Learning about learning

The hidden curriculum

2009-06-09T17:54:00.000-07:00

I don't know how many children grew up with a sense that there is something ominous and wrong about how schooling is conducted : how nonsensical, contradicting and counter-productive many of its cultures, beliefs and behaviours are. I spent most of my schooling years planting the seed of discovering the truth about schooling. Depending on whether or not you believe in the powers of the subconscious mind, that was what inevitably led me to become a schoolteacher to experience hands-on from the other side of the divisive authority of classroom. Were teachers and administrators really as helpless as they seem to be about creating real change in the way young mind's are 'moulded'?

I quit school-teaching after a few short years and the decision was helped by a simple premise I've established as a personal philosophy : Never soldier on to do what exactly others before you have done but have not achieved the results you wanted; for, in doing the same thing but hoping for different results, is merely insanity.

There were two goals I wanted to achieve with schoolteaching: to transform the ideas we have about learning English from within the school system and to lead a change towards a more ideal, healthy, helpful form of teacher-learner realationship.

Initially it was extremely difficult to think of myself as a fool for dedicating my life's purpose to uncovering the things that have failed so many that came and went before me - schooling. As young, idealistic, passionate, 'intelligent', committed, loyal to my cause and dedicated as I could be, I constantly met glass walls. The response students gave and adminstration or the entire system gave is completely different. It is as if, to be loyal to the tradition of schooling and its dumbing down system is to be an enemy to young children's minds and hopes. It is as if to nurture the intelligence and emotional health of young people is to be the enemy of the state.

In Sunday's paper, under the Education section, I read with both sympathy and interest that a teacher *Nor, was subjected to verbal abuse, be called mentally unstable and attacked in her personal life. Let me assure you this is COMMON in all learning systems; the teacher that stands up for the ideals of learning is ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS attacked. This is no different from students who are punished and penalized for questioning the asylum-inducing practices of schooling and school-teaching. I did not stay on long enough to stop becoming the Head's favourite; rest assured, you either quit, or you turn into someone with tremendous anger. For people who came from very loving, supportive, highly religious homes, they can turn their anger into a powerful force for good. But I had my own demons to deal with and knew I had not the strength to not become bitter from the fight. And so I chose a different battle. No sane person can become a proud schoolteacher at the end of their career without selling their soul to the devil; just like no young person can succeed morally, spiritually and intellectually in life if the god they worshipped is a demon of unimaginable proportions. This reminds me of a story I read somewhere, an interpretation of 'future humans'. It goes something like this : In the future, as humans create hell on earth and as their minds descend into a man-made hell, one sign to be aware of is how they slowly worship what is not for what is.

In 2006, I met Lucille Dass at a teacher training conference and managed to slip in a few minutes' worth of 1-to-1. Here was (to me) the grand dame of teaching English as a Second Language; here was a person who wanted to lead change in the training of Malaysian teachers - let's just say, if someone like her had been a welcome to impact change 20-30 years ago, we wouldn't be seeing the situation we are today with the unceasing dumbing down of our abilities, English learning inclusive.

In 2007, after I quit school-teaching to set up my experimental teaching environment (to see whether, had school allowed and supported me in the claims I was making, it would significantly alter the course of a young person's life) I was still nagged with a feeling I was a loser; exactly what the school wanted me to feel : conform or be a loser. Well, the primitive part of my mind made a simple syllogy : School and life is about conformity. To succeed you must conform. Because you didn't conform, you're a loser. If only I could look into the future again; what would've happened if I stayed on? Would conformity be the answer? Or would spending my life taking down evidence and researching their causes, be the answer?

I kept feeling that if I stayed long enough, say, until I retired, even if I was dirt-poor, I could at least prove that it wasn't my 'lack of advanced degrees' or 'immaturity' that rendered me impotent in trying to create change from the inside out. I was looking for two pieces of evidence to quell my self-doubt : Could I find two retired English teachers; one, a loyal, abiding servant of the government and another, a person who dedicated their life to hang in school long enough to collate more evidence and investigate the history that caused them?

I am thankful to the Universe for quickly delivering the answers I so needed in order to rid myself of the perpetual self-doubt I find myself having. In Robert T.Kiyoasaki's RICH DAD, POOR DAD, I found the life of a dedicated, abiding servant whose biggest contribution to schooling and his son's life ultimately came in the form of the pain and anger it caused in Robert Kiyosaki that drove him to his financial success and the success of his books. In John Taylor Gatto's THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION, I found what amounted to 15 years of research after Gatto's retirement (he quit just before formally retiring, forsaking his pension) - the smoking gun in the form of plausible historical events and evidence. In between, I found JIDDU KRISHNAMURTHI ON EDUCATION, which explained the rest of what I believed was supposed to be the purpose of an education as opposed to the unconscious enslaving of ourselves by living in the mass illussion perpetuated and extended by the ideas we attach to schooling.

Ivan Illich's THE DESCHOOLING OF SOCIETY which illustrates very clearly, for those who care, the connection between social ills and the ideas perpetuated by schooling.

Many people fail to see that modern schooling is not an extension of education but an extension of an age-old system of divide and conquer, dumbing down to reduce rebellion, concentrating the power to orchestrate the lives of the mass population in the hands of a few, creating false illussions so that people become distracted and worship larger-than-life ideals.....

I went through thousands of pages worth of works by at least a dozen authors in the last 2 years. I am surprised at how little we know about the truth in spite of the fact that many of these works were published in the last 50 years or so. It seems so simple to just give out free copies of these and let people discover the evidence for themselves; and then I realized this : The schooling system has dumbed people down to such an extent that a majority of people cannot read beyond simple literacy. And when we do not have complex literacy, we cannot arrive at another level of thought very necessary for mankind : synthesizing information. To put it simply, most people are too dumbed down to know how to make sense of the information available to them.

There is a connection between the way we view life and morality and the degree of intellectual capacity we have. It is not a coincidence that most perpetrators of violent crime in penitentiaries have low IQs, just as it is no coincidence that foot-soldiers carrying out "orders" to commit atrocious crimes against humanity, be it under Hitler's Third Reich, The Japanese Imperial Army, Pol Pot's regime, the US soldiers that invaded Iraq - all have low IQs. When I was a child, I asked adults, how could Pol Pot get away with what he was doing? Why do they kill off teachers and professors first? Aren't clever people good for the country? Won't clever people stand up and tell the rest : this is wrong!

I used to tell myself, when a child, that I would never succumb to doing wrong unto others, even if it meant my own life being taken. If everyone stood up to authority the way I knew how to, no wars could take place. Wars can only happen because there are people who are unwilling to think for themselves and instead choose to 'obey orders'. That set the premise to make me see the evils of bureaucracy and schooling is the mother of them all.

One evidence of being dumbed down is the thought that, "If nobody obeyed orders, there will be chaos in society." Again, this is a by-product of a thinking that we are too stupid to govern ourselves, that we are too corrupt and evil to be moral, that we require working hard to pay taxes in order to pay for policing and incarceration. A very young child is not naive, they've just not seen evil. No one starts out being corrupt and evil, they become so by obeying an age-old system whose very premise is corrupt and evil. And school is merely a recent reincarnation of that system.

I now perfectly understood why all throughout my life as both student and teacher, I have been hammered down and made to feel like a loser. It is dangerous to society to have people who can read to a level of complex literacy and I am not talking about PhDs - a collection of advanced regurgitation. When people become highly literate (again, you need to understand the difference between reading and reading to interpret, synthesise and create an agent of change within oneself), they naturally become more morally upright. And when people become morally upright and have a skeleton key to all knowledge and information through the ownership of complex literacy, they realize they can self-govern. And what a danger that would be, to all those kingdoms that have come and gone; from the Pharaohs and their pyramids and rituals, to the Aryans and their Hindu caste system, to the United States of America and its capitalism, to the governments of each country including our own.

Now that's what ISA is for - for those who did not get dumbed down enough.

The dangers of Teaching to tests.

2009-05-10T02:48:00.000-07:00

This is a transcript from this video here

It gives me a premise for my next blog here.

Anchor CNBC : Howard Gardner is one of the world's leading thinkers on the subject of how children learn and so we've invited him to be our guest here tonight to discuss the value of standardized tests like the SATs.

A psychologist and educator at Harvard University, Dr Gardner is the author of 17 books including his latest, "The Disciplined Mind". Dr Gardner joins us from Boston this evening.

Anchor : Do you think that taking cultural factors into account is a good thing?

HG : At first ...I like the idea very much. Basically, it's an attempt to even the playing field in making judgments about something that is very consequential like college admission. We all know that some people have huge amounts of advantages when they start off, because of the wealth of their family to the schools they go to and the amount of education at home and so on....and other people have huge disadvantages and while at the end of the day it's true that you get credit for what you can do and not for what yo can't do, and when we're making judgments about people's potential, we really need to say, "To what extent have they overcome their circumstances and under what circumstances have they made good use of them? (overcoming their circumstances.)"

Anchor :What about the statement in (..earlier....) It's sort of telling a student : You did good for you. Isn't that a bad place to put a striving student?

HG : I don't think so because after all we're not saying that you can't get the raw score, the actual score the student received, we're saying in addition we're going to talk about what you did compared to other people who had the same things going for you. In a sense, it's almost like the zipcode. If you tell me somebody's zipcode, I can give you a pretty good prediction of how they're going to do on a college board test.

Anchor : Really?

HG : and because of the amount of resources available for the people in Beverly Hills compared to say, to (...) or Compton, this is just giving us a more objective of saying, "Well, how well did this student do compared to other people who had the same amount of resources the student did."

Anchor : I wondered too how much of the problem - and I think back to the dates when I had to memorize all the dates in History class and wondered, "When the heck am I going to need those?" - Is the problem instead of teaching children how to learn and fostering their intelligence, we concentrate more on drilling them with facts, facts, facts?

HG : Well, the (...) test is a very specific kind of test - the more it has high stakes, the more teachers and parents are inevitably going to train the child to do well in the test; it's common sense. So, the priority of the test becomes very, very important. In thinking about the SAT this evening (a test taken to see which college you can get into) I thought it would be nice to have a country or schools where you could have an entirely new version of the test each year so that nobody could prepare just for that particular test ....

Anchor : That's fascinating!

HG: ...so if, for example, you wanted to know how well a student is reading,and obviously that's very important to know, you wouldn't know from one year to the next whether you're going to have (this format) or (that format) or (another format) test so that there's no possible way where someone could practise for a particular version of a particular test....But if a student did pretty well on this randomly chosen reading test, you could be pretty confident they could read well.

Anchor : That's a (awfully fantastic idea!) ...I wonder why they don't do that?

HG : I can tell you why they don't do it. Because when they do bring in a new test, the scores will go back down again. I remember, looking at the test scores in Chicago several years ago and noticing that it would go up for a while and then go back down....and the answer is you can't (...) without immediately introducing a new kind of test where the students weren't ready for it.

HG : So, there's a very big risk in teaching to the tests; - It's funny, the SAT, 20 years ago, ETS said, "You can't drill for this. This is somehow an assessment of your true, intellectual potential. Then places like Stanley-Kaplan and the Princeton Review showed you could raise the points 100,200,300 and now ETS says, "Oh, we can show you how to get better (results) for this test, as well." So we have to be very, very careful that any type of measure isn't something you could drill for and get much better for.

Anchor : See, this is why I like your work, Dr. Gardner. You always make me think differently.

Comment for blog April 6th.

2009-05-07T05:21:00.000-07:00

I'd just finished skimming through The Leader in Me last night and it did mention the importance of alignment. I think it's interesting what 'you' (the past me) say out of instinct keeps finding data/expert information to back it up. It builds my confidence in myself to know that.

Secondly, what you said about spidering sounds like what I'd just read last night in Howard Gardner's 5 MINDS OF THE FUTURE. In fact, I shared those few lines in today's class : Those with shrewd scaffoling can participate in several disciplines.

I find it very reassuring that evidence continue to turn up to support your thoughts and instincts. I bought 5 Minds around the final week of April. I know you were worried about writing something like this, an issue that's been at the back of your mind for years, because you didn't want to sound like you were bragging. But I'm glad you overcame your fears of 'sounding crazy' because it gave me an opportunity to prove to myself that mentioning the ability to magnetize information to support a theory doesn't jinx it.

I know it's hard to qualify 'research' that goes on only in your head, where only you are conducting, supervising and evaluating it. I'm beginning to see that the ability to magnetize information isn't something hocus-pocus that can be jinxed just because you admitted it. I think what is happening is that you're conducting a scientific inquiry on your own - you have a hypothesis and then you look out for data/information that will either over time support or reject your hypothesis.

Because you come up with hypotheses all the time, the timeline among the different hypotheses can overlap. Instead of traditional inquiry which looks out for only information/data that will confirm or reject one objective, you are 'spidering' for a FEW objectives at the same time. Some conclusions are arrived at before others and some conclusions preceed the emergence of the next objective. It is like a series of S-curves sometimes, overlapping one another.

Occassionally, 2 points from 2 different objective/inquiries meet one another. This synergy or fusion will then create a NEW OBJECTIVE to inquiry.....which will suddenly find a synergy or fusion with another/older ONGOING mental observation/inquiry to either arrive at a better conclusion/conviction or be the genesis for the next objective/inquiry/hypothesis to be pursued.

(Read the context of this blog here.)

Authentic Self

2009-05-07T04:18:00.000-07:00

Today I mentioned one theory I am developing/testing mentally in my mind. I talked about Finding "The Authentic Self". The authentic self lends itself to the idea of a person who tries to be honest, credible and sincere towards oneself and others all the time. I haven't yet had enough insights or information to formulate an entire story of what it means to find and become an Authentic Self. Some clues : to have the courage to become transparent, the courage to not conform, the courage to be wrong, the courage to try something others think is a mark of insanity.

I cannot be an Authentic Self if I lie that I doubt myself, that I hold myself back a lot of times. I once told my class, "Say something brilliant, you're smart. Say two brilliant things/discoveries, you're a genius. Say three, you're a revolutionary. Say four, you're radical. Say five, you're an extremist. Say six, you're psychotic. Say seven, you're insane."

I said what I did then based on the premise that humans at large are very conservative when it comes to change. They are struggling and shifting in their own traditions and discomfort yet they will do little or nothing to utilize the premise of their human capacity to be the change they want to see.

They will eventually reach a level, as a whole, where they really feel they have to change or face annihilation/destruction to the things they hold dearer than their own comfort. So they look for an answer, to a guru, to a master, to an inventorm, to a healer, a teacher, a leader, etc.

So whoever happens to be developing a theory of their own all along will finally get a chance to share it. The people embrace it. Change begins to happen. So, as The Joker says, you either die a hero or you be a hero long enough to die a villain.

So apparently, there must be 'balance'. The world is not ready for people to be Authentic. The divorce between Science, Art and Spirit, first wrought upon the world by the Western world, has not been settled. To be scientific, to be intellectual, to be rational, one must not say, "Allahhuakhbar!or talk about Heaven and Hell. One must write in an 'academic voice' or be dismissed as "New Age" nonsense.

