Wicked Witch". Being a strong reader and loving Roald Dahl, she didn't need any help from me demonising the 'other woman'. In a recent fight, I gained a lot of ground when I said, "If I wanted to leave I could've! But I didn't want to give you the benefit of calling me 'ungrateful! Do you have any idea how difficult it is to live with someone like you!"

To which she replied, "Then leave me alone! I can survive on my own!"

I had gotten her exactly where I had wanted her to be since my '5-year-sociology-plan' was set into motion : "Human life is about Living, not surviving. Plants survive, alleycats survive, stray dogs survive, tigers survive....Humans Live. I've made a promise to myself that I'm not going to let being uncomfortable with my past and you, drive me further and further away in pain and conflict. I've made a promise that I'm going to leave when you truly don't need me anymore, and when I truly don't feel like packing up and leave! There is meaning in SUFFERING! And we must understand why we suffer like this."

I bring my own 'humiliation' up because I know this is a silent story every woman or single/divorced parent grumbles to their best friends but hides from the world. And I think this is a significant factor (trying to grow up away from mom-and-dad) in parenting and the nurturing of our children. If we're in any way dissatisfied with our own upbringing, we should seriously consider the consequences of allowing our less-knowledgeable parent/s to raise them for us. There is no such thing as 'no choice'. There is always a choice. And the harder the choice is, the bigger the rewards that come later on.

Trust me. Been there, done that.

Can THOUGHT alone, Kill?

I've recently been reading quite a bit on Buddhism and the latest books I've been reading include"How to Know yourself as You Really Are" (HH The Dalai Lama) and "Destructive Emotions", the latter a collaboration with Daniel Goleman of  "Emotional Intelligence" and "Social Intelligence" fame.

In combination with Viktor E. Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning", I internalized something I've known only as a theory all along; emotions and our thoughts can really make and break us.　I began to personally acknowledge the power of how our beliefs and thoughts affect us even down to our molecular level. Everything I've been reading since my encounter with Celestine Prophecy， to What the Bleep Do We Know， to David Bohm's literature on Quantum Physics， to Buddhism, confirmed my observations that, whether people realize it or not, they live lives that match exactly what they've painted in their minds.


So,let's just assume for a minute that the tons of intellectually valid literature that can be intelligently connected to form a synthesis that points to the fact that our THOUGHTS ALONE can make or kill us, is plausible. You have to, if you are going to follow the rest of what I'm about to discuss. It might forever change the way you play-down the danger your child is in.

When beginning the discussion of Mind over Matter I ambled along before telling the class about a theory by Holocaust survivor, Viktor E. Frankl, known as logotherapy (The Third Vienese school of psychotherapy, the first and second being Freud and Adler, respectively). Logotherapy, a form of existential analysis, has in its basis the belief that all humans have an existential urge to strive for meaning and it is this perspective, he believes, that makes the difference between those who would survive the concentration camps, and those who perished in pitiful conditions.

A very high-achieving and spiritually sensitive student eagerly chipped in another story about Hitler's experiments. She related a story she'd read about how Hitler would put prisoners under prolonged psychological duress before blindfolding them and giving them the impression that he had slit their wrists, making them believe, that the sound of a dripping faucet was actually the sound of their blood dripping to the floor, and within the hour, they would bleed slowly but surely to death. By the time they hear a particular cue, they would definitely die.

I then asked the students if they still believed that psychological stress and trauma on a prolonged basis is benign. I asked them if they'd ever felt positive correlations between their mind and their body and gave them time to reflect. Once they seemed to have understood the concept, we brought out an article in the previous day's paper, about the 9-year old boy who died after being hit on the hands.

Knowing and experiencing vicariously the state of daily stress and pscyhological trauma Chinese-school students undergo, I am convinced that the boy had been suffering from prolonged psychological stress. Anyone who understands the true nature of a Child and the satanic practices in Chinese schools can fully understand how the death happened. Thinking back to how powerful THOUGHT and beliefs can be (anyone watched fire-walking, kavadi or read about how early Christians would rather endure torture than renounce their faith?), - Thinking back, can you put yourself in the shoes of this 9-year old boy?

