I had just read a response to my comment on the Education Malaysia blog. In it, the author claimed that I was “out of sync”. So, this got me thinking if I am truly out-of-sync with our education issues. Granted, I have left school for more than a decade and I do not have any school going children. However, the issue of Chinese schools being better than National schools have been ongoing since before I went to school. So, while the players may have changed, the arguments have not changed much.

Sigh. Ad nauseum

The reason that I had pointed out John Lee’s statement is because I doubt that either Kian Ming or Tony Pua would have made sweeping statements like he did without the numbers to back them up. In fact, that is all I was asking for – the necessary facts to back up his statement. As evident in some of my previous posts, I’m biased because I personally think that all vernacular schools in Malaysia should be shut down.

But the question here is whether or not I am in-sync or out-of-sync.

Anyone who reads Coltz’s reply to my statement can immediately see that he does not have any numbers to back up his statement either. He has to infer that that Chinese schools are better from a bunch of disconnected ‘facts’. Or are they? Correlation does not imply causation.

Firstly, he pointed out crime rates in schools. While I am not sure if the police actually publish statistics down to that level of granularity, I do have a simple answer to his assertion. There are more delinquents in national schools simply because the national school delinquents still bother to go to school. The Chinese school delinquents would have dropped out of school by then and are busy peddling VCDs in the market or earning some other form of work. That takes care of your bottom 30%.

Secondly, he posited that based on the National Math Olympiad results, there are a disproportionate number of top Chinese schools as opposed to National schools. So, I just quickly browsed through the list and this got me wondering, where were all the top National schools. Then, I suddenly recalled something from my past. My school never joined any National Math Olympiad. Instead, we joine the International Math Olympiad. I did okay enough. Granted, I do not know if this was still the practice today, but it is a possibility.

Thirdly, his assertion that Chinese schools have the ability to fire incompetent teachers, which may result in better teachers. Well, I would like to point out the fact that many of the Chinese schools do not even have teachers whom were qualified to be trained as teachers in the first place. Many of them enter teaching by first becoming a volunteer/substitute teacher at schools and then use that experience to then have the schools forward them for teacher training before being assigned as permanent teachers. This does not happen in national schools, which largely get teachers straight out of teacher training colleges. However, which is better is open to debate.

So, I’m not quite sure if I am in-sync or out-of-sync. Personally, I would like to think that my personal background does give me some insight into the system that I would otherwise not have.

The most significant thing that happened to me today was being addressed as ‘uncle’ by some girl who worked at the local Carrefour. I was in the store shopping for some daily provisions. I paid for my purchases at the cashier counter and the girl who worked there asked me, “uncle, do you want the 5 sen back?”. Uncle??!! I didn’t know that I looked old enough to be called ‘uncle’ except by my niece and nephews. This girl working at the cashier counter was probably some school girl earning some pocket money over the school holidays. However, it still meant that she was at least 16 years old. However, this does not explain why she called me thus.

In other news:

I read an article in TheStar today with regards to the PMR results for science and math in English. It quoted a representative from that which was formerly known as UCLES. The representative said that, “the standard of our Mathematics and Science paper was higher than the United Kingdom’s”. Incidentally this is nothing to be proud of.

In the UK, the scientific community has been complaining about the dire straits of their math and science standards for many years. They know full well that they are falling behind the rest of the world in this respect and are understandably worried about it. A mathematician PhD that I once lived with also made a similar remark before. The scientific community over there tries their best to raise awareness and pressure the government to upgrade standards.

However, it just dawned on me that our recent arguments about teaching math in English is rather moot. Everyone knows that math is a language unto itself. Hence, it should be just as easy (or difficult) to teach math in any language, alien or terrestrial. This article may be of some interest. The case for science is rather different though.

On another note:

I have come to notice that a lot of Korean sentences end with the phrase ‘su-mi-da’ or something to that affect. I should really ask my Korean friend what it means.

PS: My friend says that it is something like ‘desu’ in Japanese. Now, that makes some sense.

This article in TheStar made the most interesting reading today. It is about the final round-table meeting that was held yesterday concerning the use of English in teaching Science and Math in schools. I am actually really curious to find out what language the meeting was conducted in. Regardless, the most revealing information provided by the article were the statistics (I abhor statistics).

