The dangers of Teaching to tests.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.