I am done with mincing words when it comes to Chinese schools. Even if you can put forward to me an illustrious, flower-powered, world-class exposition of the virtues of one single Chinese school, it cannot excuse the thousands of others who have to go through man-made living hells. I have never heard of former missionary school students or international/private school students whose deaths correlate directly to the violence and punitive measures of their parents and teachers. This is a situation unique to Chinese and perhaps, Tamil schools. Let's just call a spade, a spade. A majority of public schools, in particular, Chinese national schools, would be condemned under the Geneva convention if the truth of daily mental and physical torture be made known.

The death of this child came only days after another school shooting incident in some European country. I was having lunch with my daughter and she pointed the report out to me. I remembered saying, "Wow, I thought it was much harder to get guns in Europe", to which my daughter replied, "How about Malaysia? Can students get guns?", I said owning a weapon illegally gets one the capital punishment. She paused and then said rather nonchalantly, "Oh, no wonder children kill themselves here in Malaysia." And with that she just flipped to the next page. It made me realize, that there are certain things that only children can have the clarity to identify, to cut through all the veils and bullshit we adults would like to hide behind for the benefit of policical politeness.

If you believe, as I do, in the power of Thoughts, Faith and Beliefs, then put yourselves in the shoes of this 9-year old boy......

You are possibly a gifted child, perhaps, gifted in the sense that you have a deep sense of justice and how the world should be, gifted in the sense that you are sensitive to destructive emotions around you. Perhaps you are one of those children God has awakened your purpose and sense of justice early in life, perhaps you are one of those children God is awakening en masse in times like this, to help bring peace and order, to pave the way for the Next Coming.

However, you were given the trials and tribulations of being born into a working-class family, to a mother that underwent unnecessary psychological and emotional stress in carrying you and then raising you, all in all, a culmination of 10 years, in a climate that is damaging to a human child. And she did that unknowingly because she has conformed to unexamined thoughts about life, achievements, self-worth and purpose. Perhaps you might have had an absentee father. Your mother and father, being unfulfilled in their lives, try to live their hopes through you, because they see you as little more than an object that they will manipulate and hide their own insecurities and failures behind.

Perhaps, day in and day out, from the age of an infant, your Child Nature has been brought into so much great conflict and your developing brain storing pain, abuse and destructive emotions, filling up the vast majority of your developing intellectual and emotional unconscious. Little was anyone around you aware, least of all your stupid teacher, that the growing organism has a way of killing itself off if it perceives the environment around it to be too hostile towards the growth of a productive and fruitful specimen.

And that was the environment you grew up in. Your parents probably were not aware that intelligence is mostly hereditary and pushed you away from and beyond your natural capacities while simultaneoulsy harming your emotional health by abusing you with words or by witholding genuine, warm, love and affection. Your parents probably have zero idea that children are not machines or animals you drill, command and withold mercy and compassion from. Your parents probably have absolutely no idea how to identify and nurture your intelligence let alone self-esteem and even less clue about what constitutes destructive and unhelpful behaviour and what it does to your developing psyche as you go through the stages of sensitivity.

You then get forced into an institution called schooling, a place where you placed such high hopes to deliver you from the sense of uselessness you felt at home. But school, with its regiments and unsympathetic treatment towards children, compounded the situation. You had illussions that school was a haven, a place which would nurture the best in you and help you discover what you're good at, what you're worth, how to fulfill your purpose in life. But instead, it was revealed against your own logic, that the majority of people who work in schools do not have business being there in the first place. These people you put your faith of deliverance into hide behind a pretence of labels and more labels. Oh, if only the world knew that selecting teachers was as complicated as picking straws！

Oh, Child, we could not blame you that you lost perspective. To adults who study this as a profession, this profound sense of hopelessness, this loss of perspective, is always a harbinger of the beginning of the end. Most of us only reach a level of disillussionment with the schooling system and the unthoughtful adults in our life; but perhaps we were luckier by a hair's breadth, to have met one teacher, one adult, one relative, one shopkeeper, one online buddy, one book, that made the difference; the one silver thread against the darkness around us. And that was all it really took to hold us back from imploding into ourselves, oh so precariously, towards the point of no return.