However, I think the works of people like the founder of Logotherapy; Viktor E. Frank,works of Maria Montessori (Absorbent Mind), Jiddu Krishnamurthi on Education and more recently, Daniel Goleman (Destructive Emotion) Howard Gardner (Existential intelligence),Daniel H. Pink (Story, Empathy)and a host of others are collectively creating a bridge to narrow the distance what it means to be INTELLECTUAL and HUMAN at the same time.

I have always felt that there must be a reason why I have been repelled from pursuing an academic route, in spite of the fact that as a child, the idea of reading/researching/writing 8-12 hours a day (or more) for a humble living, appealed to me more than anything else. For many years, my all-protective Ego told me it was because I'm not really as smart/lucky/disciplined as I think, and that is the sole reason why I am not graduating magna/summa cum laude on a prestigious scholarship. But I think I know now, why. I needed the freedom to be a story-teller. Despite the fact that my first 'aspiration' was to be a story teller (I must've been about 4 or 5 years old then) like many others, the idea of being a vesself for stories sounded ridiculous and pathetic in this material/post-modern era I've grown up in.

And yet, here I am, once again, in my third decade of life, revisiting the idea of playing the role of story-teller. The way I see it, there is so much information out there and a great need to be able to self-direct oneself to build the necessary scaffolding to leverage on the information/data. But academics being who they are and peer reviews being what they are, confinesacademic research and writing to a voice that is alien to non-post-grad students of their specific disciplines. The ONLY reason I can understand academic jargon on those occassions (live or recorded) academics share their work with people outside the academic circle is because one part of my 'learning brain' has been reserved early on to not tune out to academic language. That part of the brain was the part that wanted to have an academic route.

I now appreciate that writing 'voice' is distilled from an eclectic mix of dynamics that enters one life, most signficantly, the 'voice' of the input we receive, be it through spoken words or printed works. I can only imagine that a romance writer herself reads plenty of romance and experiences plenty of romance in real life. I can imagine a horror story writer is thrilled by folklore, mythology and superstitions. In the context of academics and researchers' life, they cannot help but output in the same voice. Trouble now is, the people who should act on their knowledge cannot 'hear' them.

And in that I find comfort in the idea that I can be both 'bookish' and 'story-teller'. I can be both 'academic' and 'marketer', I can be both 'teacher' and 'actor'. I can have both 'a disciplined mind' and 'comedic timing'.

I have decided not to become an English teacher

2009-04-19T07:28:00.000-07:00

Reading my posts, people must have an impression that I'm very confident in my ability to make learning happen in my students. Unfortunately, that is not true. There is a big difference between my DESIRE AND COMMITMENT to make learning happen and MY ABILITY to make that happen.

I can control for a variety of things in my teaching, such as content, approach, method, evaluation, classroom environment and interactions,motivation, style, flexibility, funding,etc. I even have the freedom to decide that if finances or schedule impedes a student's learning journey we can make adjustments so those no longer become impediments. That is how much freedom I have. Yet ,when it comes to teaching ENGLISH as a second language, I consider myself a failure.

First things first, I am not fishing for anything. Secondly, each teacher's standards of achievement/success is arbitrary. I set mine to the HIGHEST DENOMINATION possible, which sometimes means that even once I achieve the highest benchmark industry dictates, I then have new questions about how to take it further. I am not the only one who feels this way. Many native-speakers and researchers who have committed themselves to the field of ESL learning are beginning to question whether their methods and approaches, in spite of their dedication, theoretical knowledge and inspiration, makes them nothing more than fantastic motivators who still FAIL in their role to help a student achieve the level of proficiency they themselves have. In fact, native-like proficiency has ceased to be the gold-standard for ESL learning. The field, in general, now agrees that Communicative Competence is the new benchmark.

But this new agreed benchmark doesn't solve my problem. The community I serve expects from themselves the fulfillment of life-goals on the back of a proficiency in English. These life goals include success in undergrad and overseas studies and a sky-high potential in employment opportunities. And this is on top of the social status and self-esteem that comes with being able to speak and write well in English. What compounds the fact is that they want all this while losing none of their ethnic and social identity.

So you see how I cannot achieve this consistently with everyone. I achieve this with about 70% of my learners. The hardest part is letting them still keep their identity and helping them realize that English language proficiency alone does not help with their goals, no matter what the world tells them. I said, if Englis-language proficiency and a university degree alone is the silver bullet, we wouldn't see the situation happening in the US, Australia and across English-speaking/other EU countries. Aping the West, either in language learning or scholastic achievement is NOT the answers. If you match the wrong goals with the wrong solutions, you cannot get the right answers!

Another challenge is that when it comes to younger learners, most parents are still fixated on the 4-times a year, completely waste of time, utterly pointless, school tests. It is much easier for me to teach those who are 15 years above because they no longer listen to their parents by then and their decision to come for tuition is purely their own. Their parents are simply chaueffeurs and ATM machines. And since their parents have already accepted that their children don't really care what they say anymore, they are more likely to be grateful to a teacher that is willing to do all the hard work to ground their children for lifelong success.

Several blogs ago, and also....many,many blogs of the same theme, I wrote about how the idea of English as a ticket to the betterment of one's future fuelled its unjustified dominance in today's world, threatening the validity and rights of other languages. No one language should be so dominant. Combining this with my sense of failure, I find it difficult to live the facade of an ESL practitioner.

That 70% I consider my successes are actually not true successes of English teaching. If you ask them, they will sing praises of how their learning has accelerated and mindset has changed. If I were to tell them,"Look, I feel I am a failure" it would break their hearts. So this is between you and me : I failed because I wasn't an English teacher to them at all. I was simply a fantastic storyteller, a charismatic visionary in their eyes and an effective motivator, a life coach, if you may. The fact that their communicative competence and performance in college improved had LITTLE OR NOTHING to do with actual LANGUAGE TEACHING, but as a result of the inner changes in themselves AS A LEARNER, on the whole.

They attach their improved self-esteem, clarity in learning, thoughts and actions to my English teaching. But I see that they are still making errors in their spoken and written English after 2-3 years of weekly 2-hour lessons. I know that is too much to ask of myself because their environment is not supportive to autonomous learning and they are, after all, young people whose agenda in life is to get as much fun out of a day as possible. But what are their parents paying me for? They are paying me to do only one thing : teach some grammar and writing and speaking pieces. They are NOT paying me to teach them autonomy, leadership, character, goal-setting, motivation, creativity, time-management, credibility, seeing long-term, etc.

And so I feel like a fraud, a terrible fraud. The only significant, teaching-based improvement I can attach to is the reading proficiency of non-readers. That is something that is measurable. It is measurable from the speed of which they can acquire information from text and the percentage of understanding they can distill from their reading. Once this happens, they no longer find reading a difficult task but a natural and helpful extension of learning. Eventhough they make mistakes in their spoken grammar and written work, it is because of the interference by their first language. This interference usually goes away when they implant themselves for some time in an environment where the target language is spoken by language models that reflect the learning goals. And needless to say, I cannot create that 24/7 environment for them.

Yesterday, I asked my class of 11 year olds to write down 20 goals they want to achieve in their life. (I find that it's necessary to occassionally include an element of unpredictability so children do not go into autopilot each time we have a session.)There were many wonderful, uncontrived goals they listed. The one that surprised me the most was from a girl who was 'universally labelled' slow and lazy. When she came to me in Std.4, she had the reading level of a 5 year old kindergartener. (It is students like her that make Smart Reader 6 year olds sound smart. I don't really think all Smart Reader are actually Smart Readers but in contrast to the average non-reader, they do seem pretty smart. The benchmarks of readers of English in this country is so unrealistically low that a child who reads off like a parrot or reads from that horrible system called 'phonics' is considered a 'Smart Reader'. I know I digress a little, but I want to make a point that I'm not surprised there are so many unlicensed Smart Reader franchises out there. The reason is simply because it doesn't take a Smart Person to implement a program that has such low benchmarks of what 'Smart Reading' is.)

Listed there as goal No.18...after goals such as "have my own restaurant, eat at my favourite restaurant anytime I want, be a scientist, be a billionaire..." etc is the goal, "I want to have thousands and thousands of English books that I can read." And guess what was goal No.19? "I want to score higher marks in my English test."

Apparently, I was not aware that not only did she pass her English test for the first time end of last year, she was scoring in the top 75%. It was only when I threatened to stop her coming from class because of frequently being absent without notice that her mom asked for one more chance. The mom said, "she improved on her marks". I don't really sympathise with parents who come to me just to get some extra marks, but apparently I misjudged that comment. It wasn't a matter of a few marks, it was the fact that, as test papers got harder in Std.4 and previous high performers were sliding down the elevated slope, this girl was improving on her scores above her peers. The girl who was consistently last and never able to finish a test paper was now listing, becoming an avid reader as a goal in her life.

I should've caught on when we played Boggle last week and she fought for every single mark she could get. She was usually the sort that expected nothing but being a loser or the last but she actually fought for 1 mark here or there. She actually dared to compete with the group that always made fun of her. Reading had changed her inside. She was not a 'Smart Reader', she became what a Reader really is; someone who is curious, challenges themself and has a creative, productive, imagination and a purpose in life.

I see the same changes in older students but they were more gradual and less dramatic than this, mostly because, the older ones make it a point to not let anyone on how much they desire to do well in life. Intellectualism, or reading, is so uncool. It's so uncool that teenagers sometimes find it necessary to hide their passion for reading for fear of being called, 'nerdy'. I simply have to tell you about this college student who works at a local Starbucks. She noticed I always have a book with me and one day struck up a conversation about how much she loves to read too. It's strange because she felt the need to find some acceptance in an Aunty Stranger. To me, this shows that her passion for reading and discussing things intellectually is not a sentiment shared by her peers, so much so that she gets excited seeing another reader.

Well, this posting is about how I have failed in actually Teaching English. I teach Life, and I have to admit that. But no one pays to have their child learn about Life and Self-Direction! Deciding to give up teaching of English is like watching one's own child being buried. I can't teach English. Nobody can. But this is not the same thing as people not being able to learn English.

English cannot be taught, it can only be learned. And a person's ability to learn depends on a complex chain of psychological, emotional and physical factors. There is a completely different field committed to it, originally epistemology but now evolving into other disciplines which take into account the role and nature of autonomous learning in language acquisition.

As far as I am aware of, published research on the on-going process in this fields has not reached widespread popularity in Asia. Heck, even methods and approaches post-Grammar Translation and the Skinner/Pavlovian approach to learning has not reached the masses! So many teachers are still using archaic, outdated methods of instruction, testing and evaluation. And I'm only talking specifically about language learning. If I were to start from the very beginning, i.e. infant, childhood learning, kindergarten, primary, secondary etc..and discuss and compare convincingly what is available in the field and what is actually being practised, my fingers would bleed typing them out case by case. As it is, I've worn my fingernails down so much by constant typing that sounds like millions of scarabs running across the room.

I know it seems like career-suicide to put so many years of training and learning and business investment aside just when my 'business' can really take off. (60% of English centres don't survive profitably after the first two years. I've passed that benchmark.) It is something I have given much thought to, but unless the market is ready to use the learning of English as a vehicle to prepare self-directed learners and not merely a way to keep up with the Joneses by enrolling in some franchise or get a Cambridge ESOL certificate to frame up for visitors, I cannot continue calling myself an ESL practitioner.

But I at least fulfilled all the goals I set out to achieve when becoming an ESL practitioner......and the last goal was, "You cannot quit until you're at the top." There was always the risk of not being able to maintain enrollment,credibility and integrity while not letting overheads eat into what I expect to be my profit margin. There were so many reasons to quit when the going got tough, the Number #1 reason being this really big mistake in renting the wrong property. The Number #2 reason being when I see how hard these parents push their children and damaging them in the process.

One ex-student of mine probably doesn't know this, but her recent permanent appointment with a 5-star hotel sealed the deal for me. Here was a student who never stayed awake in English class until I took over. She was already in Form 5. I saw her through Form 6 and heard her express her first intention to learn English to fulfill her dream of working in a nice hotel. She was not an A-student but hey, who cares about results when you can have your dream? And when I heard the news 3 weeks ago, I told myself, "OK. You did what you set out to do. You can quit now. You've gone through and witnessed the things you only read about in the papers and heard from third party informatioin."

The Scaffolding of Learning

2009-04-19T06:29:00.000-07:00

Some of the students I have taught have now reached college-going age. When they were in secondary school, they invested in something I told them to : Suspension of their beliefs about learning. Up until that point, the only thing schooling had taught them was about Competition and Rote-Learning. Now that some are in college, they are surprised that so many other people are so clueless about how learning happens and feel grateful for the headstart they had.

I also have a few students who only came AFTER they realized they're not doing so well in college. Most of the time, it's a bit too late for me to lay the foundation for them because Time stands still for no Man. While their learning with me is progressing, so are the dates of their term exams and due dates of assignments.

The most significant difference between my pre-college students who went to college and the students that come once college is well underway is their ability to learn and handle learning. I will talk about the second group.

Those who come only after they find themselves struggling to stay afloat do not have the ability to 'capture' lectures and the point of their lecturers and assignment. Because of this inability to see where the lecturer is going, they take in learning as piecemeals instead of a continuous series of scaffolding leading up to a major learning point. I have a student who is completely clueless about his Economics assignment. Thankfully, I have students with the highest moral standards. They never ask that I help them, just explain the assignment to them.

But here's the problem : Assignments are based upon anywhere between 80-100 hours of lectures and tutorials. How do I explain the connections and implications one has to demonstrate, in one hour or less? Since they have no concept of the lessons leading to this assignment, I would actually need to re-teach the same content their lecturer did. Of course that's impossible. I might as well get paid as the Marketing/Economics/Sociology/PR/IT lecturer if I have to explain from the start in order for them to have an understanding of what to produce in the end. If a student does not have the pre-requisites lecturers in college take for granted, they cannot build new information and knowledge upon the things lecturers are delivering because they LACK THE SCAFFOLDING that is necessary for learning. Without context and assimilation, the lecturer's words are just droning in their ears.

The responses of those who did not have the 'setting' in the learning department of their brain differs greatly from the other students who were prepped during secondary school. One particular student who had to start from zero attempted to do Law. Within 2 weeks of attending HELP, she's calling home looking for HELP. Lucky for her, her established relationship with me and my style of teaching provided her with a default setting to suspend all previous beliefs. She had also already adopted the principle of critical thinking and taking responsibility to connect the world outside to classroom learning. Now all she had left to do was to learn how to see The End in Mind for a UK Law Degree and then absorb from lectures,information that can be correlated and built upon the scaffolding of critical thinking and learner responsibility to make connections. The taking of responsibility also made her receptive to the idea of paying more to access quality lecturers instead of paying the cheapest amount to get a degree. By having access to dedicated and committed lecturers, she could, with her sense of responsibility for learning, approach them before and after lectures, not with asking them for answers, but to pitch some of her ideas to them so that they can give her clues about whether she's headed in the right direction.
She is now in her final year in UK and is doing so far, so good.

