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". 



 

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.