Make Literature an independent subject

The malaise that is affecting the teaching and learning of the English Language in Malaysian schools could possibly be addressed if we make Literature a separate subject instead of making it a component of the language. All the 5 or 6 periods allocated would then be devoted to the teaching of the language per se.

English Language teachers are overwhelmed with so much to do and a lot of unnecessary paperwork. They have to handle grammar (spelling and dictation as well as vocabulary are part of grammar teaching), comprehension (reading and writing are included here), writing (this is an overwhelming task at the moment as our kids do not possess the capital to even write a basic sentence), reading and speaking. Many of the teachers were trained in TESL (Teaching of English as a Second Language) and therefore lack the confidence and expertise to teach Literature.

Wouldn’t it be better if we give 3 periods a week to the teaching of English Literature which would include all the 4 genres (the short story, the novel, poetry and the play)? Teachers who were trained in English Literature or who love it and know how to handle it should be put to teach it. It would be even better if it’s possible to do block-teaching so that students of the same ability are put in the same class. The level of difficulty of texts etc would depend on the students’ ability.

It is a fact that when we learn a language we should also be exposed to the culture of that language. The study of literature is the key to learning a language. However, only original works should be used. Rewritten versions don’t measure up. When kids read a variety of poets, novelists, short-story writers and playwrights they are exposed to the cultural experiences of these artists. Subconsciously they pick up the nuances of the language. They learn to express themselves when they read. They learn how to say something and how to describe emotions, thoughts, ideas, things, situations etc. Therefore, they learn to write.

Once kids are able to write they do not have to depend on formula-writing. Desperate teachers of the English Language and tuition centres have been making their students learn by heart such pre-written essays, with the hope of helping them pass examinations. It is indeed sad that we have been reduced to such a state where even writing has to be learnt that way. Though writing is a precise science it is also an art of the creative mind so it should be spontaneous. The study of English Literature and the nurturing of a reading culture will help overcome this dilemma of the inability to write. All the national examinations at the secondary and upper-secondary levels are putting more emphasis on writing. Writing is the true test of a student’s command of a language.

It is a good thing that students today are taught to think in the study of Science and History. In teaching writing, our kids should be taught to think logically. They do not like to think as it demands focus and too much hard work. When we write we show up the processes of our thinking very clearly. Therefore, writing must be spontaneous and never be a process of rote learning. I fervently hope that the new Minister of Education will give some thoughts to literature and writing.

Our students today are lazy and do not want to read up further on a topic and more so if no examinations are involved. Lots of parents reinforce this narrow mentality that nothing is worth learning unless it’s for passing examinations. It is no wonder students at the university are reluctant to read further on a subject. One of the reasons is that they find difficulty in understanding the reference books which are mostly written in English. When we introduce our kids to literature we are in fact killing more than two birds with one stone. They learn the language, they learn to write, they learn to read at a higher level and the study of literature involves oral discussions.

Note : Star Education also chose not to publish this.

Eat the pudding to test it

I refer to your article “Curtailing short cuts to degrees” dated 23 March 2003. Allow me to quote Stamford College’s U.K.Menon “……………...Rather than looking at the years, look at the curriculum instead.” Let me offer you an analogy. If you have to cook a large pot of dhall curry but are only given half the amount of required ingredients won’t the curry end up very watery? No matter how impressive the curriculum looks, when time does not permit, how much can you teach? Without the basics, students won’t be able to go for more. Given today’s scenario, many students just depend on their lecturers.

I am sure all Malaysians are aware the curriculum does not say anything much about a course. The real test is to eat the pudding. The curriculum can look very enticing but the real course content can be very shallow and limited. If you sit through one such course you might find that at the end of it all you hadn’t really learnt anything solid. I believe we shouldn’t trust any curriculum but that the real test is to attend the lectures. I wonder if colleges allow potential students or their parents to sit in at their lectures in order to evaluate the course content.