The only thing the students I teach have in common is that they are from non-English speaking, Chinese families. Up until the point they met me, they did not read in English nor had any interest in taking responsibility for their learning since they come from a schooling philosophy that emphasises little more than rote learning and 'obedience'. Challenging them to think beyond short-term solutions was difficult. But once they hit college, the difference between those who had built their scaffolding and those who did not, became obvious.

This scaffolding is built upon the principle that you must first know a little bit of everything so you can append new bits of something else to the little bit you already have. And then.......if you read my previous blog, you simply let is snowball. There are a few other side-dishes that can go along to navigate the speed and direction of your learning, depending on how easy or tough the course/college you're attending. A SeGi college in-house diploma in some ambiguous programme is not the same thing as an LLB from Leeds.

Those side-dishes include having an end in mind for everything from course overview, exam/assignment objectives, lecturer profile, time-management, pre and post lecture skills (reading, listening, note-taking, bite-sized revision, automatic appending of new to old information, continuous construction of scaffolding, etc). A student who knows this doesn't "wait to die" but waltzes with the dynamics of learning. One student, who had a lecturer that does little more than read off a textbook, asked me, "Wah, Master's degree so easy to get? The lecturer can't even expand or explain a question I asked." Another student sits in a lecture where all she does is count the number of times the lecturer makes mistakes in pronunciation or facts. But instead of complaining or panicking, they use this observation to take PROACTIVE ACTION and prepare themselves in other ways for the END IN MIND. So, they do well in the subject despite the fact that they got a lousy lecturer because they could 'read a lecturer profile' and match their style and available resources to achieve the results they want. And if and when they fail a subject due to a great lack of desire to pass, they don't drop out. They simply re-take the exam after asking for an appointment with the lecturer to go through the points of their failure. They then take responsibility for their failure and, coupled with the experience they had had taking the subject before, they re-align their desire and mission to pass and get it over with.

People often take for granted that successful students 'simply know the right answers and the right thing to do.' Given, there are some students who instinctively know how to do well and I have a couple of straight-A1 students who demonstrate that in-born drive. But for many others, they must be made aware that there are things that have to be learned, things that have to reach a certain point before other things appear to happen almost automatically. That is what is meant by the scaffolding of learning. People often don't make connections between one thing to another, between what's happenig inside the classroom and outside.

And by the time they need help, it can be a bit too late. The preparation for learning was supposed to happen during those 11 years taxpayers pay money to finance.....

Saying this reminds me of what I told a MUET student about how to prepare with the end in mind. I asked, "What's the purpose of MUET?". She said, "to improve our English for university." And what if you don't get a good band? "I have to take another subject, a foundation in English course." So I told her, MUET is not about entering university then, is it? Further probing into it made her realize that MUET is meant to reduce the liability of lecturers in local U-s who teach subjects in English. Students who are not readers cannot also think and process critically nor are goal-oriented. And because they lack the confidence and direction necessary to steer an undergraduate study, they become a liability to lecturers' passing percentage. Lecturers will have no choice but to keep lowering passing marks in order to maintain a university's population. And this causes the of unemployable graduates in the market; undergrads that received their scroll based on the lowest denomination of learning.

The end game of MUET is really, to have more proactive undergraduates who then go on to become employable grads. But how can MUET serve this need when students are still anchored to the SAME mentality that caused them to require MUET to be implemented in the first place? And that is the exam-taking mentality, the 'give me the right answer, give me an essay to memorize.'Again, students approach MUET the way they approach UPSR, PMR, SPM. I often get VERY depressed teaching and what I do is to keep raising my fees until people no longer want to pay me to prepare them for a myopic goal.

The students who opt out of local U-s seem to have a better mentality than those who seek the safety net of getting into a state-funded university. I have seen instances where an STPM student CHOSE not to enter public university once their mindset shifted. They then go on to take control of their learning, and their life. Those who still choose local U-s rather than change their mindset tend to become the sort of uncompetitive undergraduates we hear so much about in the papers. This is not to say that ALL local undergrads are of low quality, but only to illustrate that state-funded universities are attractive only to people with a certain mindset. There are, of course, local grads who go against the grain and these are the ones that usually get expelled or arrested for 'student activism'. I think you catch my drift.

Let us not think that achieving VALUEABLE KNOWLEDGE is a clear-cut, pigeon-holed,mechanical practice. It is a long and invisible process that begins during secondary school. If for any reason, that invisible process of learning, the scaffolding, did not happen, or got truncated before undergrad studies took place, there is little damage control that can be done later on.

How to 'score' in MUET and other examinations. - Part 1

2009-04-19T05:11:00.000-07:00

I personally feel that examinations reflect little of the learning that has happened. It's easy to beat the system if and when the way testing is implemented and scored plays to your inherent abilities yet it is a nightmare if it doesn't. A lot of research has been done in this regard; about how IQ tests and standard examinations measure only a very narrow definition of learning, a measurement that has very wide repercussions.

But here's a heads-up that 'scorers' take for granted : think like an examiner.

I first began teaching this theory when I realized, no matter how much learning I am trying to encourage my Chinese-school students to explore,to lay the foundation of exponential, autonomous, language learning that can transcend all levels of their life, they were still fixated on the importance of examinations. Teaching English, I keep telling them that NOBODY looks at your SPM score in English when you're say, an undergraduate or looking for part-time employment after school. I say nobody gives a care anymore whether you get an A1, A2 or B3 because the standard of SPM examinations, particularly for English, has gone so low that it's no longer a valid benchmark of achievement for English anymore. The reading and writing requirements and marking is so low it's really more like taking a Standard 3 test.

Something is only of value if a majority of people agree with you what it is. It's like money - everyone has to agree to the value of a certain currency for it function as a medium of exchange. Even if you have "A1" printed on your SPM certificate, it's not valuable because the Industry in Malaysia and overseas don't see any intrinsic or extrinsic value in it.

One student, who was so far the 'top-scorer' in class and particularly ambitious, ganged up with a few others and went to the Headmistress to try and get me fired. She said I was being irresponsible because I did not give them 'past-year' questions and mark every error in their essays. When I caught wind of this, I said, "Your tuition teacher is already giving you a lot of copyright infringing material to practise. You've been doing this since you were in primary school and I'm not preventing you from asking your super-tuition teacher to come and be a schoolteacher. If you had been so successful in this mode of learning, you would not feel so much pressure in my class. You're feeling the pressure because years and years of your learning has failed you and you are afraid of this form of actual learning."

I think stupid people behave irrationally because they don't know they are being stupid in that particular thing. They are driven by Fear and Fear makes us do very stupid things. Fear of a wrinkle puts us at grave risks on the plastic surgeon's table. Fear of our spouse cheating on us erodes the trust and sacredness of our Love. I can totally relate to that student and her gang's stupidity because I behave stupidly sometimes in life too. I know it is driven by a sense of lacking, insecurity, fear. Her stupidity is most obvious from the fact that she challenged someone without using proper logic. I made an ass of myself when I ass-u-me-d that Science students know how to apply the scientific approach also to life. There I was, not only a qualified and experienced second language teacher, but using logic, theory and practise to explain my approaches on top of being proficient in both the written and oral form of the target language. And there she was, campaigning to get me removed.

So in the end I told myself that it's useless to help people who don't believe in help. My job as a schoolteacher is not to teach autonomy, leadership, effectiveness and creativity, critical thinking, expression, logic, etc. My job as a schoolteacher was to feed them photocopied 'past-year questions'. There must be a reason why schoolteachers are paid so little - we are assembly line workers, not knowledge workers or investors. Schoolteachers are not required to think ahead of the curve and prepare learners of the same! I was in the wrong profession and I knew it that day.

And so, as a peace offering, I told them this : If you want to score well in any examination, 'have an end in mind.' It sounds like something out of a Stephen Covey programme but being a teacher also means we cannot separate who we are from what we teach. I am essentially a devout follower of EFFECTIVE LEARNING for life and yet I am being asked to fulfill the requests of ineffective learners.

And so I tailored it this way : Who is at the end of an examination? The examiner. What does the examiner want? Who is this examiner serving the needs of? The question writers. Who are the question writers serving? A curriculum, benchmark, etc. Who came up with the curriculum, benchmark? A committee. Who elected the committee?....and so on and so forth until you have a view from the top. Once you understand the whole point of the examination, you can zoom out and THINK like the END OF THE LINE - the philosophy that grounded the entire examination structure on. Look for the thread of what was the purpose of examination, what criteria being used to select content, select question difficulty, select marking benchmarks, etc.

I have been using this 'saving line' ever since I was a primary school girl. I don't look at what the teacher is teaching this week, this semester, this exam. I look at the entire purpose of undergoing the learning. The great part is that scoring no longer was a question of gambling but a question of desire. The flipside is I found so many inconsistencies between Learning and Schooling.

They don't teach these things in school but they might as well since we're so exam-oriented. It helped me score in every exam even those I'm taking as an adult - provided it was an exam I had a desire to score in. My desire ebbs and rises because I generally dislike the idea of examination. If you are in control of your own learning, you will find it extremely distasteful to compete with other people for 'a given score' decided by a complete stranger.

I sometimes disagree with how an examiner wants to mark me and I am willing to forsake the structures of marking in order to make my point to the examiner. In my SPM Moral paper, for instance, I skewered the points I was supposed to make so I could argue about a particular philosophy I had which could tie into the question being asked. While most of my classmates who were trying to give the right answer got P7 and P8, I somehow managed to get a C6 from a sympathizing examiner. My intention was to FAIL Pendidikan Moral to stand by my conviction that the testing does NOTHING to build morality and social consciousness.

I used to also fail Sejarah during school because I simply refused to memorize names, facts and dates while the teacher insisted on testing our memories of power. I fail every monthly test because it made no sense to me to test history based on chapters. Let me make a point here that I don't associate 'failing' with 'failure.' Because I am unafraid of 'failing' I became a very succesful learner. If, after personal reflection, I have evidence that what I'm about to do is merely aping and not learnig, I will sabotage my own exams by doing things such as passing up a blank answer sheet as protest. That was the only way I can 'fail' and call attention to my learning needs. If you are fearful of failing and then you do fail, you then become powerless to change. But if you are unafraid of failing and you look failure in the eyes and say, "I don't think this is right" then you become absolutely empowered. If I am learning effectively and my teachers know I know my stuff and I have 'potential', it will force them to think about their approaches to teaching and testing. Unfortunately, most people ALLOW failure to define them, rather than use failing as a tool to say, "Hmm, look, this way of teaching and testing is not effective for me."

I can hear howls of protest that 'schools don't allow you to do that.' I was a school student and I did that and I leveraged it to my advantage that til this day, learning comes easily to me. The only power schools have is the power we give to it, the power our parents' (well, now that I'm a parent) tax dollars give to it. Don't blame the school or the exam-orientation this country is taking. Blame yourself for playing to it. I can see that the government is proactive in its approach to try and mitigate this. Not once have I blamed the Education Ministry for all this 'exam-pressure' and exam-suicides. However, I do blame Teacher Training Colleges for not being attractive enough for anyone but the lowest denomination of society's intellect. When you staff school with people who are low achievers with low confidence, you will see them try to live vicariously through their students' academic achievements. Most Chinese-school teachers I have come across have one thing in common : A damaged self-esteem. They pass this philosophy on to their students. This is also reflected in most parents who found schooling difficult. They now try and live through their children with the excuse that they are doing this for the child's future. Of course if you dig further (psychologically) you know the only thing these parents and teachers are doing is to psychologically damage these children because they themselves are damaged goods. It is a self-perpetuating cycle. I wished the Education Minister would simply have the guts to call a spade a spade. But we all know that in our country, the Education Minister's portfolio is just a stepping stone. No Education Minister would want to sabotage the goodwill the Rakyat have for him by saying, "It's your own fault lah. That's why I send my children overseas."

Eventhough this would sound kinda corny at this juncture, we must, in a way, "Dare to Fail." I am not talking about the view of not being so aversed to failure and risk-taking. I am talking more about using FAILURE as a weapon to right a wrong. Becase I have always been a successful learner, I find it hard to understand the low self-esteem that comes with 'failing' and have spent a good part of my life trying to understand the process. The search became one of the dominos that laid the path for me to 'evolve' into a teacher.

Perhaps I should illustrate another example of how to use Failing as a weapon for empowerment. See, I felt that the learning of History should be about the ability to connect events over a timeline and see how one event gives rise to the other and other and to string that thread over millenia and through other fields of study like Science, warfare, economics, etc if necessary. To me, history was not about memorizing at all, but the acquisition of a Mind's Eye that can transcend through the movement of time to find evidence. I always told my teacher, "Look, if I ever became a historian and I needed a date, I'd pick out a reference book from the library." I suppose it was the influence of watching Indiana Jones! Fortunately for me, even when my Sejarah teacher didn't agree with me, the examiner did and I effortlessly scored an A1 without any 'drilling'.

My advice is to first of all, forget about the exam and focus on the learning. Focus on what clues you can discover about your own abilities through the learning of each thing. Focus on how you can EXPAND, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. The exam results gets you nowhere in life by itself, but learning, even if the exam gives you an F, will stay with you and increase in value like compound interest. However, if, like me, you occassioanlly want to 'score' as a challenge to yourself, then start with the end in mind : Look at what the testing is for.

You might think - "As if the examiners will tell you why they are designing an exam and how they're doing it." Well, that's understandable if you've not undergone formal training as an educator. If you have, you will have a big picture of curriculum and testing design and you will see that it is A PREREQUISITE for exam-designers to JUSTIFY AND EXPLAIN and make transparent how and why they are setting what and what questions in such and such difficulty or structure and by what reasons they are making/recommending marking benchmarks. There are hundreds upon thousands of paper-trail before an exam is rolled-out, from research to design to implementation.

The only reason why most Malaysian students believe examiners are wolves out to make a killing is because that's the sort of person their teacher is. They have teachers who don't have the first clue about testing design and thus want to 'trick' them by testing something in a way that is inconsistent with the way it is being tested. And then there are teachers who cheat in testing by pre-teaching specifically what is to be tested on. Now you see why I absolutely do not believe in exams and tests as benchmarks of learning. It is EASY to manipulate results. Schools ALLOW coaching to the exam. Fortunately for me, not all my teachers were like that and I learned the virtues of learning from them. And fortunately for the rest of us, examiners have to have a paper-trail that does not include sophisticated ways of 'tricking' students. In instances when we think a question at a standards-based exam is 'tricky', it is more likely that they are testing a skill we lack; i.e. the ability to see details or to think out of the box.

So a final word : If the only END IN MIND you can think of is not Lifelong Learning but the next exam, then that END IN MIND is to think like an examiner.

Time Out, Time for Self-Doubt

2009-04-13T03:56:00.000-07:00

I wonder if this feeling is exclusive to writers and wannabe-writers - the feeling that nothing we articulate stays valid for long, the feeling that we're somehow a fake for saying things we don't have a CONSISTENT 100% conviction on.

I forced myself to pen down..I mean, type down all my thoughts on several blogs because they were beginning to give me very bad headaches. The reason I didn't want an audience is because I doubt myself, I really do.