From an earlier article, the number of students that opted to answer the papers in English were 159,234 (Science – 31%) and 238,153 (Math – 64%). This is a marked increase compared to last year, which had 1,324 (Science) and 1,075 (Math). At the very least, we can be assured that a very large number of students are comfortable with answering things in English. However, it would have been more interesting to find out the urban/rural breakdown of these numbers.

Yesterday, more statistics were revealed, with the overall results in both urban and rural schools averaging upwards and that the performance of English has gone up by a significant 4.4% while BM remained stable. So, these results show that the students can cope with the subjects in English and it may have had a positive effect on English as a whole. Okay, I am taking some liberties with causality here but it is at least a positive sign, if not a cause.

However, the most telling statistics were those that were released for the SJK schools. In SJKT schools, 62.8% and 89.1% answered the Science and Math papers in English, in contrast with SJKC schools where only 2.9% and 1.3% answered the papers in English. Now, this is very surprising and statistically significant.

Personally, I don’t understand the resistance in SJKC schools. I guess that the teaching quality there must not be as good, with students fearing to take the subjects in English. Alternatively, they was instruction for them to avoid the English papers, which would not surprise me one bit. Otherwise, there is no statistical reason why these SJKC students should buck the national trend of a marked increase in adoption of English as the Science/Math language. To me, this has been to their detriment as we do not have any significant data on how well the SJKC students coped with the subject.

The round-table meeting resulted in 7 potential proposals:

• Stick to Mathematics and Science in English;
• Revert to Bahasa Malaysia;
• Let primary schools teach both subjects in the mother tongue and secondary schools use English;
• Let primary schools decide for themselves;
• Mathematics and Science be taught in Bahasa Malaysia and mother tongue for Years One to Three and in English from Year Four onwards;
• A combination of mother tongue in the first three years and a choice of mother tongue or English after that; and
• The two subjects will not be taught in Years One to Three and instead be integrated into other subjects.

I would like to add an 8th proposal. Personally, I think that the solution is clear. Science and Mathematics should continue to be taught in English for all schools except SJKC schools where there is an apparent resistance. There has even been alleged threats of protests from the Dong Jiao Zong. So, SJKC schools should be allowed to teach these subjects in Mandarin if they so wish to. This will doubly ensure their slow but timely death as their brethren experienced in Singapore. No sane parent would enroll their kids in SJKC schools if they are the only ones resisting this positive move.

To me, this is a win-win-win situation for everyone involved. I’m surprised that nobody came up with this suggestion. They must be quite daft for failing to see the obvious.

** Pic from TheStar article. Not mine.

According to a MalaysiaKini article today, Lim Kit Siang claims that, “Umno Youth chief aspirant Mukhriz Mahathir had committed sedition in calling for the closure of Chinese and Tamil primary schools. He pointed out the Constitution Amendment 1971 had imposed absolute prohibition on Malaysians from questioning the four issues, which includes anyone who propose the closure of vernacular schools.”

Does this mean that my previous blog entry might be seditious as well? As I am not a lawyer, I wouldn’t know for sure. So, looking at the Sedition Act 1948, it mentions in 3(1)(f) that:

“A seditious tendency is a tendency to to question any matter, right, status, position, privilege, sovereignty or prerogative established or protected by the provisions of Part III of the Federal Constitution or Article 152, 153 or 181 of the Federal Constitution.”

As we all know, Article 153 deals with the special rights and privileges of the Malays and Bumiputra while Article 181 deals with the royalty. However, Article 152 does deal with the issue of languages. So, let’s see what it actually says:

The national language shall be the Malay language and shall be in such script as Parliament may by law provide: Provided that-
(a) no person shall be prohibited or prevented from using (otherwise than for official purposes), or from teaching or learning, any other language; and
(b) nothing in this Clause shall prejudice the right of the Federal Government or of any State Government to preserve and sustain the use and study of the language of any other community in the Federation.

While Mukhriz had called for the closure of vernacular schools, he has not called for an end to the study of any of the vernacular languages. Quoting the M’kini article, “We can make it compulsory that the Chinese and Indians study their own language in their mother tongue while these two languages can be optional for Malay students to learn or we can make it compulsory for students to learn at least three languages.”

Obviously, our respected Lim Kit Siang and all the other politicians who are rising up to the defense of vernacular schools, have been misinformed. They are also in the business of spin and trying to play this issue up for their own political mileage. What Mukhriz is calling for is in fact an reinforcement of Article 152 of the constitution, a fairer and more sustainable way of doing things.

