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

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

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?"

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.