I hate it when I see other people second-guess and doubt themselves. It is so disempowering and sad to see. And then I find myself, now and then, plunging into a state of guilt over my euphoria, guilt over my confidence, guilt over how good life can be at times. I find one small thing that isn't going like clockwork and then I base my entire person, my abilities, thoughts and impassioned philosophies, on that one single event that didn't go like clockwork after a good-run of things that make it seem like I've been hitting the jackpot every time I pull the lever.

I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that anything worth saying can only be said post-humous or with some kind of delayed expression, to obtain the perspective of hindsight. It's like, unless we have something 'solid', 'material' and 'measurable' to show for, we should keep that big mouth shut and ignore the chatter that's layered itself in one's subconscious and bringing about migraines of self-destruction.

But you know what's funny too? Well, let's take Courage and Perseverance for example. The people who write about all the 'positive thinking' and 'dare to fail' philosophies seem larger than life. These people are not regular folk like us, are they? They've Arrived. And so, we take whatever they say with a pinch of salt, like that's not going to happen to us in the same sequence. We're not suckers, no sir-ee. They have a right to say all these feel-good things because they don't know what it's like to be us. They mention some things like hardships in life, there's some mention of personal events that could possibly parallel some of the things we're going through, but they're not us. The gravity of their situation cannot be as serious as ours!

Besides, anything that's in print and carried by popular retail outlets or has words like, "1 million copies sold worldwide!" or "Best-seller ...." is definitely larger than life. To have a book printed, what more, selling over a million copies is definitely some Material Measurement of Arriving. So how can we relate to those feel-good stories? How can it be stories about Joe Public?

There are many of us who have had our fair share of traumas and abuses from the time we were children. There are many of us who are unravelling in negative directions in life because of the unhelpful beliefs we've held on so strongly to, beliefs that form our Ego. An Ego is necessary for the psychological survival of the human mind - without it, we lose perspective and our Identity in Time and Space and our relation to the world around us. So, it's not so easy to just say, "Well, then just don't have an ego-lah."

It is extremely difficult to have the philosophies I do when I have nothing material to show for. All those other people we read about have achieved either substantial wealth, success or happiness; people like Anthony Robbins and Robert Kiyosaki and Rick Warren and Jack Canfield or even Napoleon Hill. (But I think I read somewhere that Hill was still poor at the time he wrote the book.)And then there was that Malaysian version published a good 15 years ago - Dare to Fail by some over-the-top, middle-aged, self-styled, Chinese-version of Reshmonu. I think his look is a bit dated but maybe it's a generation gap thing because I don't get what's up with the image. And when you don't get the image, you can't really relate to the message.

Life must be much easier when we have millions pouring in on the back of the belief that we have millions made already. It must be a lot more easier (intended)to substantiate "dare to fail" and "law of attraction" when the people who are saying them 'been there, done that' 20 years or more ago! How can we possibly believe that in a world where information feels like it's moving at the speed of sound, the obstacles and triumps that people who are now in their 40s,50s and 60s went through are still relevant for us?

I am both skeptical and optimistic about life. I hope that as more and more people read my blogs, they will apply Caveat Emptor; I write exactly how I was feeling in the preceeding hours. Since we live in a State of Flux and I expect honesty of myself (if such a thing were even completely possible)I might default on the highs I was experiencing. I do wish, of all things, to arrive at a state where I am completely mindful. That way, I can both curb my enthusiasm and watch me inflate myself upon my own expectations only to be deflated to meet the equilibrium that is my perpetually moving, Current State of Flux.

I'm not sure whether it was pragmatism or a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I've been having a good run of luck in the last few months and I had begun to wonder when the bubble might burst. It just did. I can't say I like it when this happens but I did realize that I start losing a sense of perspective when I'm on a seemingly never-ending ride of elation.

But then I tell myself, "So many people like you sabotage yourself the moment you start thinking that Success is an Absolute. Success is a culmination of a process a person's Mind goes through, a process of Faith and Perseverance and Humility to accet setbacks. Success is not a destination, not a platform to stand on and get a standing ovation ; Success does not demand for something to show for. Success comes by itself after a person has trained their mind to not sabotage itself. Look at the way you're talking! It's people like you and being associated with people like you that drags everyone else down."

I was afraid to believe in human potential because what makes us think we're necessarily more deserving than the next? But when I look at other people and see how little of their potential they can see in themselves, I am compelled to challenge my own worst critic. I get torn constantly between risk-taking and the fear of a devastating, humiliating failure. But we tend to ignore the message in Kipling's word, that both Triumph and Disaster are Impostors and we should treat them equally the same. The fear of being wrong, I realized, is what keeps everyone the same, unchanging, in a world that demands for us to change and flow. It is because we are afraid to be wrong in the first place that sets us down in stone.

"Look, we have one life. Whether we are afraid or not, we're going to die. We might as well die knowing we Lived. The whole point of looking towards success is not success itself, but the permission to Live our Dream, the permission to allow ourselves to feel what it's like to be Alive. We cannot Live until we're not Afraid to Live."

I woke up feeling this really heavy weight of being a pseudo-failure. The level of convictions I have been writing at represented the Highs I feel. This blog is my permission to allow a realistic deflation of elation to be be valid, to be presented alongside my usual euphoria and advocacy on my philosophies about Life and Living.

"So, how come you know so much wan ah?"

2009-04-07T08:25:00.000-07:00

Often, people ask me, "So, how come you know so much wan ah?". Years ago, I would've responded, "How come other people don't know anything one leh? The information is out there mah....you don't know meh now so easy to get information, we live in an age called Information Age mah."

Nowadays, I just say, "I read about it." I can't even say with a straight face it was 'hard work' to 'gather knowledge', because it doesn't feel like it at all. Information or clues turn up exactly the right time I need it to lead me to another and another and another. Money will turn up to enable me to pursue that path. Help will come, in the form of previously unidentified opportunities, acquaintances or temporary benefactors. All I have to do is .....really, Do Nothing. The harder I work, the less I get. I cannot be filled with "show me the money/evidence" attitude and then go hunting. I have to just think of the thought, put it somewhere at the back of my mind and then go do something else, which is usually nothing...until I completely forget about it. And then the information will turn up, days, weeks later.

The funniest "Do Nothing and something happens" event I like is how I got to know about Paul Krugman. The thread of how economics ties into politics was starting to emerge in me - I've forgotten the stream of thoughts that led into that, must've been when I got so pissed about how people cannot see the link between money,war and power. Up til then, my interest in economics was as much as my interest in politics now - negative. I am so apolitical, in fact, that 'politically-minded' people have chided me with the remark, "How can someone as intelligent as you be so damn stupid about life." Touche.

But around 2004/5, I found this book THE GREAT UNRAVELLING in a 'bargains' table at POPULAR - it was going for RM14.90, hardcover. I remember laughing out loud because that was such a fantastic bargain I almost wanted to drop down on the floor, kick my legs in the air and get up again to do a victory dance. Paul Krugman was articulating all the things I've been thinking about money, politics, policies, relations, etc since Bush the Dumber went into power. (I really bought the Al Gore environment pitch.) Every afternoon, I sat there reading the collection of his articles in that book and laughed out loud every few seconds, sometimes whooping. My uncle asked,"What's the book about?" I answered, "Economics".

Looking back, I must sound very crazy, holding a hardcover 'textbook' written by an MIT (or was it Princeton....err, go google that) professor and reading it three times over. By 2006, I loved Paul Krugman so much that I would pray for him to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, the way I was so happy Mohd.Yunus had won the Nobel Prize for Peace. ( I had tears in my eyes when I read the news report announcing Mohd.Yunus as the winner for the Peace prize as opposed to the expected Economics prize. I still remember the photo of him in the paper on that day, sitting down next to the Grameen logo for a picture.)

At that time, I had no idea the size of the celebrity status Paul Krugman was enjoying among the NY / Economics-academia circle. I was able to pick up his books and the dozens of others later on because my 'mind's eye' was ready for the information.

It would seem like I'm intentionally understating the 'effort' I put into Learning because I'm jealously guarding some 'secret'. That could not be further from the truth. I have tried very hard to reflect on my path of learning, to articulate them so that the general themes can be duplicated by others.

The closest way for me to describe the feeling is that of a 'Snowball effect'.
I had titled one blog "my time is UP' with another name, "Let it snowball." Eventhough I've changed the title since, I now realize the significance of why I wanted to call it so several weeks ago. I had wanted to write about the feeling of 'alignment' and 'creativity' that comes once you lign up all other things first; then you don't sweat the rest.

My interest in marketing, investment. economics, law, sociology, anthropology, literature and languages don't feel to me as if they are 'separate' things to learn, rather, the learning of each enhanced the learning of the other in a spider-like way, you know, like an internet search spider. Because I picked up one new piece of fresh information at one place, it facilitates the spidering of information of another thing and another thing and then it expands exponentially like a web without much effort. And because there's an intricate and meaningful link between one piece of information and another, the quick retrieval of information, almost spontaneously, becomes possible.

I personally don't think I know a lot - it's just that other people don't know a lot of things they ought to. The truth is, it feels like the more I learn, the less I know about anything, which is a really amazing feling because it keeps 'learning' novel and fresh. It is unlike the thoughts we normally associate with 'learning', i.e. Effort. There is really no 'effort' at all because all we have to do is 'lay the dominos'. So often we associate Learning with Education and Schooling and that is why it is hard for us to accept the more Natural way of learning - a learning that is very organic in nature.

The thing is you really can't see anything significant happening when you're laying things down in alignment; it's a pregnancy you don't know you're having or a tooth you don't know is starting to have plaque buildup :p. Sometimes it might even make you feel down for doing what your gut tells you is right - yeah, kinda like morning sickness or going to see the dentist!

I'm pretty sure that life is not about 'hard work' and effort at all. We only struggle and suffer as a consequence of not having the right alignment to things; we're out of harmony, out of sync. I know a lot of people will say that's not true at all, and I bet you the same people saying that are the people who have the most amount of suffering and struggle in their life and yet choose to defend their excuses. I don't mean to belittle anyone except to make a point that the freedom of expression allows suffering people to undermine what I say while being a living witness to the ease of Life underscores the point I am trying to share here.

But to be fair, I am simplifying things a little bit. However, it is my wish that people take the big picture, the long shot, and not the myopic version of things. Of course the passage an infant takes while squeezing through the birth canal can be considered, 'struggling' but the infant does not define it as such, it defines it simply as, "is". Of course Helen Keller seemed like she had to struggle and suffer - but it only seems like that to us, not to the individual undergoing it. For the individual Present in the situation, what they go through is simply part of the process of the alignment or the snowballing. If they had believed it was a 'struggle', they would become bitter from the sweet. So I am not talking about the 'description' of struggle or effort from a third party's point of view, I am talking about the Present Experience of the Experiencer - and to the Experiencer, it is not a 'suffering'.

I believe that this principle of first aligning oneself and Do Nothing in order to allow that alignment to happen can be applied to a lot more things beyond Learning. It can be applied to investing, management, psychology, creativity, etc. Once the first phase of alignment is 'set', the 'roll-out' will happen. As more and more phases unfold and align, the speed of the 'roll-out' will feel like the Snowball Effect.

I suppose if this were so true, then the next question would be, "How to do Nothing? What does Doing Nothing entail?" - I think it is ironic that we even need a silver bullet or a step-by-step tutorial to do Nothing. I could suggest getting a cat; they are perfect examples of how to be absolutely glorious in The Doing of Nothing.

You don't have to take anything from me - I am, after all, a nobody, only someone who finds learning always effortless and fruitful. But my take is this : Nothing of significance is ever achieved through struggle, effort, discipline and hardship. It can only be achieved in equilibrium, joy and love - and the Centre of Equilibrium, Joy and Love is to stop moving 'externally' and just be 'still' enough - to just stop rattling our own cage. You'll find the key there. And when you do, everything else, even what we like calling 'discipline' becomes a natural extension of our Living rather than an imposed doctrine of 'shoulds' to upkeep.

Will you get on board but miss the boat?

2009-04-06T23:28:00.000-07:00

It's no longer a valid question as to why English has to be the international lingua franca. That idea is passe....wayyy past its sell-by date. The question now is, "Is playing catch-up in English the answer in achieving egalitarian equality in all major fields in play?"

Truth be told, I did not succeed in bending the Time-continuum. I cannot slow-down or prevent the Future I see from affecting the choices Malaysians and Asians are making today. I couldn't even if I knew of a way to do it! I'm merely the mortal mother of one girl and an owner of five cats. No special powers come with that combination.

Seriously though I cannot delay the movement towards what most people define as Future (which, actually is what Now is moving on). The Future is actually Now. And Now is constantly moving towards a Past. By the time your children 'arrive' at the future, they will, essentially, be equipped with a mentality suited perfectly for Now but is outdated for that Future they had arrived at. Worse than arriving with a mentality suited for them Now, they might end up arriving in the Future with a mentality from your own Past, that is, if you are one of those parents who insist your children live the life you felt you should've had.

How many times have you heard the tagline, "The Future is Here". How many people really understand the implications of that catchy taggy?

Your children will arrive "in the Future" not prepared for it because they have used their past (what you call, Now) to prepare for a timeframe you thought was the Future. The reason why you thought it was The Future was because you framed that 'future' using what you felt you had lost out on Now. If you listen to most parents, they like to say, "I didn't have those opportunities back then." Adults are framing their perception or sense of losing out in the Now based on decisions they made in their relative Past. So, Imagine this : A parent realizes Now and looks back to his/her past (10-25 years ago). The parent thinks, if only they had done things differently then. Hang on to this thought, OK? The parent is now looking at life 20 YEARS AGO.

So, when parents make decisions about their children's future, isn't it actually framed by their perception of their past? These children then spend the next 15-25 years trying to live out their parents' expectations or pursuing methods and ideas their parents had arrived at based on information from their parents' past! However, parents will insist that they know better than their children. If their children refuse to go to school, for instance, and saying schooling is useless, parents will insist that they found out too late how a Master's Degree would've helped in their current position!

Maybe an imagery will make it easier.
- The tram-way has been built. It took some time but finally, you notice it. You notice the first few locomotives speed past you. They are victorious. Your feet are sore with blisters, the weight of worries on your back weigh down heavier and heavier on you. The station the locomotive had arrived at was erected months ago. You still had no idea the boomstown is now a city. The passengers had disembarked and are integrating well into the new structures of civilisation and enjoying affluence and freedom unlike what entire civilisations have ever experienced before. You decided, what the heck, I'm getting on the tram-way myself. The first few among you got run over by the locomotive! You tell the tales to your children, you may not live long enough to enjoy the prosperity you've only heard whispers of. You tell them, "When you see a station, wait there and persevere. Get a ticket on board. Don't miss the train....otherwise...."

So you put everything you got into seeing that your children get a ticket on board. The time comes, your children get on and arrive at the City of Dreams. - They end up doing work that no one else wanted with menial wages. They live in shabby conditions. They try to change their luck and dabbled in gambling and end up in debt. They lose their shabby dwellings and end up in the streets, with loansharks waiting for them at every corner.