A curriculum can be very beautifully packaged to look good. Today’s world is very shallow and people just look at the aesthetic aspect and if that looks good they agree that something is good. But is it really good? Today, people aren’t very honest because profits are uppermost in their minds. Moral responsibility and a sense of fairness are secondary. I’d recommend that people should not just trust the packaging but open up the box to check its contents. Private colleges are not unlike salesmen. They will never tell you the whole truth so we must remember the adage “Buyer Beware”. We must remember that they all exist to make money. Making money is fine as long as people get their money’s worth.

These days there are lots of MBA, law, business etc etc graduates who drive their employers up the wall with their slip-shod working ethics. These so-called graduates truly believe that they had indeed been very well-trained by their colleges. I do not dispute the fact that these colleges have trained their graduates very well in the “copy and paste” technique.

You get so-called lawyers who happily sign documents which are full of serious factual and language mistakes. Weren’t they trained to check their work? Executives proudly send out letters which are full of rubbishy sentences. These letters are made up of bombastic words and phrases which are stringed together into so-called sentences that can make one blush.

One day the fast-track engineering graduates will be building bridges, high-rise buildings etc. Wither is our nation heading? Let’s just hope they won’t start producing doctors ala fast-track!

Note : This was not published in the "let's Hear It" page of Star Education, The Sunday Star probably because The Star can't afford to offend the private colleges LOL.

Those who cannot, teach

George Bernard Shaw, the English philosopher, writer and dramatist says that those who cannot, teach. He must indeed have a very low opinion of teachers. However, almost everybody is a teacher. You could either be teaching your kid to play tennis or your spouse to cook. The American swimming coach who coached an Olympic gold medallist could not swim!

It is indeed true that a person must possess all the criteria listed by Airil Haimi Mohd Adnan (Those who can, teach, Let’s hear it, 7/3/2004) in order to take up teaching as a life-long profession. He forgets patience and fortitude and a host of other superhuman qualities. There’s a tendency for the Malaysian society to subscribe to the view of George Bernard Shaw. They tend to think that it’s the losers who’ll take up teaching as it is considered the profession of last resort. So-called lecturers at colleges and universities aren’t considered teachers though they are basically teachers simply because they use esoteric terms and language, which in most cases, are beyond the comprehend of the lay man.

You can have all the right paper qualifications, the compatible human qualities and the best of intentions but as an ordinary school teacher or even a university teacher in Malaysia, you can still be short-changed. A teacher who feels cheated due to terms of service or unfair vindictiveness will be a loss to society. He will just waste away simply because he will hold back and not give of his best. In order for people to work at their optimum level and for them to contribute fully, their welfare must be taken care of. They must never be mismanaged by immature and revengeful administrators. By right, all administrators should help their people work at their optimum level and not make them feel like they are working “under siege”. Administrators must never forget that their strength comes from the people whom they manage. And incidentally, their glory comes from these very people.

Malaysian teachers are being constantly exhorted to be creative and innovative and pro-active in this challenging age. However, there are 4 creativity killers which a lot of our administrators at school don’t care about at all. They are:-

1. Surveillance – this is when senior managers “hover” and constantly scrutinize what is being done. This results in disgust on the part of staff because they’ll feel their managers do not trust them. They’ll feel restricted and not free to think for themselves. It’s like working “under siege”!
2. Evaluation – this is an overly strong tendency to assess, check and evaluate. Often this is critical and destructive. There is a preoccupation with judgement. This inhibits the willingness to think of something new and to try it out as it’d be safer to stick to old ways of doing things.
3. Over-control - when there is micro-management of every detail then there is a tendency to focus on operational issues. This type of manager inspires fear and despondency.
4. Relentless deadlines – people are stressed and can be broken if there is no let up. Who would have the time to think?

I hope I have provided fodder for thought as to George Bernard Shaw’s maxim or to Airil Haimi Mohd Adnan’s adage. Whichever one you choose doesn’t matter. What matters is teachers are never victimized in whatever way but are instead nurtured so as to bring out the best talent/talents each is endowed with. Such talents are invariably going to be passed on to the students.

Note : I do not know why this letter was not published in the "Let's Hear It" page of Star Education, The Sunday Star.

