I'd always consider myself a bit of an oddity and an outlier among the Tiger Lane brethren on at least one count: my youngest is in primary school, and her sister in lower secondary. Sarah is sitting for UPSR this year and Aida PMR. My classmates, by and large, are way past this fun and festive period. Some are passionately engaged in sports. Not golf, the slow-blow sport, but the high-energy types like football and the hurdles, all at a tender age of 57. But most are now busy marrying off grown-up sons and daughters. One was so busy that he married off three sons at one go! A novel and original solution to a perennial logistical problem. Another one went one better when he married himself off. He'd apparently found a solution to all problems(or was it the mother of all problems?) Oh, a couple of guys in our ranks are still on diaper duty, an outcome of yet another high-octane activity. Don’t beat yourself up just yet because it's not level playing field, if you know what I mean.
Pushing sixty with my over-run, skinhead persona, I'd easily pass for one of those grandfather-rappers in cargo pants waiting for their teenage charges outside the school gate. That's alright with me. I feel young and healthy because of them. It's payback time of sorts, as they'd been left to fend for themselves when I was deep in corporate hellhole. My retirement couldn't have been more opportune, just in time to prepare them for their exams. My ambition now is to transform them into near-geniuses, good enough for Princeton, and, who knows, one of them might even end up marrying a President or Prime Minister! Sorry, bad joke. I know you can take the whole range of jokes. I had plenty during my school days. Food jokes, HM-with-Kedah-accent jokes, Sekolah Izzuddin Shah Ipoh (SISI) jokes. My physics and chemistry grades were best-kept jokes. My good friend Azlan and his posse of prefects were, by default and design, a fertile and steady source of jokes.
Sorry for the digression. Back to the serious subject of my girls and their tests. It’s like a huge proverbial monkey off my back when the exams were finally done and dusted. There's no UPSR or a similar test during my time. But I remember LCE, a PMR equivalent. I’d thought LCE was tougher because it’s in staid English but I quickly changed my mind when I read Aida’s textbooks and was stumped by the plethora of strange and even fancy Malay words and terms like nyah tinja and pasangan tertib. Until this day my parents didn’t know that I’d sat for LCE. It’s definitely a world of difference between my parents and my girls' parents. I know my girls’ exam timetables. I feed up my girls with brain nutrients like double cheeseburgers. But this attack of awareness isn’t necessarily laudable. Why? Because I’ve to also fork out something like RM500 a month for their tuition, that’s why. Outsourcing of tuition is tragic because teaching is a huge missed opportunity for paternal bonding and learning. But I can't do it myself. Malay as a learning language has developed beyond recognition, and I've to unlearn, learn and relearn if I want to teach the girls any subject. To prove this point, let's attempt Question 5 of the recent PMR BM Paper 1, which had me flailing and flagging in despair. (This is an actual question, not a prefect joke):
Pushing sixty with my over-run, skinhead persona, I'd easily pass for one of those grandfather-rappers in cargo pants waiting for their teenage charges outside the school gate. That's alright with me. I feel young and healthy because of them. It's payback time of sorts, as they'd been left to fend for themselves when I was deep in corporate hellhole. My retirement couldn't have been more opportune, just in time to prepare them for their exams. My ambition now is to transform them into near-geniuses, good enough for Princeton, and, who knows, one of them might even end up marrying a President or Prime Minister! Sorry, bad joke. I know you can take the whole range of jokes. I had plenty during my school days. Food jokes, HM-with-Kedah-accent jokes, Sekolah Izzuddin Shah Ipoh (SISI) jokes. My physics and chemistry grades were best-kept jokes. My good friend Azlan and his posse of prefects were, by default and design, a fertile and steady source of jokes.
Sorry for the digression. Back to the serious subject of my girls and their tests. It’s like a huge proverbial monkey off my back when the exams were finally done and dusted. There's no UPSR or a similar test during my time. But I remember LCE, a PMR equivalent. I’d thought LCE was tougher because it’s in staid English but I quickly changed my mind when I read Aida’s textbooks and was stumped by the plethora of strange and even fancy Malay words and terms like nyah tinja and pasangan tertib. Until this day my parents didn’t know that I’d sat for LCE. It’s definitely a world of difference between my parents and my girls' parents. I know my girls’ exam timetables. I feed up my girls with brain nutrients like double cheeseburgers. But this attack of awareness isn’t necessarily laudable. Why? Because I’ve to also fork out something like RM500 a month for their tuition, that’s why. Outsourcing of tuition is tragic because teaching is a huge missed opportunity for paternal bonding and learning. But I can't do it myself. Malay as a learning language has developed beyond recognition, and I've to unlearn, learn and relearn if I want to teach the girls any subject. To prove this point, let's attempt Question 5 of the recent PMR BM Paper 1, which had me flailing and flagging in despair. (This is an actual question, not a prefect joke):
Question: Zulkifli berasa.....................apabila melihat Zaleha yang disangkanya telah meninggal dunia muncul secara tiba-tiba di hadapannya.