Well, that narration is an exaggeration but the tram-way is actually the illussion of schooling. The locomotive you're willing to sacrifice to get a ticket to board, is the learning of English.

Would you like to know what happens next in the story of "The Future that is Now" ?

My time is up....the end is near, so let is Snowball.

2009-04-05T03:42:00.000-07:00

I would like to insist that none of the things I talk about are new nor novel. If they, for some reason, appear eye-opening or insightful to you, the credit goes to many thinkers and writers that have gone before me. The only thing I can take credit for is how I sometimes, attempt, to meld existing information into narrative digestives and putting them up - like this. The availability of online blogging made this sharing possible and that's all that matters to me. It took 10 years of silencing the inner-critic for this to happen. I even gotten some advice from people who told me not to publish anything electronically because then the copyright would be lost. But I suppose that's only valid for academic papers and works of fiction. Who in the world would want to sound like me anyway? Besides, I believe in a world of abundance and reciprocity; there's a revolution out there, there's more than enough for everyone!

I think the idea of the threat of people plagiarising off a person is OTT. (over-the-top)Sharing is caring, right? I live on a philosophy of abundance; 2 plates of Char Koay Teow, keh-liao. If someone wants to ridicule themselves trying to sound like me, ...it's really not an insult, you know? Think about what good can come out of it; the plagiariser would make my ideas known to more people and proliferate even further knowledge expansion and thought. Everyone loves a freebie but no one wants to give out any, notice that? So, when it comes to the thought of someone ripping my ideas off, I think I'm going to be OK with that. (Notice how I'm phrasing my words.)

As for my belief in reciprocity, I'm sure you've heard of the saying, "What goes around, comes around." I don't plagiarise. I don't see a need to plagiarise. Anyone who has to plagiarise might as well consider a new career path for their own mental and spiritual health. Everyone wants to be able to make a living and go to sleep at night, right? Having said that, once in a while, when I see that someone else had put what I had wanted to say in better context than what I could've come up with, I'd lift that part to fit into the rest of the context of an argument I'm making. But I cite the source - so that's not plagiarism then...I suppose. ???

Besides, do you know what the greatest drawback would be? The things I think and blog about are not tea-talk pieces. They'd make enemies out of friends. They are not topics you can sit on the fence on. They'd even make you sound a bit off your rockers if you bring them up in a social setting.

Blogging and I are strange bedfellows due to the fact that 'blogs' are an avenue to (1) self-publish (2)advocate a thought or opinion while hiding under an electronic veil of anonymity! and (3) which is completely uncritical of a person's lack of ability to edit for clarity. The only reason I decided to put my thoughts out on public domain is because my time is up..........my end is near. I've delayed writing for 20 years and it's done nothing for my life except cause protracted adolescence and the guilt that comes with not allowing a thought of mine to be unleashed, to gather momentum and magnetize other similar thoughts/people in order to put the wedge in the door. It's time we allow radical thoughts to Snowball.
Enough over-thinking, really.

Is English really necessary for our future?

2009-04-05T01:58:00.000-07:00

At first, it might seem very strange that for someone who makes a living teaching ESL, I don't always advocate the 'urgency' and 'importance' of grounding our nation's young in The Internationl Tongue.

I don't think a good command of English is NECESSARY in ensuring a brighter future for oneself or our young; it merely facilitates the processes ensuring a brighter future.

The reason why I'm making this argument today is because I worry that if I delay any longer, I would've delayed the realization of our future generation that they had been chasing shadows.

First things first : Let's make sure we're all on the same page.

(1) The rate of new information doubling has been estimated at anywhere between every 6 to every 18 months.

This estimate is greatly biased towards information being produced in or translated from English.

Putting aside the consideration of whether or not the information explosion is riding on the back of the English-language, 11 years of being schooled inside walls that make a distinction between 'school-world' and 'real-world' is going to cause severe collateral damage beyond economic means to repair. The two are related : Whether or not new information is in English, the rate of new knowledge is developing too fast for effective curriculum to be designed and implemented in schooling systems. If 80% of new information is in English, the only way a learner can catch up is by having a command of English at a strength determined as 'native-like fluency'.

While the rest of the non-native English speaking world is playing catch-up translating or adjusting their curriculum or otherwise to fit into White-Man's knowledge-frame, the explosion in information will go on to spearhead inroads in new branches of knowledge, information and technology.

But what if 80% of new information is not in English? That's unlikely to happen already because non-native speakers have missed the boat. The Race to Dominance was won when the Spanish, French, German, Italian and Japanese lost the respective watershed wars. Up to 20% of new information may still be found in non-English languages but they will ultimately be debated using or translated into English in order to gain validity or commercial value/use of that knowledge/discovery.

(2) The 20/80 rule, or the revised 10/90 rule (for the year 2009 onwards) also explains why

- Even if only 20% of people are native speakers of English, they dominate the movement of 80% of knowledge in important fields such as technology, medicine (patents), psychology, education, business, management, etc.

What we will see is that, 80% of the world's way of thinking is going to be replaced by the way of thinking of these 20% native speakers.

- This being the case, 80%-90% of the cultures, values and ways of thinking of non-native speakers of English will be lost amidst the race to conform to the way White Knowledge processes and validates knowledge.

- 80% of speakers of English will actually be non-native speakers.

From this, we can see that a majority of people who are rushing to learn English as D'Lingua Franca would also have to nullify the merits and values of how knowledged is acquired, processed and validated in their culture.

I'm not arguing against the trend because the snowball had started rolling before I was born and there is absolutely nothing I can do except to enjoy the ride while it lasts.

If we are going to pay such a heavy price (loss of thinking processes, language and meaning, knowledge, etc) to acquire English as the lingua franca, then caveat emptor.

We're buying into the idea that in some way, the English language has a higher currency than our Mother Tongue, and thus, the studies, ways of thinking and thought processes in the English language have greater currency and validity than ours. We will then conform to White Studies, since we covet knowledge, translated or otherwise, that are obtained from White Man's universities.

We may think in simplistic ways that to do well in university is simply a matter of hardwork and a decent command of the English language. - How wrong we are. In order to get good grades and to be viewed favourably, we must think, act, behave, and process, argue and debate according to the White Man's standards of what is valid. There are great differences in style of writing and arbitrating between White and non-white cultures as much as between any 2 cultures. Nowdays everywhere you turn only a degree from a university, that has been pegged to the White Man's standards of acquiring information, is valid.

Before we jump the gun and think I'm anti-white I'd just like to clear the air that I'm not anti anything unless I explicitly say I am. I've benefited greatly from choosing to learn and produce thoughts in the traditions of the West at the cost of diluting the distinction between my ethnicity and my identity as a global citizen.

However, the point I wish to make is that there is a price to pay for acquiring English as a second or third language. The more the differences between one culture and the American-British model, the bigger the price. Knowing grammar or simply being able to identify words in print or converse competently doesn't give one an edge in the English-speaking world. One must assimilate into the culture, contexts, semantics and thought processes of the native English speakers.

It's no longer a valid question as to why English has to be the international lingua franca. That idea is passe....wayyy past its sell-by date. The question now is, "Is playing catch-up in English the answer in achieving egalitarian equality in all major fields in play?"

Ultimately, isn't that the wish of parents and nation heads? To do whatever they can so that future generations won't get left behind? The problem with this sort of thinking, though, is that their hopes of the future is framed in a point of view calculated from the time they were young, from the time they were not able to see the trend. Their hopes of the future is framed from retrospect, from their perceived loss of opportunities. So now they are preparing the next future (20-25 years from Now)based on a timeframe from 20-25 years AGO. You must do the math here because this lends a new definition of how the Future (X-from now) is framed from the Past (Now). So, no matter how we are trying to 'prepare for the future', we are essentially preparing for the PAST because our Hopes and Expectations of The Future is framed entirely from our movement of time from our Past to our, get this, our Past. Our past to our past! Do you understand what I mean by the second 'past'? Physical time is essentially movement, there is no such thing as a Now, because Now becomes the Past.

See, by the time you read this blog, this frame of mind I have would already constitute my Past. I know the articulation of this particular thought of mine, as well as many other thoughts bubbling in my head, are way past their time. But I have for years chosen to hold them back, hoping that in doing so, I can lock the potential of it happening from actually happening.

The Best Time to Learn English....or not.

2009-03-29T00:08:00.000-07:00

It is without a doubt that it is a common belief that there is a window of opportunity, a period of sensitivity to develop certain abilities when one is still a child. In fact, there is enough research and evidence to support this. It seemed to everyone, even me, that it was the most rational thing to start them young.

This appeared to be particularly true for language development - people often agree that it is easier to pick up a language when you are younger. We attribute this ability directly to evidence that points out that children, like other organisms, have periods of sensitivity to develop certain functions that will become more effective if the stimulation and environment supporting that growth is generously provided during this period of sensitivity. A lot of people also believe that this ability to acquire language tapers off upon the onset of adolescence. But we can also argue that childhood is generally a time when an individual is less taxed upon their time, resources and energy.

However, more recent research has argued whether the belief that language becomes harder to learn with the onset of age has more to do with the psychological barriers learners have brought with them towards learning, a disadvantage generally thought to not affect children yet. On top of a more open and less cluttered mind, we seem to overlook the fact that in general, the life of a typical child affords them more time for learning and less taxed financial resources from their younger parents. Year after year, living expenses go up together with the pressure adults put on younger people to perform : a pressure, I firmly believe, which correlates directly to how dissatisfied an adult is with their own sense of underachievement.

After two years of purposefully experiencing and testing the notion that "the best place and time to help them is to start them young", I have reversed my opinion. I maintain all the reasons and logic I have made in the first place regarding my initial opinion. But I'm beginning to be aware that there are other factors, which are perhaps, very localised, that I have not considered its impact upon childhood learning of a second language.Children nowadays do not always have the time and energy that is essential to the sort of rapid absorption we associate with them. On top of that, the pressure to perform in school or the negative outcomes in experiencing language learning in school creates the mental and psychological barriers we normally associate with older learners.

We realize that most adults approach learning with a sense of trepidation and fear of failure or judgment. Past perceptions of failures creates the premise encouraging future failures. This is a condition well-noted in self-help books and cognitive psychology. Rolling back to their schooling days, most people exit school with a sense of relief and liberation that they got that over with. Once mandatory schooling is over and done with, they try and re-establish a new identity, exert more autonomy in their lives and empower themselves to experience the real world outside the prison they knew as school - the beginnings of which we can see clearly in the explosion of creativity and delinquency and unreigned expressions of liberal behaviour seen among college students.

As children grown into adults, they usually succeed in implanting a new image of themselves over the restrained identity they had had to endure during years in school. But when it comes to learning again later on in life, the cognitive and affective barriers are erected again, which is usually one of the factors impeding the maximum potential for adult learning. We now see this build-up of mental barriers which we normally associate with adult learners, happening in primary school children.

When primary school children approach learning out of a sense of failure or 'grades dropping', they are in almost the same mental state as an adult learner, thus negating any advantages we associated with children's language absorption.Parents wish to take advantage of a period of development where children can 'absorb like a sponge'. But we have to pause to recognize that even sponges have a certain capacity of how much they can absorb. Stress, worry, mental and physical exhaustion, repetitive drills and homework, restraining the internal conflicts between being who they are and what everyone else expects them to be - all these emotional exertions usurps the advantageous developmental capacities of a child.

Sometimes we unwittingly treat our children as accessories - or like containers we carry around with a hinged skull we can open up, fill in with some lessons and then simmer in that crock-pot. Those whose children do not end up cracked pots (or worse, crack pots) should count their blessings that their children are so resilient. It's really funny when we visualize it as a caricature but that is essentially what we're doing in practise . A child who is fearful, overthinking, understimulated or conflicted is cooking a broth inside their heads. If their cup, so to speak, is not empty, we can keep pouring things in and they flow out through another orifice. Nowadays, children's cup are overflowing with ridiculous drills and practices which are unexamined and worse, causes intellectual and emotional retardation. It should be acknowledged that every child has a different level of tolerance before they 'space out'. It is a matter of time before they do, causing them to tune out and turn away from learning.

I mentioned earlier how most adults become resistant to learning due to the strokes they have coloured their past learning experiences with. - Teachers are particularly good examples to illustrate how adults turn away and resist learning. They are good examples because, unlike most other adults, teachers are directly involved in the business of learning. Teachers nowadays generally have a bad rep - a ruinous reputation as autocratic, closed-minded, unimaginative bullies. (Having been both a student and teacher, I confirm my observation!) I suspect what happens is, with the reversal of fortune and now being given the seat of authority, teachers or people in the capacity of bosses, are most prone to drawing a kryptonite divide between themselves and others.

I've also noticed that the degree of how successful and autonomous a person in a managing capacity perceives themselves to be corresponds directly to how open they are to negotiations and further learning from others. In other words, the less confident a teacher or authority is about their own merits, the less open they will be to absorbing learning and the more likely they are to remain highly authoritative. (My very personal allegory - the kryptonite divide.)

It is true that the market for teaching children is the easiest to exploit and make money from. From a capitalist point of view, it makes most sense to advocate the 'get them when they are young' point of view. But is this capitalist point of view contributing to the spin of the rat race which is now engulfing a child's right to their childhood? When children space out, which may or may not be the fault of one particular type of lesson they are attending (usually, a combination driven by well-intentions which causes burn-out), all the King's horses and all the King's men.......

So, from a socialist point of view, we have to question whether the more time and money we are spending translates to more learning that is happening? There used to be a time when those who have money to spare pay for extras in life that schools cannot afford to provide. The irony nowadays is, people are paying and making time for extra lessons because schools are not providing the learning they are supposed to!

It seems very ironic, and sadly, the pawns at play are children and their mental and developmental health. If schools could deliver learning, then children will still have the sponge capacity to absorb additional learning. Right now, we are unconsciously already taking up that capacity through double missed-learning : You cannot learn enough in school so you have to (1) do a lot more homework and (2) attend a lot more school-based tuition given by the same school teachers. We can add the negative clutter of mental fatigue and personal conflict (children learn through play, not work!) to the sponge capacity we took for granted.

To recapitulate why I had reversed my initial belief that 'The best time to start them is when they are young, I would like to highlight an advantage teens and adults have which children don't. - Children do not attend foreign language lessons with the same sense of purpose and future-orientation that young people and adults do; unless they (linguistically talented children) come from very well-adjusted, accomplished families and this is a rarity across the world. Say we take away the advantage of their 'free learning'and 'sponge capacity' by cluttering the child's absorbtion with negative learning instead, can a child (undeveloped frontal lobe!)substitute their absorbtion with the sense of purpose and future-orientation more mature learners possess? Of course not. But that doesn't mean some parents don't try. However, pushing children to develop that sort of far sightedness ruins the natural and necessary present-orientation children need to pass through to develop into mentally healthy adults. Look what happened to Michael Jackson and other child-celebs and child-beauty queens.