The myth of taking tuition

Of late there’s such a hulabaloo made about tuition – the whys and wherefores.
The necessity of taking tuition is a myth, not unlike the myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus’ boulder keeps rolling down to the foothills every time he manages to get it up to the hilltop. It’s an exercise in futility. Going for tuition today is fashionable but it’s likewise a waste of effort.

School teachers are made to look bad in this controversy. The popular belief is that school teachers can’t cope. Give the teachers a class of 25 or even 30 and you would be surprised just how superb they really are. Are the Malaysian taxpayers ready to address the twin and perennial problems of overcrowded classrooms and overworked teachers? Try teaching about 50 restless kids with 50 different personalities and you’ll know!

A lot of parents, some of them teachers themselves, coerce their kids into going for tuition for the simple reason that they must keep up with the Tans, the Ahmads and the Muthusamys. They panic when they see other kids going for tuition. The rationale is that their kids might not be able to keep up with the rest if they don’t attend tuition. Therefore, is there a REAL need or is it a PERCEIVED one?

I remember that when I was studying for my exams while at the university I’d borrow lots of reference books and then line them up on my study table. I’d look at them and feel very confident that if I ever needed to refer to them they would be at hand. To be honest, I never touched those books, not for any of those exams. But then I felt “safe” having those books right in front of me every time I sat down to study my notes. Parents feel psychologically “safe” when they send their kids for tuition, notwithstanding the fact that they are already excellent students. So do we blame the school teachers for this tuition frenzy?

If kids are reasonably intelligent, listen to their teachers during lessons, do their homework faithfully and are always one step ahead of the teacher (by reading up the topic before the teacher starts teaching so that they know what the teacher is talking about), do self-study, and read widely, is there a REAL need for tuition?

The tuition centres use marketing psychology to make parents feel this panic by telling them if they send their kids to their centres, the kids are going to gain 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on and so forth but woe be unto them if they keep their kids at home. The “slow” kid probably needs tuition but if classes at school are small they don’t either. Some tuition classes are simply replicas of the typical Malaysian classroom.

Why torture the kids? Some kids never experience real childhood because their life is a merry-go-round of school, tuition and more tuition (piano lessons, ballet lessons, swimming lessons, riding lessons, what-have-you lessons). Whatever for? Are they going to end up super adults or freaks? Do you think they really enjoy all these lessons? Why not save your time sending and fetching them to and from tuition/other lessons and save your money buying so much petrol? Why not use the money saved for buying a set of first-class encyclopedias or for their higher education? Why not spend the time saved in guiding your kids a little? Why abdicate your responsibility entirely to the tuition centres?

The time they spend travelling to and fro could be used for leisure-reading which is so very enjoyable or even for watching TV (not everything on TV is bad. There are so many fun cartoons, very educational documentaries and excellent movies). They could even spend the time lazing about the house. Don’t ever think a child is wasting time if he is staring into space. He is really reflecting and using his imagination which is really important. Some kids have to take a bus or even buses for tuition and some get kidnapped while waiting at bus-stops and some meet worse, unmentionable fates. So, I wonder why parents go to all the trouble.

The merits of tuition are negligible and in our folly we are simply enriching tuition centres which build their success on the hard work of school teachers. If school teachers are unethically willing to “leak” exam questions to students, our kids would all score too. Kids attend tuition for a short while and wonder of wonders their marks improve melodramatically. The tuition centres must be better than Harry Potter’s school of magic! Is there any real improvement? Teachers at school hold back much useful information and this will be downloaded into the ears of their own students who attend their tuition classes. A very strategic move, all in the name of money.

Finally, today’s kids don’t know how to THINK anymore because they have tuition teachers to do all the thinking for them. Thinking takes too much effort. It is tedious and tiring so it is easier to get the tuition teachers to do their homework for them by providing them the answers. Kids today don’t struggle to figure things out themselves. They run to their tuition teachers every time they are stumped. If one tuition teacher can’t help, it’s of no consequence as they have a plethora of them. Kids today are experts at taking the easy way out. It’s fine to provide them a lifeline in case they drown but why provide so many? The Malaysian society needs to reinvent itself to become a resourceful one, not train our kids to become so dependent on others. Tuition helps create the dependent culture amongst today’s schoolchildren.