Child, the teacher who was unsympathetic, who lacked love, who uses violence as an excuse for 'caring about the children', deserves to undergo a deep and meaningful breakdown, a spiritual crisis, for not being human enough to identify the long-present duress you were suffering. Let me tell you, even if this is too late, that 'homework' is that excuse given by teachers to provide busy-work, you know, work to keep you busy and to impress other people, when in fact, they are completely ignorant of proper methods of teaching and learning.

Child, I am sorry I couldn't be in all places at once, like a spiritual deity who would have a silver chariot or albatross wings, a spirit who will go, ethereally, to every child beckoning for one last hope, one way of validating the pain they are enduring living in a world of broken, damaged adults.

Your death is homicide on our hands, because we as a society have created the conditions that condoned the behaviour of your parents, your neighbours, relatives and teachers. We as a society, have not reached the necessary 1% to become a microtrend, a group with enough momentum to shake the wrongful, destructive beliefs of the people your life was made up of. We, as a society, did not mitigate the severity of how factions within factions have splintered our identities and magnified our insecurities as minorities.

You have not been the first nor will you be the last to sacrifice yourself, oh Child, oh Lamb. The pain that the world acknowledges will in time turn inside of them, touch them so much, so personally, that they will come together as a collective to stop and punish the sheperds who have led so many astray. So the price we pay for our own Ignorance, Passivity and political correctness, is the blood of Innocents and that is the dearest price humans can pay.

I'm not advocating a wishful thinking for the immediate and direct closure of all jenis kebangsaan schools under our new PM. In my moments of madness, I promise you Ihave wished for that. The reason I don't advocate that is the same reason why Batman won't kill The Joker, because desiring that would make me as ignorant and violent as they are. The schools are the tentacles, we must go for the Heart, the Root of everything.

I am, generally speaking, a person who makes a living from standing in front of people appearing confident, calm,collected and selling ideas and information that will empower them, convincingly enough for them to buy it. And yet here I am, in a cybercafe, choking back tears because THIS is another child's death I could not prevent. THIS is another death, another damaged child that was surrendered directly into the mouth of the Beast. You may think I am exaggerating but I am not. The schooling system is full of people who do not have the first idea about education and nurturing the well-being, emotional, physical, psychological, spiritual and emotional health of your child. And every day you lose not learning how to identify what teaching and learning is, is surrendering the right of your child to the hands of incompetent or uncaring (or both) public servants. Look at the term, seriously - servants. How empowered are servants?

It is time people stop deluding themselves that teachers are 'trained'.  Dogs can be trained, cats can be trained, even tigers can be trained to put on a show in a circus. But the idea of TRAINING TEACHERS is ridiculous. Teaching is not a matter of training, for God's sakes, we are not animals, not even if you're one of those who liberally interprets Darwin's theory. Teaching is a thing that only those who have been called to it strongly, who are spiritually and emotionally strong, who are intellectually gifted and psychologically aware can internalise the significance of and bring the souls of little children into fruition as effective, balanced, intelligent adults. And the root of all of that is one very simple thing; Love. Love is so simple and uncomplicated that it does not need fancy labels to describe it or complexed theories to analyse and define it. Love is just Love. You just know it because it just IS. Love is not to be confused with inner-Violence, Ambition, Conflict. Every parent knows there are times there is Love, and there are times other things that are disguising themselves as excuses for Love, surface. If it is hard for a parent to recognize this between them and their children, imagine the chances of a non-parent, a public servant, in a class of other people's children. I am not saying it's impossible, just asking you to imagine the chances.

Teaching is not a matter of training, it is a matter of INTERNALIZING. Teaching IS A SPIRITUAL DUTY, and the creative processes and expressions a teacher goes through is one and the same, a spiritual process, a calling for existential expression.

