december - school's OUT but not for me...

These fingers have not tapped on the keyboard to share her boring thoughts to the world for A LONG TIME! Firstly, I don't think anyone's following so no pressure for me to keep updating my blog. Someday InsyaAllah I hope this blog will come in handy for my students, especially because next year I'll be teaching form 6 so it's part of the purpose to get students in touch with several different ways of learning and in this new era independent learning has become a buzz. I hope the internet connection is good enough to make this happen. I'm thinking of several ideas to kick start my lessons next year. Taylor Swift's Fifteen would be a good song for these students I suppose. Basically the song is about all the lessons learnt from one's first love. All the 'I told you so' incidents, you know what I mean. Perhaps for Malaysians, introduction to the song at the age of eighteen is not too late. As for me I experienced my own share of love and hurt at that age, hopefully it wouldn't be too far out of reach for my students as well. Apart from teaching form 6, I'll also be teaching form 3 for half a year. Only half a year because lower six students will be coming in in june, so before that I still can teach form 3 students. I've kind of gelled with these students so I didn't want to let them go when I was told I will solely be teaching F6. I then settled for half a year before another teacher takes over. Just a bit about what I'm doing now which is supposed to be P&C, huhu, I'm currently marking SPM papers. Sorry, can't reveal anything much but boy, isn't it painful! I'm just seriously appalled by the students' level of English. You go to school for 6 + 5 years + perhaps 2 years of kindergarten, and you don't know anything? Not even how to string a decent simple or compound sentence? It actually dawned upon me just how left behind these kids are. What will their future be like? Some of them were struggling and that was still fine because even though they weren't any good but they tried but quite a handful simply just gave up! How can you put your future on the line like that? I kept thinking hard and long and it really upset me as to how their English had become this poor? What were their teachers doing? As a teacher myself, I had form four students who will most likely be like those cases I've mentioned too. I tried to get them interested, but everything was just too difficult for them. I brought the level down to kindergarten but in reality SPM is nothing close to that. We need to a major revamp in school. Almost everything about the schools in this country is not conducive for learning. To top it up, English acquisition, not merely learning, is about the exposure one gets to the language. That's why it's no surprise any kid from the town can speak English but my students can't even ask for my permission to go to toilet properly. How can I get it through to their minds that English is not difficult, it's so much fun!!!