If there is anyone who is acting seditious, it is the Dong Jiao Zhong who have fought previous attempts at introducing vernacular languages in national schools. So, if Mukhriz gets elected in as UMNO Youth Chief and then gets appointed as the Minister of Education, I will support any attempts that he makes at phasing out the vernacular schools.

However, he must put his money where is mouth is and introduce a third-language into our schools. We already have the option of taking Arabic, French, Mandarin, Tamil in SPM. So, please introduce all these languages in schools and allow anyone to take any languages that they wish. It will make all our kids trilingual and that can only be a good thing, particularly for national unity.

I stand by my previous statement that vernacular schools need to be “burned down” (not literally of course!). However, we should also open up all our national schools to everyone, meaning that there should not be any measly quota restrictions anywhere. Let’s all play fair now!

According to MalaysiaKini, Wee Meng Chee (aka NameWee) is once again embroiled in another stupid saga. However, I personally think that he is acting like an idiot now. I think that his touch with fame has gone to his head and he is now attention hungry. It speaks volumes of his musical talents if he has to resort to constant controversy in order to sell his music.

According to the article, “The video featured a school teacher teaching English in a class, using vulgar words. The clip also included several semi-naked scenes. The first part of the video was four minutes and 54 seconds long, the second was four minutes and 47 seconds and the third clip was three minutes and 3 seconds long. Wee had shown the name of the school in the third clipping.”

Personally, I have not seen the video myself as it has been flagged as inappropriate on YouTube. However, I can already draw some conclusions from the news article. They quoted him as saying that, “I think the school wanting to take action against me is a good thing because this will allow more people to get a chance to see the video and understand the issues.”

He claims that the education system in Malaysia is all screwed up for Chinese schools. The example given was for mathematics. The students learn it in Mandarin in primary school, switch over to Malay in secondary school and then switch over to English again at the tertiery level. While I totally agree with his observation, he should not blame the government entirely for the predicament.

At present, Mathematics is taught in English at all levels but there are certain quarters who want to revert the teaching of it back to Mandarin. These quarters claim that it is easier to switch the students over to English at the secondary level while maintaining Mandarin as the language in primary. To these people, I say “hogwash”. If the foundations were built with Mandarin, they would have to play catch up with the rest when they get to secondary school, which isn’t all that easy.

However, I think that NameWee is an idiot. While I think that he is free to comment on a pertinent issue, I vehemently disagree with him using the footage of his school in the video. There is absolutely no reason for him to do so. He can still raise awareness on the issue without naming any specific school. Afterall, this is a national issue, not a specific issue with the teachers in a specific school. This smacks of idiocy to me. I thought that after his Negarakuku saga, he would have learned to put a little more effort into his work.

Not only do I think that it is stupid, I also think that it borders on illegal. Schools are not public grounds where one can freely enter or exit. Moreover, his school is not a public school and I am sure that he has no grounds to use footage of his school in his video. Any person with half a brain should know that you will need to apply for permission from a school before you can shoot footage on their ground. I know because I had done it before in the past.

So, I think that NameWee is an idiot. He hungers for publicity, has to sell his songs through controversy, and has no respect for the law at all. I personally hope that the school sues him for every last sen that he has.

I just read this article in TheStar today, where our DPM (and soon to be PM) openly questioned the quality of the Malaysian education system. Quoting the article, our DPM said that: “Our education system must change. Our children are just not curious enough. They must be curious about the world. They must ask questions.”

This brought back memories of the time when I was training to be a lecturer. The professor that I was under, was telling about how we need to challenge our students to think. As my task at the time was to design a series of experiments for the students, I had to make sure that the experiments had a purpose and that the questions raised during the experiment would force the students to think and constantly question the theory that they were taught in class.

In the end, I ended up designing experiments that seemed to show that the theory was consistently wrong (didn’t matter how many times you repeated it). Instead of getting the result that they expect, they would consistently obtain results that were significantly different and cannot be attributed to simple experimental error. Then, I would ask the students to suggest reasons why the results were the way that they were.

At the meeting where I presented the draft copy of the experiments to the professor, even he had some trouble figuring out the reasons until I pointed out the trick to him. The trick that I used was to move the problem from the theory, to the underlying assumptions. So, the student would not only have to question the theory involved, but work their way back to the basic assumptions.