I will write about the process a human being has to experience and go through in a different blog, about how the ripening of a thought can take place before an internalization washes over you.

You know, this blog has an emotional flavour to it but in general, I have a habit of demanding of myself  that I quote extensively from acclaimed, respectable literature to support every single point I am trying to make, and sparingly from anecdotal evidence, in this case, about the Nature of the Human Child, the practices of Chinese school systems versus best practices in education, the social and psychological history of the people who end up teachers in schools and the implications on human life, etc.  

But I am also aware if I do that I'm going to be as effective as the millions of literature on sociology, psychology, economics, psychiatry, education, on learning, health, biology, etc etc etc that in the past 400 years, nobody seems to be picking up on. One promise I've made to myself was that, if I ever am going to write from the point of view of a teacher, I have to find that sweet spot between two extremes;  sounding neither too much like a raving mad diatribe by a social-activist nor a dry, jargon-overloaded, citation-impregnated academic paper.

I appeal to the Intelligence of every parent reading this to judge that I gain no personal benefit in standing up for the voices that are too meek, for the lives that could've been, for the children who endure a living hell everyday.  I also realize how ridiculous it sounds to cry over the deaths of children that I do not know personally, children I would not have even gotten the chance to know otherwise. But it is enough for me that I meet these children year after year, children that needed just ONE caring adult to have a strong influence on them, until they grow strong enough to take care of themselves.

It is ridiculous to cry and I am glad I am not writing from home, otherwise someone in the family would mysteriously subscribe (yes, not presribe) to an online marketing scheme which delivers vouchers addressed to me through mail. These vouchers will read, "yearly doses of valium".

But perhaps this emotional sensitivity for an issue like this is the burden given to me; this sensitivity, to be able to see and write about things that people would otherwise miss, or find too difficult to articulate the thoughts that just sink heavily into their psyches. Thoughts that then go buried because it is not conveient to think about, to express, to share - thoughts that needed some conduit to relieve the pain through.

Read the news report here here if you haven't yet.

Birth of another blog

10 years ago, I promised myself I wouldn't blog, no matter what. I wasn't going to make a fool of myself pretending I could write and doing so on a media that allows me to self-publish. But you know what they say about how, if you stand on the edge long enough, the high-tide will sweep you in sooner or later. 

And here's my 7th blog, the 4th in this particular log-in on blogger.com - This template/theme is the least likely theme I'd choose for a blog like what i've intended this to be for. But i learned something last week from Thea which made me think, "what the heck, I'd choose pink."

See, Thea has two journals, one beautiful one her aunt from Australia had sent her for her birthday. She leaves that journal laying around where I would find it, making a feigned protest at how Mummy shouldn't read her journals. What she doesn't know is that Mummy knows it's all for show, because she just as much reads my journals, which I keep laying around. Both of us keep our real journals hidden.......

But one day, I found an entry where there was a half-written sentence in the middle of an entire journal....a sentence that was about to 'talk behind my back' and she cut that off mid-sentence and had an arrow pointing to it saying, "I shouldn't write this here." I innocently asked her what that part of the entry was about (by this time, we've settled on a truce where we'd read each other's journals and ideas) and she nonchalantly answered, "Oh, I write the nastiest things about you in my other sweet, pink journal. I have so much anger and hatred towards you that only an extremely sweet-looking journal can neutralize the feelings and make me feel better afterwards."

And from there, I found the idea fitting : Choose a template that has the sweetest and most innocent appeal, to neutralize the saddest, heaviest, angriest feelings I have. 

In defence of children against the tyranny of teachers and adults.

I've long held a thing against teachers who are intentionally or unconsciously cruel in their opinion of children. The Ms. Trunchbulls of the world! This is an email I wrote in response to one such Ms.Trunchbull. (Matilda, Roald Dahl). They outnumber me 100,000 to 1 but if I'm going to get crucified, this is one cause worthy of ex-communication by the whole teaching community. The teacher was responding to a series of complaints by parents about the cruel punishments inflicted by teachers, which really, is only skimming the surface on the extent of the problem in schools. 