Underachieving parents try and live vicariously through their children and in pushing them to 'think like adults', damages their life for good.A part of me worries when I teach young children - am I contributing to a loss of their childhood? Eventhough most teachers prefer teaching young ones, I realize I prefer teaching teens and young adults. In terms of my own ego and intellectual challenge, there is more at stake as I have more to risk being judged more discerningly by older learners. But the gratification comes from the fact that teen and young adults have the advantage of reflecting on their own learning and accept a reasoned rationalisation and thus responsibility to undo their past-negative perceptions and unhelpful beliefs they have held about themselves as learners.

We can argue that we can use the same fix-it for children, but we cannot compete with the many hours and many days they are still spending in school which will simply undo what we are trying to fix. Teen and young adult learners, on the other hand, not only have the autonomy to prevent the same conditions they experienced as younger learners but are empowered to make changes to their pace of life and environment to clear up clutter and make space for learning. After many years of questions about how to help others learn a language, I came to an unexpected conclusion : The best place to start is with the Adult, be it the adult learner, the adult parent or the adult teacher-parent. The way I see it, an adult who understands their own learning stigmas will also understand what they are trying to achieve with themselves as learners as well as their children or students as learners.

Instead of putting the hopes on their children or students to 'do better' for 'their own good', parents, teachers and adult learners can reclaim the sense of loss and self-esteem they seek to feel fulfilled in life. Not only can adult learners reclaim their confidence as learners, they can re-orient their lives with this new esteem and pass down the learning to their children or outsource learning more discriminately so that they can get the most value from their children's learning. This will give children and parents the freedom to not have to do everything to cover all bases, but have the confidence that the few things they do will bear positive outcomes. This doesn't mean that I desire to teach language awareness to adults, rather, my experience with teaching young children made me realize that there is so much more learning that needs to happen synergistically with language development. And that is where the role of the Adult in a child's life comes in - to learn about learning, so that they can better understand and contract out learning in a meaningful way.

Why in the world would anyone want a JOB!!!!

2009-02-10T04:20:00.000-08:00

I am no exception to most people who were told by their families to "study hard, get good grades, get into college, get a steady job with great benefits, ...."

I never bought into that. I bet just as many kids mouthed off the way I did to those who chanted that mantra to them : "If you know that, why didn't you study hard, get good grades, get more education and get a better job yourself?"

My teachers threatened me with doomsday prophecies of not being able to 'get a job' coz I was not a good student; to which I replied, "I wouldn't want to end up like you."

It might sound like I was intentionally being mean, but I was just a very frank person who did not realize that I was supposed to make a distinction between what I was really thinking in my head and what I actually said out loud. Of course, later on in life, I fitted in a few more HEPA-standard filters to prevent myself hurting the sensitivities of others.

I promised myself that I would never get 'a job' for the sake of having a job. I just thought it seemed really obvious to everyone that earning more money and working harder simply doesn't deliver the Utopian promise of a life filled with happiness, joy, harmony and peace. That is my basis for not doing homework that did nothing for me. My teachers used to threaten that if I do not "work hard" I would not get a job. Then I might as well not get a job since I don't believe in 'hard work'.

And I thought it seemed pretty obvious that everyone is not "happy" in their jobs - so why the constant religious fervor to 'get a job'? To me, the lecture of "go to school, get good grades, get a job" was the single most destructive philosophy for having a happy life. And I made my stand very clear and was labelled, "intelligent but lazy". I wrote essays rebuking the myth of 'the lazy child' and my theme was "There's no such thing as a lazy child, just an unmotivated one" and each essay argued the conditions that can turn a child off from being motivated. Of course, they called me things like "radical" for not believing that "lazy" is a direct consequence of not 'obeying orders blindly and perform the task diligently as instructed.' I even remember one where I wrote that, if they really want to insist I am intelligent (I do not believe I was) then wouldn't it also mean that it would be redundant for me to 'work hard' since I have already mastered the content? And in subjects that I am not interested in, wouldn't it be redundant to 'try and improve' in areas which obvioiusly I am not displaying an aptitude in.

I've always believed my schooling taught me nothing and robbed me of the times I could've spent on my own learning. I envy George Bernard Shaw that he beat to saying, "My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home my myself."

I was not so lucky in the sense that parts of me crumbled and the forces of ignorance and sheer stupidity in my life eventually infiltrated my soul and wreaked great dysfunction in me. If I were a Buddhist, I'd probably believe that I have my previous Good Karma to thank for saving me when I was on the verge of crossing over and dissolving the Nature I was born with. I used to sing this line, "Somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must've have done something good" whenever I experienced an epiphany or awakening that pulled me back to confidence just as I was about to succumb and drift into the stream of ignorance.

I spent my 20s trying out different forms of work - and job-hopping was still scorned upon back then. Since I knew I was never going to 'get a job and work myself up', my plan was to just take a job because of what I can learn from it, not what it can do for me. - I was never really good at math, but I figured any hierarchy always follows the shape of pyramid - the numbers are most at the bottom and tapes to a single point in the end. For me to move up would require me to celebrate others having to stay down. That wasn't the sort of environment I wanted to enslave myself to.

The one job I loved the most was actually being a door-to-door salesman. It's really laughable but it's the only job I had that taught me how not to have a job and yet make money. (I sold Kirby vacuum cleaners!) I was given a choice to take a 30% commission on each sale I make or take a fixed salary. A fixed salary would be the equivalent of 2 sales a month. I figured, if 2 sales a month is the most I can make for the rest of my life, I deserve to live a life of a glorious loser. Picking up other people's dirt has been the richest experience of my life so far. It drummed into me the signficance of how money can be earned without a job. I proved it could happen. I feel so sorry for salespeople who grumble and complain about how much they hate their job because they are losing out on the most valuable lesson of making money. And I feel even sorrier for people who say they hate salespeople / network marketing people. But that's another story.

I told myself that the only way I was never going to work is to find something I loved so much that I'd never have to dread waking up in the morning to do it - something I would do even if no one was going to pay me to do it. A lot of the things I would like to express about learning and happiness and self-actualisation sounds radical, foolish and stupid and that's only because I am not (yet) a multi-millionaire. I don't covet money and the material things and status it can give me but power is the only way you can convince people that they're being stupid. And money is power.

Thankfully, a guy born 20 years earlier than me who believed equally as much that school doesn't teach anything it purpotedly teaches is an exponent on why the advice to, "go to school, study hard, get good grades and get a job" is the worst and most damaging advice a parent can give their child. While I had a really weak banker as an absentee father, Robert Kiyosaki was that much more fortunate to have two dads that gave him simultaneous, real-life scenarios - like a lab-controlled experiement, on who's more right than the other in disproving that (ridiculous) notion of 'hard work'.

I've noticed from reading history books and watching North and South (remember the show that launched Patrick Swayze in the 80s?) that rich people NEVER work hard for their money and I tried telling everyone that the secret of being happy, rich and successful does not come from simple, honest, 'hard work'. But no one ever listens to a 10 year old.

I'm just thankful that I came upon this realization early in life and that I have been vindicated in my convictions even if it was after having being pulled back from the threshold of going mainstream by divine forces which kept me firm on my belief of "Why in the world would anyone want a JOB!!"

So, what's a better way?

2008-12-28T14:06:00.000-08:00

I wrote in one blog recently that if we view the change of S&M from MT to English in a different way, it has been successful. Successful in telling us what the problems really are and how far they extend and what cards we have at hand which we can play.

I'm optimistic about a lot of things except the notion that we will have enough, what M.Bakri Musa calls, "native" (proficiency) bilingual graduates who can read/write/speak/dream in Malay or, if I may add, their MT plus English.

We've had 30 years of bleeding out English-proficiency speakers. We completely forget that the spare parts to change our cogs and wheels no longer exist. You can try and revert your vehicle of progress to an English-medium one but the parts to accomplish that exist only in junkyards here and there.

I am a product of the KBSM system. In case you missed it in another blog, I do not come from a typically educated, middle-class English-speaking home. It seems that being instructed in Bahasa or another MT does not automatically compel one to be deficient in acquiring English. The surgeon's training in solving a problem typically requires their diagnosis to consist of identifying and then removing the thing they can see which was not there before thus must be what is causing the problem. But we cannot solve every problem by trying to revert everything back to how it was - cutting this out and replacing it with another part. Sometimes, we have to understand what was the original cause of deterioration and whether current beliefs and practices induced the deterioration/deficiency.

I had mentioned in a previous blog that some English-speaking, English-dreaming advocates of the policy to implement English as the medium of instruction have an unchecked air of superiority in the points they advocate. It is as if ENGLISH is the only ticket to being competitive and progressive and a final saving grace. Consider the case of Japan though. Despite the fact that Japan has taken its time to bow to its own whims and fancies in teaching their people English, their lack of English did not deter their competitiveness in the global market. It would also be prudent to note that significant numbers of native-speakers never actually acquired reading and writing and thinking skills that would've made them productive, creative forces in their given economy. This, despite the fact that they obviously dream in living English.

Before we jump into any of "Malaysia's Next Big Idea" (things which seem to make perfect sense because they just sound sensational) people need to be informed that the idea of "Total immersion" works in collaboration with a lot of other heavyweight factors. Since I am not a Linguist of any sort, I would refrain from weighing my blog down enumerating those factors. But say I were a non-English speaking student once again, how receptive would I be towards this Total Immersionism? And would my receptiveness or lack of contribute to the success of Total Immersionism? And if I were not so receptive, what sort of roles do cognitive and associative factors play in that and to what degree? Say, would students and their families perceive a threat to their own cultural identity? And would I not question, how does total immersion account for the number of failures among English-speaking people who cannot read and write at a graduate level? Or Hispanics and Blacks who are 'totally immersed' yet completely behind in their (legal) economic competitiveness?

I just drove home a point to myself : the people who would benefit most from a proficiency in English are also the least likely to question policies in a critical way. They are desperate. They probably can't read and think critically enough to go look for data which would've pointed out that total-immersion is not a be-all solution. It drives home the point that Malaysians are too eager and open to adopt change that will fill their rice-bowl or increase the volume of their future rice-bowls. That is why I do this : because the people with a 'voice' do not always speak for those who cannot have a voice.

Anyway, let's consider this :How many gifted teachers and programme facilitators would we need, logistically, to be able to set up an 'incubator' for 'total immersion' and keep the momentum going? How much research and training before that? How do we diagnose learners' from different areas to ascertain their AFs and a host of other psychological and cognitive factors that may or may not facilitate and promote the initiatives of 'total immersion'? Instead of being so ambitious in trying to tailor ideals to our local scenario, let us try and find new parts and recalibrate the whole vehicle. Sometimes, it helps to forget the old ways and try something we've never tried before.

I can go on and on, arguing one by one against the points supporting complete instruction in English. When we talk about introducing L1 as a subject only after several years, we are essentially killing off L1 as a language to read, speak, write and think critically in. If we're going to teach content (Science, Math, History, Geography) in a foreign language would that not spell the eventual death of a language? Does every language have to die so English can have its dominance? Other Mother Tongues would do a Rodney King and say, "Can't we all just get along?"

In general, I am not a stickler for traditions and cultures, but an institutionalised submission of a mother tongue to a dominant (economic and academic) language will lead it to its eventual death. A language being 'alive' is not as simple as being able to speak it but to be able to think and write in it, innovate with it and add to it. To relegate Bahasa Malaysia and other Mother Tongues to be taught only as one subject has phychological connotations as well. You're basically telling me it's not as important to me, my community, my country, the world' heritage and future diversity - and young people, lacking foresight and living on immediate gratification would never cultivate the sort of engagement and motivation required to be proficient in any given language.

What scares me about writings that get so much airspace in Malaysia (websites, newspapers, etc) is that they come from highly narrow perspectives of the big picture. Sometimes it feels like everyone just cares about their own importance in the issue, their own egos in the face of this question. If all of you English-thinking, Chinese and Malay nationalists take up all the airspace in three corners to articulate your highly eloquent opinions, who's taking care of the little guys to whom all this really matters?

The one thing all of you have in common is that you are all well-educated people who are obviously in a position to articulate, publish and garner support for your views. You all have your team to gather reports and references and this and that, which makes perfect sense when you try and outdo one another scoring points for yourselves. You have all the hard, soft data to validate whatever opinions you have already arrived at. You are all too intellectual and ambitious and egoistic, whether you realize it or not.

And whether you realize it or not, there is a sea of people who completely disagree with some or all that you say, but thanks to the very same things you are trying to champion for them, lack the sort of brazen-ness you all possess which is a given to you all, since you are all well-connected, well-read people. Their subdued response is due to their own sense of humility of not being able to 'reference' and compete in the three-cornered fight. Who are they? They are the loose collective who will be the most affected by the outcome of the things you are all debating.

From school teachers to educated parents to middle-class working parents, you all have had your say. But there is the sad silence of the majority who will be the most affected. Where are the voices of the Malay, Chinese, Indian, etc teachers who genuinely wished they had better command of English? Who have to overcome the disabled function of an innate autonomous nature? Are the children really allowed to speak? Are the low-educated, non-academic, inarticulate parents represented? Or have they simply been informed or misinformed, whichever was more convenient, to sway their responses to support whatever outcome the studies were intended?

I'll start again by saying, whether we believe we can or we cannot, we are right. I believe there are more efficient ways of teaching language development than what has always been publicly hawked. And I know this because I have spent 2 years of my own money setting up a control situation proving my theories on top of enough time in a school environment requesting for complete autonomy to give my beliefs a shot.

I would again like to put forward a disclaimer that my observations an my language incubator were not funded by any university or body which also effectively renders me impotent in any design, implementation, supervision or conclusion of what I've observed. I accept that. But the fact that the course of dozens of learners' lives have been permanently altered from their 12-24 months of language learning experience and the inspiration that they will carry with them to continue fostering autonomous language learning after they leave this experiment will bear witness to itself.

It's a piece of cake teaching students who already have some English but it's a challenge teaching students whose L1 and L2 contain a disparity of at least 10 to 15 years of full-time learning between each. It's also easy to claim success after 2 years of kindy under a levelled reading programme, but we're looking to finish the race, not just to start strong.

Can everyone be effectively bi, tri and quadrilingual?

2008-12-28T10:57:00.000-08:00

I'd like to put a disclaimer on all the things I write that they cannot be supported, correlated and concluded the way you'd expect a 'credible' piece of writing ought to be. I'm not credible at all and have no ambitions of being a mekah of credibility. In a blogosphere of writing where every author is pretty confident in the validity of their perspective, to care none at all about whether or not I would appear 'credible' or 'noteworthy' seems radical even without trying to be.

I say the things that sophisticated and intellectual people, who are already set on the trajectory towards their own conclusions, would less likely say. The difficult thing about correlating and quoting accurately every point we're trying to present is that we lose everyone else in the course of it. There are enough academics, intellectuals and born-again-politicians/activists that can provide their own statistics and references to support the arguments they want to make. I can't see myself doing that and it is purely from a lack of trying.

When I write about my views on education and TEMS, I have to bear in mind that I am up against a well-educated, well-connected network of people who have been surfing the tide during those years when I was merely observing how and where the currents would flow while idly watching each sunrise and sunset.

