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". 



 

How to use your authority as a teacher to exploit and ruin a child's fruitful education experience.

One 'popular' way to manipulate scores is to not teach at all or teach insufficiently what the teacher plans to test on. This will affect the student's ability to properly grasp the learning outcomes and fail to obtain 'high scores'. A situation like this opens up an avenue to exploit after-school tuition given by school teachers.

Now that the students are imbued with a sense of failure, a real fear of being a complete failure compels them to take 'extra tuition' from the test-setting authority. Whether or not the teacher does this out of some twisted intent or pure ignorance is beside the question. Taxpayers should not be servicing the payroll and pensions of these individuals who are so greedy or too inefficient in delivering learning within public-funded hours and facilities.

Maybe it's just me but I find something very unethical and manipulative about this practise of inducing fear of not obtaining perfect scores so that students shelve everything else and take regular and extra tuition classes from the test-setting teacher. I've recently learned from a European friend of mine who is a teacher of foreign languages, that her students tell her their teacher starts the first week of school giving out her namecard. She was so appalled and said that something like this would never ever happen in her home country. And I agree. Agree so much that if I could agree more, wax would explode out of my ears.

It's not only that. It's so common nowadays to hear students telling you that no learning happens in class because the teacher is on the handphone, sms-ing, hangs out elsewhere (like a nearby McDs) instead of coming into class, comes into class late, rambles a few nonsensical things, barks at you and then says, "Do your own work". It used to be only this way for secondary schools, the teachers' excuse being, "By the time they come to us, it's too late, we can't do anything to help them learn anymore." But now it's happening in Std.4!

My friend tells me that in her 10 years being in Penang, she has witnessed how Malaysians are getting more and more progreessive - progressively stupider! I sure got out of that system in time.......

I have every right to say that things can be done differently because I was a school teacher, and I understand the complexities and difficulties of teaching a non-native language to our students. I understand the complexities of mixed-ability classes, limited time, split-periods, discipline issues in class. That is why I think personal reflection and developing skills for effective and speedy lesson preparation is all the more important.

Time spent organizing profit-motivated, fear-induced 'extra tuition for exam' should be used for more effective lesson planning and organizing peer-to-peer learning groups. Except for school holidays and weekends which is rightly the teacher's 'time-out', teachers should consider after-school hours on weekdays as also being on the clock. They should use that time to reflect on their teaching, catch-up on their learning and give guidance to students who cannot keep up.  

If a person feels that they cannot make ends meet as a teacher, or cannot achieve results within the school system they are in despite asking for support and help, they should consider quitting and setting up their own freelance services, like what I am doing. (And if this fails, oh well, que sera, sera).

If becoming a teacher means you cannot afford to drive a new car and you have to take the bus, or ride a motorbike, if being a teacher means your focus is constantly on the welfare and development of the minds of the young, then that is what being a teacher is. Just because there's a saying that teaching is a metal rice bowl, it doesn't mean you have to expect a diamond-studded rice bowl. Being a government school teacher doesn't buy you a golf club membership and a BMW (actually, nowadays, it does if you use the school as a fertile recruiting ground for 'tuition' income) but a pension is a great reward. Anyone with a material drive in life is quite unfit to be a teacher. A person who is immersed in a sense of insecurity about their future material comforts does not possess the qualities traditionally expected of a teacher.

I think it is extremely shameful for a school teacher to induce fear of failure instead of encouraging the will to learn. I think it is disgraceful to create this fear-based phenomenon and then profit off it. I think it is irresponsible to insinuate that it is the government's fault for setting standards that  are high for languages, and as such, a teacher's hand is forced to ask for a 'goodwill fee' of RM60 or RM80 for a class of 20 to 30 or more students.

Just call it what it is  - your own insecurities digging a deep hole in you that your Greed is attempting to fill up. 

In place of in-school tests, what can be done?

Considering the fact that school teachers cannot be masters of everything including how to properly write tests to reflect the learning situation in the classes they are conducting, non-standardised in-school tests are quite useless and should be done away with. The system should focus instead on actual learning and daily/weekly/monthly observation records of learner progress. This doesn't have to be tedious if user-friendly, intelligent forms are drawn up for the teachers to tick and keep track easily. Precious time is wasted on monthly and bi-semester tests, IMHO.

The task of evaluations should be centralised at state or national level the years prior to the SPM exams. A department of pedagogical experts in each subject could create test packs with a questions databank which accurately reflects objectives of the curriculum for each semester. With the technology widely available and relatively inexpensive, test packages can be put on cd-roms and sent to schools or uploaded on a website with secured access. Teachers then have the flexibility to choose the number of questions, question types and difficulty level to suit their group of learners.Schools can work at their own pace inside a semester.

All the teacher has to concern herself with is to help learning to happen in meeting the requirements of the curriculum. The effectiveness of a teacher can be tracked and consistent performance in improvements from semester to semester be used as a yardstick for remuneration. 

In this way, teachers are not only working towards perfect scores, which can be very deceiving,  
but instead, working towards semester on semester percentage improvement. A gradual improvement shows a mastery of skills. Teacher set tests can be manipulated to project false 'high scores'. It is widely known that many students can 'score' fantastic marks in language papers but their real life abilities reflects severe gaps in knowledge.  

High scores are not an indication of learning. All you have to do is randomly pick a high-scoring student from a high-achieving school and ask them to converse or share their opinions in that given language, written or spoken. A blank look or a desperate attempt at fluency would be the giveaway, don't you think? It is a commonly known phenomenon where Malaysian students are experts in mimicry and regurgitation and absolute vessels in common sense and its application. This applies equally to all subjects.  

Are perfect scores really about perfect learning?

Something truly upsets me about the way certain 'experienced' teachers are propagating the idea of perfect scores in tests. A consistent perfect score should give a clue that the work being done is below the potential of the student's actual ability. Perfect scores are not the same thing as all-correct answers in a Math test.

The objective of school-based tests should be less about accuracy than it is for the teacher to gauge how much learning has happened in a class with this group of learners and whether or not the methodology and approaches applied has worked for this group or not. 

If the majority of a given class did not obtain perfect scores (depending on the median score) it can be used as an indicator of

1. whether or not the class has academically strong students
2. whether or not the methodologies and approaches are working and
3. whether or not the syllabus has been written accurately enough to reflect the objective of learning and whether the curriculum meets the needs of learning.  
   

Test writing is such that it requires the writer (in all cases, the subject teacher) to understand the curriculum objectives, learner needs, the various methods to meet those objectives and needs and the factors involved in grading and evaluation.

It also means that not knowing why and how tests should be written defies the purpose of having tests an average of 4 times in a school year, and using those results to determine whether or not a child has 'potential'.

The negative implications of such a system is obvious. A stigma or false praise is attached to a learner based on tests which are written, evaluated and graded in a way that does not reflect whether or not learning has happened. When test results are not up to a teacher's expectations, the blame falls squarely on the students, not on whether or not the teacher's approach is appropriate.