I refer to the letter 'Homework given for good reason' (The Star, August 12th, 2008) from Practicum Teacher. It is not humiliating for a teacher to be called a hooligan. "A", being a singular form, refers, in this case, to the particular individual who behaves like one and we shall call a spade nothing else but a spade. Not being able to perform under pressure and not being brave enough to make a decision to leave is not an excuse to take it out on the children, the parents or the system. You know the saying, if the kitchen gets too hot.....

We spend gruelling hours at teacher training colleges and many hours on writing lesson plans. Why can't the students appreciate that?

An efficient teacher within an effective curriculum would not neeed to spend hours planning lessons and preparing for classes. It is the fault of the teacher training college or a teacher's own if they cannot find methods that will enable them to plan an entire semester ahead. I understand that most teachers are not lucky enough to attend a decent business school or have a faculty for continuous learning but these things can be acquired. I also understand that students don't always perform according to the lessons planned for them. That is where extensive reading, visualisations, case studies, reflections and becoming a self-directed learner and scientist of the classroom on the teacher's part, comes in. Before we get frustrated by why students can't learn and retain what we want them to, we have to ask ourselves whether we've been doing our homework reading teaching journals and keeping up with research on how learning happens, various classroom practices for different needs, etc?

We put in effort to prepare homework for them. Why can't students complete it?

There are two reasons why students don't do their homework. I should know. I'm famous for not doing mine. First, the student doesn't know the work very well. Even if they are honest about it and tell the teacher week after week that they are falling behind in a class of 40, others won't be. Their kiasi-kiasu classmates will get their older siblings and tuition teachers to do it for them or copy off the abler classmates. An honest and ethical student always takes the brunt of the teacher's own sense of frustration.

A second reason is that the homework given makes sense only to the teacher. My 10-year old nephew slouches over and has to spend about 45minutes coloring pages of a workbook. I asks him why he looks so miserable. He says his teacher thinks he's still a 5-year old and that coloring inside the lines of small pictures in a workbook that was meant to be colorless will make him a clever person in the future. The following week, he comes to ask dear aunty to help him complete 15 pages of English Science. His teacher tells them to do it at home. I asks him what does the teacher teach in class? He says he suspects his teacher is unable to teach in a way they can get it, so the teacher passes the buck to them.

What if a student doesn't complete his homework, and comes back the next day without completing it again, and it goes on for weeks. Other students would follow them if the student got away with it. What should we do? Give them a pat on the back? 

Practicum Teacher believes that children are so naive as to imitate the behaviour of others for the sake of imitating it. But if that is so,it can also work to a teacher's advantage. Motivate a few underachievers or inspire a few achievers. When the rest of the classmates see how much their friends have improved by subscribing to a particular teacher's way, they will find an intrinsic motivation (familiar???) to do what is advantageous to them. I've seen it work many, many, many times. The onus is on the teacher to be the Highly Effective Manager the children need. Children need to model after highly effective, motivating, inspiring adults. They can definitely tell the difference between one who barks louder than their teaching message and the leader they are inspired by. 

We teachers are trained with methods to deal with these students. 

Practicum Teacher says that 'we are trained (to deal with imperfect students) and that is why we have our methods when we deal with them'. I would suppose that these 'methods' are widely-recognised, globally effective methods with extensive and reputable empirical research behind them? I would like to see this list of studies which says that homework and 'methods to deal with those who are imperfect students' makes for the most effective learning. 

Ad lib : I wonder if these methods include, "Do as you wish with the children, even if it means inflicting irreversible psychological and emotional damage on them, because it was done to you when you were a student, and look what a champ you are now. It's only fair that what you witnessed, you do unto others. Question not. You are a teacher after all."

There's not enough time in school. 

Not having enough time to complete the learning within the 6 hours, 5 days a week given to teachers is not the students' problem. It is a reflection of a combination of highly ineffective management of a school, ineptness of teachers to troubleshoot a classroom situation and a curriculum that was not written taking into account learner needs and available resources to achieve those goals. 