A lot of times when I've attempted to write about issues that feel as if I was born to experience, I've held myself back because, working on an hourly wage and juggling single parenthood didn't give me enough time to collect enough references and digest enough journals and studies to quote extensively on every opinion I want to express. I suppose that can also be a reason why a lot of people produce questionable research design, implementations and results - it takes bloody a lot of time to select and screen target study groups, design and re-check question design and control for this and that....well, you get my point. They just need to come up with something that would 'validate' an opinion that has already been reached.

I don't go so far as to pick something out of my .....hair, but a lot comes from my solitary observation and readings from journals and most recent papers presented in ESL conferences around the world. I do not claim to have read every publication to date nor internalised all the findings synchronistically and coherently. If anyone is industrious enough, they can take time out and trawl through the sea of research and publications and eventually ...no, wait, I wouldn't recommend that. Research is an ever-expanding field. It can go either way for or against a theory depending on the time of the millenia. For that reason, I would rather each person appeal to their own inner reflections, trust their own insights in order to swim freestyle in any direction that benefits them most immediately.

Anyway.....

Right. There is this argument, authored by an M.Bakri Musa that goes it is now accepted that exposing children at a young age to bilingual education confers significant linguistic, cognitive and other advantages. The authors’ recommendation that pupils be taught only in their mother tongue and learn a second language later at a much older age is not supported by modern research.

I agree with half of the opinions he expressed in his entire article and appreciate the sort of analyszing and referencing he does that I would never find time to do. That is probably very necessary if he is going to be a credible author. Right, so yes, there is a lot of evidence to suggest bilingualism benefits children. But who are these types of bilingual children? For many years I've observed people who are bilingual and trilingual and they all have one thing in common - they come from homes which are generally more progressive in thinking and have more helpful psychological make-ups. You can also say they come from a lineage that is linguistically more gifted and diverse and cognitively more 'advanced'. I agree that there are great benefits to reap if you can be bi, tri and multi-lingual, etc etc etc. But does reverting to the medium of instruction in English facilitate this?

We seem to ignore the fact that we model language after what we are exposed to. The author said himself later on that if you teach bastardized language, you get bastardized language. The 'linguistic' and 'cognitive' advantageous our brains have do not come equip with a 'Standard Built-In Language Rules for the (year) child' that we can upgrade like a software. GIGA.....so to speak.

So we think we can effectively train teachers to ......undo their bastardization of the language (no fault of theirs), recalibrate and holify their English in.....how many man hours? As I observed from 1990 til 2005, I saw how we have passed the point of no return. But it takes a landslide for us to realize our slopes are naked, so.,,,,,,

People often ask me, as a child coming from a working class, dysfunctional Chinese family and schooled in the KBSM system, how did I gain the level of proficiency I have? If I told you I skipped all my English classes or slept through them, would you believe me?

I largely did not conform to the instruction nor absorb the environment English teaching was creating around me. No one else in my family nor my primary classmates, not even my American educated older brother, speaks and writes the way I do. In fact, my AF (affective filter) towards the learning of English in school was very high. I joined the English society because I was obligated to choose co-c activities and that was one society I could take it easy and not do anything worth doing. I remember the teacher advisor teaching me this word starting with 'z', - 'Zeal'. She said I had no zeal for learning English. Point taken then. During English Week, I was conscripted, rather than an eager participant. I attribute my autonomous learning traits and my proficiency in English to all those years of never conforming to what schooling expected of me and living with a label of being an underachiever. I could've been what they now term "a dysfunctional independent learner" but I'd like to think that I knew exactly what I wanted to learn, what I needed NOT to learn in order to achieve the sort of gratification I wanted from my learning experience.

No, we cannot train teachers as conveniently as we install new software or buy new RAM. Some English-ed teachers have written in newspapers about how they had to transition from being English-ed to teaching in BM and do not see why the current batch of teachers cannot do the same. Whether it had something to do with their 'training' or not, a lot of o-ty's assumed that the deterioration of minds has a direct relationship to denouncing the remnants of colonial indoctrination through education. Then why are schools in English-speaking countries suffering the same decline? And do we actually believe that the stronger economies of English-speaking countries has everything to do with English itself and nothing to do with trading policies etc?

Another factor that explains why the ol-ty's can do it but the current generation would find it more difficult is the way one language transfers up or down to another. This is no way marks a superiority of one language over another. If it did, we should all be reading and writing only in Arabic and Sanskrit and a whole host of other nominess even before we adopt English as our International Lingua-Franca.

It's a no-brainer that if your brain has already been accustomed to read and write / listen and speak in the more complexed system, it becomes easier to acquire language from a less complex system. That is only one aspect of language acquisition. Transfering from English to BM is generally a stepping down. The lack of informed approaches towards the teaching and learning of English to speakers of other languages and the continuous deterioration of minds through traditional schooling compounds the difficulty of current day teachers being able to acquire English.

Having said that, I would like to see these English-ed teachers transition to teach in Arabic or Mandarin and then see if they can still claim the same air of superiority. I suppose I cannot blame our English teachers - like what M.Bakri Musa pointed out, a lot of what our public teachers have access to is dated. I've always noted that the danger of being a teacher is a false sense of exclusivity and superiority about the 'subject' you teach. Teachers don't actually feel an obligation to empathise with others and keep themselves updated about learning before passing judgment on other people's unsuccessful learning.

I'm going to share a story told to me by a lady, we shall call her Cikgu Pah. She was a student of the famous Malaysian BM expert, Adibah Amin. Cikgu Pah was often told off during class for not being good at BM and that she should go back to Arab where she came from. This hurt the sensitivies of the young Cikgu Pah very much. (This is very typical of us insensitive Malaysians somehow. The other variant is "Go back to tiong-hua if you cannot speak Bahasa properly!" By properly they mean in RP Bahasa Malaysia.... their judgment of RP Bahasa Malaysia which is el supremo.) - So, anyway, by the time Cikgu Pah graduated, the policy had been revised to Bahasa as the medium of instruction. - The next scenario would seem familiar to many teachers : By virtue of being Malay and being conversant in Malay, she was seconded to teach Bahasa Malaysia on top of the subjects she had majored in. Those subjects she had majored in she learned in English and now she has to teach them in Bahasa.

What I mean by a familiar scenario is that I've noticed how School Heads decide which teacher teaches languages, especially English : first priority, the ones who are not Chinese, followed by those who might be Chinese but who were not completely schooled in Chinese and when both groups are not available, any teacher that can read the most words in Bahasa/English, even if it's still at a Ladybird series level. I mean no offence, but if you only worked in schools before, you'd know. No parent out there can realistically expect the conversant English/Malay speaker assigned to be their child's subject teacher to be an expert in language (L1 or L2) pedagogy. Once in a while, you would be so lucky as to get a Cikgu Pah who has a lot of initiative, drive, passion and commitment and a heart the size of........Alaska!

Back to my little piece of anecdotal story - Eventhough Cikgu Pah was more fluent in English than Bahasa then (coming from a well-educated, urban Malay family in the 50s) her transition to Bahasa was difficult but do-able. She wanted badly to tell her cikgu, "Hah, tengok! Sekarang saya jadi cikgu Bahasa Malaysia!"

Kind of like what I would like to say to my English teacher in Form 4. She told me to go be an English teacher if I think her methods of teaching my other classmates (I was not from the first class) were ineffective and destructive to their self-esteem and language development. Actually, the last thing I would want to be is an English teacher. I don't mind teaching literature and theatre on my free weekends but who needs Shakespeare when the rest of the third world needs applicable skills in acquiring knowledge in a fast-changing world?

Back to the comparison the group of retiring/retired teachers made about,"If we could do it then, why can't they do it now?". English to BM is a stepping down in terms of linguistic difficulty. On top of that, there was an existing cultural and social environment that was very condusive for learners who were self-directed in their learning. To be fair, all teachers should be self-directed. This was during a time when the teaching profession was the reserve of the most self-directed of students!!

The landscape for our teachers today is like climbing Mt.Kilimanjaro on stilettos compared to the skiing trip down an artifical Alps the teachers in the 60s experienced. On top of it being a stepping-up transitioning from BM to English, English is not as widely used now as Bahasa Malaysia was. Of course we can argue that with so much more English-media clutter and broader air/webspace in general dedicated to English, there's a greater environment. In mass, there is more...which necessitated also a new ability to manouvre around and filter through all that clutter and noise in order to select their prime sources of information.

Way back when, we had only a couple of channels and radio stations and print publications and they were either in Bahasa Malaysia or English. In fact, there was this radio subscription channel called Redifussion which broadcasted extra Chinese or English channels on top of the RTM ones. The scenario is vastly different today. Even in simulated environments like mass media, Astro channels and the dozens of paid broadcasting, multiple-language interface products, etc are competing for viewer attention. When given a choice, people would revert to the language they are most efficient in. I would never read a manual in Bahasa or set my Windows or google browser up in Bahasa if I had a choice! And I think even rural kids nowadays would rather read in Bahasa Malaysia than Jawi?

Besides, if I am not mistaken (you dig up the archives yourself) it was in the late 70s and full-throttle in the 80s when teaching colleges were synonymous as the last refuge of those who could not hack it for university courses. I remember being a very young girl running around Recsam eavesdropping on what teacher trainers go through and what they were like and trying to catch what visiting educators would lecture. By the time I finished secondary school, I told my dad that it would be over his dead body that I would become a teacher. I know now that we really must be careful what we say when we parlay with the Universe in rebelling against our parent's wish.

We simply cannot compare high-school leavers from the 50s and 60s with those from the later decades up til now. We're comparing high achievers like Cikgu Pah (schooled in the 50s and 60s) who got into undergrad and teaching diploma programmes on pure merit with mediocre achievers who got in on quotas and by virtue of having failed to get places in universities. To imitate my German friend's expression, "What is that for a comparison?"

High-achievers tend also to be more self-directed and have more initiative in their learning. Apple to apple, the first group would have transitioned better from BM to English when compared to the latter group. Mediocre achievers are constantly plagued with a quiet confession that they became teachers because that is the last respectable thing left for them to do. I hope everyone is aware though, that the way we perceive ourselves as learners from the time we first experience learning, greatly influences the initiative, resourcefulness and progressiveness of our future learning. Can we see now the many ways our teachers are handicapped?

Eventhough I am but a lowly lone-ranger, I am as guilty as our local academics and researchers in beginning with a conclusion and then looking only for the evidences which corroborate initial views. I knew trainee teachers were in a lot of trouble when it came to continuous learning, I knew different demographics predicted a general economic outcome due to a correlating lacking of proficiency in English. I knew almost instinctively that those who did not acquired enough mental lexicon, vocab and efficient reading and writing skills would most probably not enjoy post-secondary and the domino effect can settle in. (Fortunately, a lot of other factors can contribute to a change in a school-leaver's trajectory, if only they would let go of the unhelpful impressions they have acquired of themselves during school and replaced them with more helpful and positive beliefs after school.)

As a primary school student, I sympathised so much with my trainee Malay teachers who confessed how difficult it was for them to improve themselves because so much information is written in English. (That was in '85,'86). One Cikgu Sapiah gave me an English storybook to encourage me to continue on my then promising path of mastering English. She had told me how difficult it was for her and the only thing that kept her efforts up in English was reading romance novels which were a lot more 'interesting' than Malay ones. She gave me one of those. I never read it but I developed an aversion towards romance novels.

I also saw how many of my friends were falling behind in acquiring English and they were not the ones who copped out from doing homework and rested forehead on folded arms during English lessons. I integrated my passing observations of the sort of trainee teachers we were getting, the teachers we already had, the people outside of school who were their age groups, the areas where my friends lived, what jobs their parents did and whether I found any correlation between their school work, family backgrounds and their acquisition of English. I did that passively, day in and day out. There is no one clear episode, just a general theme of a memory I have of primary through lower secondary school.

It pained me that there has always existed a double-standard in the treatment of those who did better in English compared to those who didn't. This directly causes how a person values and perceives their ability as a learner, what is more, were were only children. Could the prejudice be remnants of teachers schooled during a time when English was the medium of instruction? It pained me even more that I put in none of the accepted norms of learning effort yet them, twice as much or more.

I started with two conclusions : There were two broad themes I concluded from my own reflections as a language learner within the KBSM system. First, the methods and approaches were deeply flawed. That was the only way to explain how my non-conformism to standard classroom norms saved me from language bastardization or fossilization. My English textbooks were always returned as new as they came, and I never came across any English exercise books during spring cleaning. Textbooks did next to nothing for my language acquisition. But it could have done something out of the thousands of others, maybe. But at the end of the race, my non-textbook, disengageed perspectives towards classroom learning of English put me miles ahead.

Second, a high sense of self-esteem is imperative in both the teacher and the learner in order to acquire language effectively. A teacher with a high self-esteem in their ability to teach and inspire in the subject is a safer bet to be more reflective, encouraging and supportive of his learner's language development.

There is a part of me which wishes I could be put into a state of hypnosis and regressed to my childhood to see how my learning happened. I've learned significantly a lot more things in the area of SLA and Learner Autonomy to understand a significant part of how I acquired my language. I always put out a disclaimer that my memories are fallible. But there is this memory of always reading a column by a Lucille Dass in The Star newspaper in the 80s. There was another teacher called a Miss Dass at my school at the same time. It always fascinated me that there was a Dass I could see who never spoke that intelligently to me, and a Dass I could read, who wrote so intelligently, whom I could not see. I never actually met Lucille Dass in person until about 20 years later and very briefly at a workshop.

Abolishing vernacular schools and focussing on the actual problems of teaching Science and Math in English

2008-12-27T07:06:00.000-08:00

Yes. We should abolish the term vernacular schools and make them equals to kebangsaan schools. Why do we call them 'kebangsaan' schools anyway? Schools that nationalize people? Do we need to actually 'teach' nationalization? We wouldn't have had to if politics simply got out of the way of education. So, yes - we should abolish the term 'salah satu jenis kebangsaan' and make verncular schools kebangsaan schools. What's wrong with simply celebrating the richness and diversity in languages that makes Malaysia so unique? What's wrong with switching from one type of school to another? There would be nothing wrong if vernacular schools were simply just schools.

That Mahathir's son...what's his face - said that all vernacular schools should be abolished to promote unity. He has a point there eventhough he dared not say what really needs to be told. The problem is not in the teaching of non-Malay languages, the problem is the race-politics and racist indoctrinations promoted through these schools! He couldn't come on out to just say that unless he went undercover (like I did) and saw it with his own dua-biji....mata.

I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that he's not some ignorant race-chauvinist because I have deep reverence for his father and respect for his sister. However, if he is the black sheep of the flock, then it would be truly regrettable despite the fact he came from such a pedigree stock.

Speaking of my reverence for Mahathir, there has been only one public policy he has stamped his mark on that I have not supported. (There may have been other views by him but I only pay attention to the headlines that get the most airtime, like KLCC, standing up to the IMF, the Look-East policy, championing South countries,...). Everything Mahathir suggests and says in public, I jump out of my chair in support. He could not have delivered it better. People who call him pemimpin kuku besi or hate his guts simply have none of their own. I suppose that' explains the unmerited gravitational towards Abdullah Badawi which ended up giving him such a landslide victory. Now that Malaysians get a true taste of what it's like to have no-LP, I am sure they have a new appreciation of Mahathir.