University education should never be about rote learning but this brings back another memory. During one of my tests for a humanities subject, I actually wrote down, “I know that you expect the answer to be XXX but I disagree and think that it is YYY because of …”. In the end, the lecturer gave me the mark but told me under no uncertain terms, that I should refrain from doing such things during exams and stick to the answer script.

I do agree with our DPM that our education system stresses too much on rote learning, and needs changing. Students need to be challenged to think and the easiest way to do it is to ask them difficult questions. However, the problem would be with the teachers who will have to evaluate the students’ answers. If the teachers themselves are only capable of rote evaluation based on a specific scheme, they would need to adapt to an entirely new style of teaching, which isn’t always easy.

A teacher must be fully versed in his/her subject area in order to be able to handle anything that the students are able to dish out. Otherwise, the teacher will often end up looking foolish in the eyes of the students. This challenges the established power structure and may make a lot of teachers uncomfortable. Considering that our teaching profession is staffed by many people who generally took up teaching because they had no other choice, this doesn’t bode well.

We need to do what Obama promised to do in the US. We need to hire new teachers, pay them better wages, and demand for higher standards and accountability from them in return. However, this raises a big budget problem for the government. The teaching union is the largest work force organisation in the civil service with about 150,000 members. So, I don’t see this happening anytime soon, particularly in the present global economic climate.

/>My nephew celebrated his seventh birthday a few days ago. For his birthday gift I decided to buy him a chess set. I felt that it was a good time to learn how to play. On my part, this is a fairly long term commitment because I was the only one in my family who plays chess. So, it would be up to me to teach him how to play and also to play a game with him from time to time.

Today, I taught him how to play. Seeing that I have never actually been through a formal training method, I decided to just make stuff up as I went along. This was the scheme that I had come up with.

1. I started by introducing the different chess pieces to him and also their different values. I know that some people will say that the values do not reflect the actual strength of the pieces but I felt that this was the easiest way to teach a kid how to evaluate simple situations, by the numbers.
2. Then, I showed him how each piece moved and captured other pieces. I kept the rules simple and didn’t include more obscure situations such as en passant or even the rather common castling move. I’ll keep these other things for a later time.
3. Next, I wanted to test his understanding of the what I had already taught him and also teach him how to evaluate simple chess positions. I did this by setting up some simple scenarios. Then, I would ask him what the problem was, what are the different possible moves, and what were the consequences of each move.
4. In each situation, he had to work out what the final points were after the different pieces were captured. To keep things simple, I limited it to only a 2 move depth. So, in the end, he would choose the best move to make based on the points. I know that this isn’t always the case, but it is the simplest way of teaching chess in the beginning. Strategy would have to come later.
5. Finally, we had an actual match where I played white and he played black. When he made any move, I would ask him why he decided to make the move and what would he gain or lose by making each move. I would also explain every single move that I made and showed him the thought process that went into making each move.
6. In the end, I ended up playing both white and black, by actually showing him the different possible moves he could make and introducing a couple of new strategies such as forks and pins. All in all, I felt that it was a fairly good attacking game with neither side ever gaining a serious upper hand. After about an hour, he lost focus and I ended up playing the game myself.

All in all, I felt that it was good to play a familiar game again, after so many years. Chess is one of those few board games that I have always liked playing. When I was little, I have always dreamed of owning a fine chess set and board. Now that I can afford one, I am merely waiting for the right time to buy one. I had actually come across a good one while I was in Salzburg but the prospect of transporting it around for the rest of my holiday did not particularly appeal to me.

I have also realised that teaching the game is a very good way of improving my game. When playing the game, one mainly sees the board from one side but while teaching it, I had to see the board from both sides. So, I ended up making a lot of rather risky moves because I was interested in seeing where the game would go.

So, I guess that I will have to play a few more rounds with him to ensure that he has learned all the basic rules. Then I plan to introduce him to playing chess on computers so that he can gain some practice with beating the computer. I would need to find a chess software for windows that can have its AI calibrated to different levels. He needs to be able to win a game once in a while for him to build his confidence.

It seems that the government may just end up reverting the teaching of science and mathematics back to the mother tongues, instead of the present system of teaching it in English. The logic and evidence behind this decision is also highly flawed. Personally, I do not think that it is a good idea.