Note : This article was published as a lettert in the "Let's Hear It" page of Star Education, The Sunday Star dated 23 February 2003. It elicited quite a number of responses.

It's foolish to attack Iraq

Reading what Tan Sri Hasmy Agam said in Focus (The Sunday Star, 23 February 2003 Page 28) which I quote “It won’t be easy trying to put an end quickly to this whole episode. Iraq is a difficult and complex country ………….” I would like to highlight the phrase“difficult and complex”. The U.S. should learn from its Vietnam experience before it loses billions or even trillions of US dollars which can be put to better use and thousands upon thousands of virile, young men. The Americans lost the Vietnam War. What next?

Does the white man underestimate the Asian because he is physically smaller? The Americans should have read up all about the Vietnamese before they went to war. If you look at American history, they only have a mere 227 years, no history to shout about. Methuselah, Abraham and most of the prophets of The Old Testament lived more than 4 times longer. Historians claim that any nation without at least 500 years has no history.

The Americans have suddenly found themselves at the peak of the power pinnacle, not because they were smart enough to invent this and that of war but because they were smart enough to steal the ideas of the Chinese. Any American who cares to challenge my daring claim should take a look at the Discovery channel programmes on Ancient Discoveries and Inventions. The Americans themselves did the programmes.
From the basic knowledge they scrounged from ancient Chinese records they invented the most destructive weapons of war imaginable. In that, they are the best. The U.S. is the only nation which has the largest collection of such weapons that can wipe out Earth in a heartbeat, to use a hyperbole.

Due to its short history it does not have time to learn how to handle this incredible power. President Bush looks like a fighting cock on TV these days and he reminds us of an angry 13 year-old, deprived of his favourite toy. And so much power in the hands of such a man is dangerous indeed. Old President Bush would have responded differently. Young President Bush lacks the maturity to handle such an affront to American supremacy.

The learned Tan Sri must have read well Iraq’s history. Iraq sits at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. It was once the heartland of Mesopotamia (meaning “land between two rivers”) or also known as Sumeria. It is believed by both historians and archeologists that this is where it all began. Civilization began here. Read about the great kings and the great wars and you will understand that the U.S. will never subdue the ancient Iraqi spirit. After 14 years of trade sanctions they are still surviving. They did not beg for medication in exchange for oil. Others negotiated it for them.

Such ancient people grow stronger in the face of adversity. Read the Epic of Gilgamesh and see how he fought against Death. These people had survived for millions of years. If the U.S. attacks we can be sure the Iraqis would rather they perish and Baghdad vanish into the sands of the desert, never to be seen again, and become another huge “tel” (mounds), awaiting American archeologists a few thousand years from now, that is, if this world is able to survive for that long. These future American archeologists would then go ooh-aahing over their finds, not knowing that their largely “uneducated” President Bush had caused the end of a great civilization. An “uneducated” president can’t be expected to think of that. I do not give a damn about Saddam Hussein but the history of the region is close to my heart. J.D.Salinger in The Catcher in the Rye said that absolute power corrupts absolutely and Plato said that democracy gives rise to corruption. What we need is philosopher-kings but alas, most existing kings today are mindless laggards.

In conclusion, what is puzzling is the fact President Bush came to associate the destruction of the WTC in NY with Iraq. It’s only logical for somebody to strike back when he’s pushed into the wall and finds it impossible to breathe. It’s a survival instinct. People should know that it is dangerous to push others to the edge. They’ll fight back or perish. The U.S. pushes a lot of nations around. Why pin it on Iraq? I’m hoping for peace to come so that one fine day in the near future I shall be able to travel there to see the land where it all began, and hopefully not where it all ends too.

Note : This article is the original version of that which was published in the Dear Editor page of The Star dated 26 February 2003.