Way back when, I knew Mahathir made the wrong move in pushing for Maths and Science in English. But to his credit, he didn't have much time left. Whether he left it as it is or drove the gear into this massive experiment, nothing much is lost. He knew his successors would have neither the will, vision nor LP to consider radical change. At least in this way, we were jolted out of our very infamous Malaysian attitude of dragging our feet about getting anything worth doing done.

There are those who fret about how it's been a great waste of time and money and our children being treated as guinea pigs. But what makes us so sure that the same amount of time and money would not have been spent on even more wasteful activities? Like, sending five space tourists instead of one?

At least, having done this form of ACTION RESEARCH we have amassed a mountain of data and insight into the deep problems of our nation's human productivity and capacity and not wait til it is way too late. We Malaysians have a way of ignoring falling rocks and tilting buildings with an over-optimistic view that a massive erosion and landslide will not occur just because all the signs says it will. (Yes, just because). If we can ignore signs of devastating floods and landslides, do you trust us to actually ring the alarm on a quiet deterioration of Malaysian minds?

So now we know that most of our schoolteachers are not qualified! Hahahahaha! I am so delighted to know that I was right about some of my teachers - that they did not become qualified teachers by virtue of their initiative in learning nor pioneering insights to teaching. It also has nothing to do with inherent intelligence and productivity since everyone knows that teaching is the last resort for those who did not qualify for choice courses.

Memories are fallible, but perhaps some of my classmates could validate this later on. I remember one time in Form 4, I told my History teacher that in order to teach a chapter on the Industrial Revolution or the Renaissance or Islamic history, she needed to acquire the experience and covered reading the width and breadth of those his-stories. She did not know who Michaelangelo was and could not extend further about his works and pronounced his name, "Mee-kah-eh-lang-e-lo".

Anyway, time to grow up and be an adult about this. I spoke at length to some primary school teachers and I actually sympathise with them. In front of a class, they have to present themselves as authorities. It's probably very damaging for their self-esteem to have a student point out their ineffectiveness and ignorance, and disheartening to know that they cannot do their job to their best ability and holding their students back at the same time. That is what any teacher who is not proficient in English would be made to feel.

As Head of Department once, I had a choice between hiring a teacher who is fluent (but neither proficient nor had a convincing recipe for effective teaching) or a Chinese-educated teacher who has demonstrated a great ability to bond with students, is highly committed and dedicated to learning and is passionate about guiding her students to achieve. I chose the latter, because you can buy a piece of certificate, but you can never buy passion and the drive to learn. Of course, if I really had a choice, I'd go for a proficient speaker with insights into language learning and acquisition, training, width and breadth in knowledge, applications and theory, great presenter with humor yet able to control a class without being an impeding authority, etc.

From the day I started teaching, I've always had this fantasy that we could do teacher-training the way we do direct-selling training. I really love the way the MLM-ers achieve their goals. The good companies have a wonderful mentoring system with practical coaching and motivating approaches and tools to drive people to become self-starters. I've always told myself, if I had not had a taste for words and writing and teaching, there is nothing I would love better to be than a network marketing coach who started out as the door-to-door saleslady working on commissions.

The only way I can see the government really helping teachers train and be self-starters is to include other-medium language schools in their fold - not as stepmothers, but lawful mothers of our future nation. I am sick and tired of the race politics being played out in school. I know though, that if we allow students to transfer from one-medium to another and have the flexibility of starting at a lower grade for certain subjects which they want to take in the other language and be allowed to take effective FL classes, racial politics could never happen in school. Imagine what would happen if children came back and could give feedback of what's happening in their school that is negatively different from what they've experienced elsewhere? Imagine if there was a programme where teachers can transfer to different medium schools to share with other teachers their strengths and expertise in teaching a particular subject in L1 or as a second-language? Not only would it eradicate the opportunities for creating strongholds in racist ideologies, it would promote the proliferation of knowledge and languages.

Sigh...someone should really make me Hishamuddin's policy writer. His policies would be so successful and popular it would propel him to Premiership even if his cousin was in his way.

Why Malay and Chinese nationalists protest over the use of English - Pt 1

2008-12-27T05:50:00.000-08:00

What is culture? Look at these web definitions of culture for a moment :

a particular society at a particular time and place; "early Mayan civilization"
the tastes in art and manners that are favored by a social group
acculturation: all the knowledge and values shared by a society
the attitudes and behavior that are characteristic of a particular social group or organization; "the developing drug culture"; "the reason that the agency is doomed to inaction has something to do with the FBI culture

To feel that one's "culture" and "traditions" or budaya is being threatened, to feel one's lineage, thus identity, is being threatened is reflected in a tenacious desire to preserve that particular status quo in its time and place, to preserve a set of thinking that is favoured by those whose voices we hear, to preserve 'the knowledge and values' shared by those whose voices are most vocal and a reflection of a particular social group, in our case, the ketuanan Melayu and the DJZ.

If we are to preserve and fossilize culture as it is, we might as well never validate education. Despite the fact that millions of people have been disillussioned by a system failure of schools, nevertheless, education and schooling are not synomymous. Schooling is about the mass production, the acculturation of a nation's people as a supply resource to industry, a resource that is as tangible and consumable as the machines used and materials produced and consumed. Education, on the other hand, is about the flowering of the individual, about the sharing and proliferation of the insights, wisdoms and skills obtained by those who have found the path towards a higher, more existential existence.

In discussing the merits for or against MT learning for Science and Maths I think we must first start bottom up. What I think has been happening is a scenario where people are shooting paintballs while hiding in camouflage. The field is a big mess with the general public walking around like forensic amateurs with neither the tools nor expertise to ascertain what happened - and drawing misinformed conclusions or opinions about the whole scenario.

Thus I've decided to start with the premise of 'mati bahasa, mati bangsa' by asking everyone to consider examining what this 'budaya' really is? Is it a productive, helpful budaya? A budaya pining about the loss of face and pride, a budaya tied to past glories or ketuanan?

Upon clear examination, we will all come to realize that all that talk by Malay nationalists and the DJZ party is about their own political agenda in the end. I don't know of that many Malays, including lawyers and national laureates and academics, medical doctors, engineers, aerospace tourist, bankers, etc who have not benefited from and who would not want their children to benefit from a strong command of the International language. (I will substitute the term "English" for "International" because the number of non-native speakers has surpassed those of native users a decade ago and is projected to outnumber native speakers 80-20 in the next decade).

If you have ever wondered the way I did, what the variables are between those in ICS (represented by the umbrella body DJZ), Chinese government schools and 'the other schools' that gave Chi-Ed people such a disadvantage over other peers despite their incomparable diligence and tenacious ambition, you would infiltrate the schools and observe it with a reporter's eye and arrive at what I have : that these 'nationalists' are concerned about appearing concerned for the Chinese community but they really aren't. (No, I'm not a journalist, I engage in role-playing as a fantasy).

If you can only witness how much access they have to professional educators, private language consultants, tons of sample textbooks and research on ESL and the resources (money!) they claim they don't have but are pretty much throwing around, you can see there is no actual sincerity or will to do anything for their own 'Chinese' people. I have done more for their students after resigning than they could have done for their own despite having teachers like me amongst them for years. Yes, I am bitter. But I am bitter for the right reasons. I was not ambitious and was willing to be paid next to nothing, take days or weeks away from family to take part in any activity that aimed to collate the productivity and skills of their English teachers to affect change in the right direction. I was willing, like so many other idealistic teachers, to live paycheck to paycheck as long as I could render my services to stop this rot and get things rolling the other way, to not waste one more day of our children's future.

Many times I considered electronically recording my experience inside the DJZ. There is so much racial-politicking and anti-government sentiments that you could cut the tension in the air with a knife. I am a person sensitive to collective energy and 'vibes' of a place or person and for the most part of my life, I am 99% accurate about people and situations, which earns me sometimes, a creepy reputation of being clairvoyant. But since I was not contracted as an undercover journalist by a reputable agency, I would never be able to validate what I've recorded. It can always be thrown out as 'doctored' or I prompted and recorded only certain responses. I could not even have gone in undercover for the govt with experts and the DA planning some elaborate years-long investigation. I could not even suggest to any university to sponsor this sort of 'research'. There was no legal and foolproof way I could've recorded and related the things I saw happening amidst them. It's just me and God as my witness. But I can finally blast these communist with a clear conscience. I've always suspected they were doing things like this and I could not be more thankful that I was given an opportunity to validate my suspicions.

If you could've experience vicariously through me, you will see that they (the Chinese nationalists) are no better nor any more sincere than what they accused the MoE of not to be. I would bet my chips on the MoE any given time even if two-thirds of their policies masuk angin. I do not doubt MoE's sincerity because I know there's always a price to pay when you are part of a bureaucracy. Which explains perfectly why I am not cut-out for that sort of place even if that is where the heart of education revolution will start from.

Going back to the DJZ, there is simply no political will on the side of these so-called 'Chinese' nationalists. Despite being labelled, 'ang moh sai' (white man's trash) by people like them, I can say with a clear conscience that I have done more for Chinese students than these Chinese natioanlists. A lot of my resentment towards them can evaporate if only I tell myself in a Zen-like philosophy that 'they know not what they are doing'. But then again, I think, you should not excuse people who wear the labels of 'Teacher' and 'Authority' or 'Leader' if they are misleading you through an assertion and protection of their total ignorance and the exacted conformity of everyone else beneath them. Along with the reverence and money a community of people surrender to you comes the condition that you do not simply exist for your salaries and distorted ideologies. You exist to serve their needs, to use your intellect and elected offices (as teachers or education leaders) to find ways that directly and immediately increase their learning and value to the economy, improving their state of mind and self-esteem. It does nobody any favours spreading the propaganda of fear and the notion of being under-seige from the non-Chinese.

Any and every effort they have ever attempted and called a press conference for (or prepared a press kit for) is mere window-dressing. It would be completely unethical of me to say any of this if I was the same anti Chi-Ed I was a decade ago but I grew up, old enough to pass off as a teacher and infiltrate their network, read their publications, attend their conferences and workshops and trainings and a thing or two I cannot reveal because I had signed confidentiality agreements.

In the turmoil of discussion for or against the use of English for Science and Maths in primary school, the issue of cultural or racial identity got picked up. It misdirects the intellectual energy to inform and resolve this question. Learning and education should have nothing to do with culture and race at all. For isn't that the entire point of education - to remove barriers and examine the unexamined thoughts and behaviours, to bring people higher in their awareness and consciousness. A perceived dilution of cultural or racial identity should not even have been an issue. I could be Chinese today, or Malaysian-Chinese if you like, but 5,000 years ago and 5,000 years from now, I doubt I would have been so rigidly classified. So whether or not language makes cultures more permeable in a multicultural society as ours is not even a worthy point of debate. If the great Mayans and Incans could vanish, what is so great about the rest of us that demands permanent validation and attachment to a label of our 'kind'? I hope no one ever wastes anyone else's airtime and pollute their thinking field anymore by spouting unexamined ideas about the mothertongue-culture-identity trinity.

What is valid though is that in Second Language learning, it is noted that information can transfer faster if the learner already has a substantial amount of knowledge and information in their own L1. Teaching new concepts in Maths and Science has more to do with teaching content than language. Because most of these very young learners may not even had had exposure or content knowledge of the concepts in Math and Science in their first language, it makes it completely incomprehensible to do it in a foreign language. Teaching brand-new concepts in a foreign language is definitely a bad idea. If I had a choice between taking up a Linguistics or Philosophy or Sociology or Law or Engineering or a Forensics course in English or Mandarin, I'd rather do it in English, since that is the language in which I have more access to references in my mental lexicon to make sense of new content that is being taught. Soon, we would be teaching Maths and Science in Arabic to improve the Malays' command of reading and interpreting the Quran?

There are parents who believe that learning in English makes more sense as you don't have to re-learn everything again in another language later on. Urban families or educated families who read, write and speak English could never imagine the world of difference between them and non-English speakers. Families who aspire to be fluent in English may falsely believe that simply knowing a few hundred words in English through recognition and being able to do simple guesswork in English tests and regurgitate sample answers for written ones is enough to be 'goodt' in English. As earnest as those intentions are, it is gravely misleading. Proficiency in English in order to compete academically in the language is a much larger picture than the few pieces of puzzle they have in hand. Eventhough it sounds more efficient to learn it in one language from the start, it becomes a bigger waste if you realize 9 years later, the rate of mastery is a longshot from what is required for tertiary education in the Science and Maths. Poor English language skills is only one of other factors causing us to lag behind in these fields.

After removing race-politics from the mix, there is real reason why content should first be taught in L1. Knowledge from L1 can be transferred to the target language. The focus should be on how an Other Language is acquired. Would it make sense if I said that language is acquired through input that is comprehensible. (For more on this, read works by Stephen Krashen). Have you ever experienced watching a foreign dialect or movie or singing a foreign song you liked and then figuring out what means what after some time being exposed to content and plot while reading the substitles in your L1? With the visual simulating context in an artifical 'environment', you acquired the meaning of words over time.

Language learning is thus separate from the learning of other subjects that can be mastered through instruction and drills alone. It is the job of linguists and their relatives in psychology and pedagogy to explain the rest. What I'm trying to introduce is the proven notion that there is a whole range of things that goes into the mixing bowl when it comes to helping learners effectively acquire a language, any language.

According to Krashen's works and everyone else' common sense, we develop more and more complexed language abilities through a continous series of being exposed to comprehensible input plus 1. We experience this everytime we are trying to learn foreign phrases. We pick up the most common ones first that is universally understood (cuss words, saying "I Love You") and we build on our understanding, spurred by our interest and without being impeded by our own sense of failure. How else can I explain the way I learned Cantonese and Mandarin and Malay? I first had a huge bank of references, cultural and vocabulary, which I transferred to the other languages. And then, without being instructed, my brain figured out the sounds and developed a frame of how the syntax and context works. I can say for certain that none of the languages I learned, I learned from pure instruction. Of course, like I said earlier (disclaimer!) there are other things that goes into the mixing bowl for the Full Monty......

If we are sincere about helping young people gain the advantages of acquiring English as a strong 2nd language (I think I've succeeded, and I've also succeeded in examining my own success in learning the language) it's time to look at the theories and practices of 2nd language learning and the mountains of research that has been done in this area. Hishamuddin should just sack everyone on his staff and hire me to implement a plan that covers curriculum design, instruction and implementation, methods and approaches and the logistics in customizing a few sets of design to achieve optimum results that transcends race, geography and social ladders. Then, as his advisor on Education, I would hire the most talented and passionate and committed educators to help me recalibrate the whole system and attack gangreneous system weaknesses with the blindess of a scalpel. Then we would run a 5-year pilot project that would make all of us on board fully accountable for - something like what N9 did. When the results are out and we see mass-scale success, Hishamuddin would have all the support he needs across all barriers to become Prime Minister. Then, he can rule with his own agenda while seceding education away from the government - whatever government comes next.

I think that's a good plan.....don't you think?