Answer: A. kaget B. takjub C. kagum D. pelik
Be very afraid. This is figurative and literal Bean. Aida checked D and was roundly roasted because, according to her teachers, the right answer was A. kaget. Aida’s mum was furious because kaget wasn’t even Malay. It's Indonesian and probably illegal, just like cewek and cowok. It's hard to argue because she'd been watching all those serials. This Malay mayhem, for some reason, reminds me of my former HM, (Datuk)Mohd Khalid Halim. Long on passion but short on patience, he spoke Malay or English with a thick Kedah accent which got thicker when he lost his temper and turned physical. I always thought his grasp of the Malay language was kind of suspect, which makes me wonder how would he handle this question. And how would he handle (or manhandle) the person who wrote the question, if he ever gets to meet him. For an average and active Kelantanese, I’d rate my Malay as excellent. In my mind all the above answers are, technically, fine. But takut would be the best answer in the context but somehow it’s not there. Sending my girls to tuition is a right decision. Fire must be fought with fire.
Apart from the colourful Malay language, there are other glaring differences between my LCE experience at Tiger Lane (a residential school) and Aida’s PMR experience at a humble daily school close to home. For starters, she doesn’t have to attend evening preps in sarong like I did. She steps out for tuition in whatever fashion she fancies. She eats any time she feels like eating while I had to wait for the sweet ritual ring of the bell three times a day. What does she eat? KFC, McD and all the juicy stuff while I’d to contend with the unbranded and scary stuff prepared by the cooks and spooks in the kitchen. I’ll skip the taste comparison. Finally what comes between Aida and a possible straight-A performance is the three main sources of distraction: Facebook, Astro and Lady Gaga. While my only distraction was the prefects, but there’re thirty of them! The upshot of all this is that Aida’s better prepared and conditioned for the exam compared to her dally daddy. So there’s no reason for her not to outperform him. I’ll update you on this once her PMR results are in.
Exams are an obsession and a big industry now. Parents rudely confront teachers for a slight slip in their children's midterms. Lady teachers retire early to open money-spinning tuition centres. Fathers go back early to send children to these tuition centres. Mothers cook early to feed children before their tuition. Perhaps this exam sub-culture and mindset that's bothering the fair-minded people at the Ministry of Education (MOE). A proposal to scrap UPSR and PMR had been floated for years, and recently it took a serious turn when people from all corners of life (only Nepalese security guards and illegal immigrants were excluded) were solicited for ideas and feedback. Why ditch these exams? Well, according to the hard-thinking MOE people, exams breed rote learning and stifle creativity and thinking skills among students. If you asked me, I'd be more worried if there’s lack of creativity and thinking skills among teachers, what with all the telltale signs like the above PMR question. (Don't worry if you don't know what rote learning is. Neither do I. But it sounds bad, so it must be bad). The education minister finally announced in Sydney on 9 October that UPSR would stay with a new format, while PMR would be replaced by a school-based assessment beginning 2016. My immediate and two-sen response to this was, why Australia?
What exactly is this school-based assessment? I’m not supposed to think because I’m fully retired. So your guess is better than mine. It’s still a long way from now to 2016. In this age of internet chatting and blogging, it’s an eternity. So expect another flip-flop and volte-face. Remember cluster schools? Maths and science in English? Moving SPM grades from A1 to 1A to A+? And back to vocational schools? Scrapping public exams is never a good idea, not for the reasons cited at least. I'm not sure about your girls, but my two girls won't open their books without strong, hard-hitting reasons like UPSR and PMR. School exams, mid-term or end-year, are right behind You Tube in priority and urgency. There's already so much distraction in their lives, why take away the one denominator that's keeping all our children on a straight line?
What exactly is this school-based assessment? I’m not supposed to think because I’m fully retired. So your guess is better than mine. It’s still a long way from now to 2016. In this age of internet chatting and blogging, it’s an eternity. So expect another flip-flop and volte-face. Remember cluster schools? Maths and science in English? Moving SPM grades from A1 to 1A to A+? And back to vocational schools? Scrapping public exams is never a good idea, not for the reasons cited at least. I'm not sure about your girls, but my two girls won't open their books without strong, hard-hitting reasons like UPSR and PMR. School exams, mid-term or end-year, are right behind You Tube in priority and urgency. There's already so much distraction in their lives, why take away the one denominator that's keeping all our children on a straight line?
Sensing the fragility of this issue, the MOE showed off their thinking skills by proclaiming that public exams are costly. Without the exams, the government will save hundreds of millions ringgit (they forgot to mention my good RM500/month). This suggestion smacks of desperation because it doesn’t quite add up. If the government really wants to save, the better option is to do away with schools, teachers, free text books, students and, laugh with me, the MOE. This will encourage thinking skills. Our thinking skills. Because now we’ve to figure out how to educate our girls.