Educational policy should never be dictated by the electorate. Parents do not know what is good for their kids, especially parents who are themselves, products of the non-English education system. It is undeniable that English is the lingua franca of the sciences and the children will have to face it at some point. If we choose to let them face it at university, it is no different from what we have today and we will end up producing graduates who are forced to study with a dictionary by their side, have a poor command of the language, and are unable to find jobs inside or outside the country.

Many people blame the fact that the content isn’t as important as the delivery. So, there is no point teaching it in English if the teachers themselves are unable to deliver the content in English. This is precisely our problem. The current crop of teachers today are the very byproducts of a system that reverted away from English, decades ago. If we decide to revert away from English again, we will just end up producing more of the same teachers who are unable to teach in English. Those who do not learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.

Statistics given by the government reveal that the kids themselves are not doing as well in primary school, as their seniors did when the subjects were taught in non-English. Obviously, if the kids have parents who are unable to comprehend English and are unable to help them in their school work, it is perfectly understandable that they will be at a disadvantage. So, the parents will not be able to brag about their child’s progress in school. So, what?

The correct response to this problem should be to fix the delivery of the curriculum instead of reverting back to the mess it was before. I can appreciate that it is going to be difficult to retrain the existing crop of teachers, whom are byproducts of the previous mess. Heck, even the trainers themselves are probably from the same mess. So, I would propose an alternative solution. One solution is to bring in existing people who are already capable of speaking English.

This may entail recruiting expatriates into the teaching fraternity. As there are many unemployed foreign spouses around, this may not be as difficult as it may seem at first. I am sure that almost everyone of them would be capable of teaching primary school mathematics and science, once they are given some teacher training. It would also solve the problem of them not being able to secure jobs within the country.

If there are not enough foreign spouses to go around, hire in other expatriates. Considering that we are not really paying the Phillipino maids more than a teacher, it may actually be a good idea. Many of these maids are actually graduates themselves, and have a good command of English. They may actually be willing to teach, which is far easier to being a maid, and pays just as well, if not better.

If this isn’t enough, hire actual expatriate teachers from any country. Open up the teaching profession to anyone from anywhere, as long as they are properly qualified to teach science and maths. Pay them better than the other teachers. In fact, any local teachers who are willing to retrain themselves to teach in English, should be paid equal to these expatriates. That should be sufficient encouragement to induce people to actually make the switch.

We will not need to do this forever. We will only need to rely on the expatriates for several years, until the current crop of students make it through university and are reinserted back into the system.

Anyway, I am biased. I personally think that regressing back to the old mess is a bad idea.

I’ve recently been receiving a lot of email from the department with regards to my teaching work. At this time of the year, all teaching assistants are drafted in for marking work. There are a number of other things that we have to do but the bulk of the work essentially involves checking and verifying marks after the exam scripts have been marked by the principal assessors.

One of the interesting things that they recommended was for us to work on checking the scripts at home. This is to protect the secrecy and confidentiality of the marks. The idea is that working in the department itself is not sufficiently secure as students can gain access to the papers as we are working on them. The papers also need to be kept safe for review by external examiners and record purposes.

However, in my case, it’s going to be a little bit of an issue for me. I cannot work on it in the main engineering site as I do not have a place to store the papers there. My desk at CAPE is also in an open area without any suitable storage for the papers. So, I would need to work on it at home. However, I have a couple of engineering undergraduates living in my house. So, I would need to hide the papers from them in my room.

The things that we are supposed to check for are pretty standard. I did the very same thing previously. We’re supposed to make sure that every page of the answer scripts have been looked at, that the appropriate marks have been given, and that the marks have been totalled up correctly. According to the emails, it seems that a number of errors have been detected this way in previous years. We’re supposed to raise up a red flag if we spot any problems so that it can be resolved immediately.

I’ve decided to come up with an optimised method of doing the task. Unfortunately, a computer would not help me much in this task. I will start by totalling up the numbers on the front of the answer script to ensure that it is correct. Then, I will flip through the pages to check that the marks on the front correspond to the ones in the answer scripts. Don’t ask me why, but I have a feeling that this is more efficient than doing it the other way around.

So, this means that I’ll have a stack of exam scripts sitting on my desk over the next week or so. I’ll have to go through the mundane task of flipping pages and punching numbers into my trusty scientific calculator. It’ll take me hours to go through all the scripts. I have been allocated several hundred scripts to mark. It’s mind numbing work and I think that I’ll do it between writing up.