Enough of wasting children's time in schools. Bring the problem to a higher authority to rectify a situation where 6 hours, 5 days, 11 years is STILL not enough to produce a desirable result. Homeschoolers study an average of 4-6 hours a day or less and not more than 5 days a week and most of them achieve higher results in test scores for their age group than schooled children. How do we explain that? Smaller group? Better management of learning? Is it the child's fault that the classes are overcrowded and learning material ineffective and inadequate? Is it the child's fault that teachers are not hired from among the intellectuals and progressive thinkers this country produce(s)(d)? Is it the child's fault the Schooling machinery cannot attract, retain and motivate the cream of intellectual creative thinkers like they do in less troubled schooling systems?

If we didn't care, we would simply dish out the lessons and not care whether students understand it. 
There is a much more effective way to evaluate student understanding of materials taught. Organize quizzes. Let them have quiet time in class to do their work. Walk around and offer positive, constructive help when needed. Observe how many percent are able to complete on their own and note them. Jot your observations on the post-it you carry around and write a lesson plan on topics that need more learning. These are just a tiny fraction of ways to gauge learning. I'm sure you trained teachers have a lot more of those 'methods you are trained for' where it comes from. I'm sure I don't have to write out an entire book on 'Positive Ways of Gauging Learner Progress' or 'Motivating Students to Participate in Reporting Their Own Progress in Class.'

Homework should be done at home. I wonder then what the children are doing at home? And don't their parents care enough to know what their children are doing in school?

An overgeneralised conclusion - homework should actually be done at home. - Just because a compound word is coined that way doesn't make it legitimate in its definition. How about we call it 'schoolwork' instead of 'homework'? Both are etymologicaly the same [schoolwork - the material studied in or for school, comprising homework and work done in class.] In this case, parents and students can then ask, "Why is there schoolwork? What were we doing in school then for those many hours if we didn't learn what we were supposed to?"

If you are wondering what students are doing at home, they're doing what they were not allowed to do in school - relax and be themselves. Hang out with family members. Chill out. Find their centre. Let their Chi-flow. 

The responsibility of teaching is that of the teacher. To say that parents 'don't care enough about what their children are learning in school' is the same as saying the parents might as well not send them there if the parents have to function like a Quality-Control Supervisor at the end of the conveyor belt. The parent's role is to love, protect and provide for the child. That includes checking in on the goings-on of school which contradicts the parent's philosophies on loving, protecting and providing for the rights and potentials of the child. 

Students who do not complete their homework should be punished. The older generation received harsher punishments and their discipline was good.

If you believe so passionately that students who do not do their homework deserve to be punished, have you ever asked yourself where this belief sprung from? Was it from your own bitter experience of quiet terror when you were in school? Or is it a hidden sadism you need to deal with before we entrust our children to a teacher like you? Are you a happy, contented, fulfilled, loving person? Or are you, like many teachers nowadays, a bitter crusader of life because you feel lacking? 

You are sorely, sorely mistaken to equate subservience in children, which springs from a need to survive, with respectfulness. If we were to give in to these compulsions of authoritative teachers like you, we might as well forsake the progress we've made as human beings and go back to being slaves and plantation owners. That would be a major step forward for humanity, wouldn't it? - Watched North and South? I did as a child and I swore that as long as I am a free person, no one is going to treat me like a slave. And as long as I am among free people I will not subject anyone to cruelty, violence and damaging fear. I will obtain respect through my intellectual strength and actions, not from being a classroom tyrant. You claim that the 'older generations' were whipped into discipline. I say they were whipped into emotionally unavailable people at best and perpetrators of the same violence unto others at worse. If punishing was such a popular and effective tool, why the decline in this approach? 

If teachers put in so much effort to prepare homework, why can't students complete it?

You ask why students can't complete homework which the teachers have painstakingly prepared. Students ask the same question - why can't a teacher teach in a way which does not require us to waste so much ink / lead and paper? Not to mention, our free time? You're making it sound like being a teacher is the only profession where one can get away without intimate knowledge and understanding of what you're dealing with. To be a teacher is to understand your learners and what motivates them or impedes their learning motivation. Can you imagine a surgeon who doesn't understand his patient's anatomy? Or a dentist that doesn't know why a tooth hurts? "Let's cut out the entire heart since the pancreas isn't working!" or "Let's just pull each tooth out one by one, that way, we can avoid future problems with toothaches" is a scary, scary proposition. It's not that much different when you approach teaching in a way where it is a struggle and a perpetual problem instead of applying observation and diagnosis the way a scientific mind would. Teaching, after all, is the sciece of how learning happens. Or at least, it should be! I believe that's what every 4 year old believes when they go to school, that someone's going to understand them and teach them how to learn. 

In life, when we find that something is a great struggle and causes great hardship, it is because it is the wrong way to pursue it. The right path is an undertaking filled with love,peace, joy, energy and purpose. It is a path of exponential learning and continuous appreciation of the value of learning. It creates a long value chain because it begins with the right premise and is undertaken in the right ways. And I say all of this now with great vindication because, 15 years later, I've answered my teachers' challenge - "If you think being a teacher is so easy, then why don't you go do it?"

Because of the Government we have to slave over Bahasa tuition.

There is this irrational fear that if you fail your Bahasa you will get nowhere in life. The last time I checked, you can fail all your subjects and yet be allowed to go to the next year until you reach Form 5. I say this fear is irrational because if each teacher is doing her job, 11 years of being immersed in a system with Bahasa as one of the main mediums of instruction should not result in failure. And there's always the July paper. 

The irony is that 99% of people who are so fearful of not obtaining high scores in Bahasa Malaysia tests in primary school are the same people who would say they have no interest in their child pursuing a public service or government servant's job in Malaysia. Perhaps more than half of them are not even desirable of going to a local university, which is the place one needs a credit in Bahasa for. I, on the other hand, am very hopeful that my child will enter public service or be a civil servant. Yet, to be honest, my daughter does pretty badly in her Bahasa Malaysia during school tests. Regardless, I have seen her interest in the language and its cultural aspects,  
its communicative functions and her skills in 'planning a karangan' and 'figuring out the right imbuhams' greatly improve since she left a vernacular school. The teachers at @@@ school must be doing something right in teaching her how to approach learning the language. 

I am grateful to her teachers for instilling a sense of interest and culture in her through the learning of Bahasa Malaysia. She watches Indonesian dramas and compares the quality in storytelling between them and the Malaysian ones. She can critically evaluate that the translation for High School Musical 2 into Bahasa spoiled the whole thing. I think above perfect scores, this is the objective of learning Bahasa Malaysia....to be able to appreciate the language, access the cultural content and develop critical thinking in it apart from learning the systems of the language and its similarities./differences to another language. But I could be wrong. It really looks like I'm wrong because I'm the only one out there who wants to believe in the Visions and Virtues of our Education System.

Speaking again of the System (which I am no fan of, but do not completely blame it) I have never come across the idea that the government has implicitly or explicitly expressed that students require perfect scores from Std.1 in order to hack it in Malaysia. And I went through every page of the school record book, with all our piagams and objektifs.

Besides, even if Bahasa Malaysia or Spanish were a foreign language to me, 11 years of formal schooling in that medium of instruction should be able to provide me with the basic reading and writing (including listening and speaking) skills to progress to an intermediate to independent learner of the language! The fact that we need perfect scores in tests, especially for Bahasa Malaysia 'because we are in Malaysia' in order to make a living is so ridiculous I don't even know whether I want to laugh or cry when I hear it. All these fear-induced Bahasa tuition ........Pfffft! 

Perfect scores are a waste of the paper they are printed on if too little learning has happened in between those years to enable the student to function basically, or better still, prolifically in that given subject.  A student should not be saying, "I'm not learning anything in class that I need from this teacher, so I have to go for tuition with said teacher".