10 June 2009
Wanted: Good teachers
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Malaysian schools; Teaching .
If there’s one thing practically all of us are in agreement, it is this: something is terribly wrong with our education system but no one really knows how to fix it. So it no longer surprises anyone to hear that some institutions of higher learning are deliberately lowering standards to ensure their students pass crucial exams. Now isn’t this rather unbecoming – and curious – of academia, especially when an institution’s reputation could well be shredded by this kind of hanky-panky.
On the other hand, what is the public to make of the exam achievements of our primary and secondary school kids then? Following every public school exams we are feted to stories after stories of beaming students with strings of As. In March this year, Education Ministry director-general Datuk Alimuddin Mohd Dom announced that in SPM 6,277 students scored straight A’s in all subjects compared with 5,060 in 2007. From the total 1,676 scored A1s in all subjects compared with 892 in 2007. So are Malaysian school kids getting smarter? Not so it seems.
It is common knowledge that a lot of tertiary students including these same straight As students are underperforming in college. They are doing so poorly, lecturers have to lower the bar so that the numbers look better. College lecturers I know admit the practice is so rampant no one bats an eyelid.
While fingers are pointed at colleges and universities for these regrettable lapses, educators trace the rot to secondary schools.
“We know of students who got straight As for PMR coming into our centre and they literally can’t string together sentences properly,” says Tan Poay Lim, principal of Creative Horizons Language Centre.
“Numbers of distinctions now are so high but the performance is still so low. Put the two and two together and you know that our standards have dropped.”
With 20 years of teaching experience behind him, Creative Education Consultancy managing director Alagesan Arumugam has seen certain trends in the public school examinations.
“I have assessed some of my students and find it hard to comprehend that they are distinction students,” he says. “On my tests, they would get 55% but end up getting 1A in SPM. It does look like it’s relatively easy to score an A these days.” [More]
According to this report, low standards in schooling assessments are apparently the culprit.
So what’s the real problem here? Is it the language, the medium of instruction? Is it the lack of state-of-the-art facilities, computers and projectors? Crowded classrooms? The teaching methodology perhaps? Should we blame the curriculum? Or the ridiculously unimaginative textbooks our kids are fed with?
If you think this is a peculiarly Malaysian problem, do a bit of googling. You’ll see that in almost every civilized country, there is just as much concern about declining education standards. Among critics it is thought that less political interference and more diversity, choice and competition will do the trick. Leave it to market forces, so they say. Surely, it is argued, if parents were given a choice of schools they prefer to send their children to, good ones will grow while bad ones would fold.
But according to The Economist (25th April), recently published research by the Institute of Education showed that neither choice nor competition has improved education standards, at least in the UK.
Significantly, a lot of research already shows that the answer lies in the hands of teachers. Good teachers, that is (See here and here). However while no one doubts that good teaching matters, there is little consensus about what makes a teacher effective, or what constitutes a good teacher. Meanwhile in education circles, the argument whether a certified teacher makes a qualified one continues to rage. According to conventional wisdom the more knowledge a teacher possesses (or the more training a teacher undergoes), the better qualified this teacher is.
Which is why critics of homeschool love to question if parents have what it takes to educate their own children.
For sure more training and more qualification can only improve teacher quality, but do they always translate into better teaching? On this point the jury is out. As numerous reports such as the ones mentioned suggest, conventional schools aren’t exactly doing a good job either, even with all the emphasis on training and certification. Besides, why isn’t more done to turn out better teachers?
My take is that a classroom teacher and a homeschooling teacher are two different things. There’s a world of difference between teaching a class of 40 children according to a set syllabus, and educating your child at home. Obviously, the parent-child dynamics in the comfort of home are different. A parent as teacher is really a resource person and facilitator. This doesn’t mean teaching a child at home is less demanding; it just means it requires a somewhat different approach, employing different sets of skills.
This is already a long piece, so I’ll write about being a parent-teacher in my next post.
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4 Comments so far...
Luke Holzmann Says:
10 June 2009 at 10:13 pm.
I’ve heard that a lack of disciplinary options has also hampered teachers.
I’ve heard from several ed majors who have told me that many of their classes were on classroom management and not how to teach or even learning material themselves. What’s more, several of the students I was in class with who received rather low marks have gone on to be teachers. …which I find both odd and encouraging: You could be a D student and still teach in today’s schools, which means any mom can be at least as qualified [smile].
~Luke
Sh Says:
12 June 2009 at 1:23 am.
Take a look at the kind of candidates who enroll into teacher training colleges in Malaysia. Most of the candidates chose teaching as a profession because they flunked their exams or couldn’t get other jobs. The teaching profession doesn’t pay well, unlike the situation in Singapore. Things were different back then in the past when people actually chose to be teachers because they wanted to teach. I think that makes THE difference in the quality of teachers today and in the past.
I do recall teachers who inspired us , challenged us and gave us more than words to be memorized and exams to ace in the mission school my friends and I attended. They had papers to grade, extra-curricular activities to run, record books to write, families to care for and classes to teach , yet they managed to impart something extraordinary: It think it was a sense of vision of what we could be.
There are good teachers left in our schools, few though they may be. But they’re up against a whole lot of stuff : pengetuas who want to impress the jabatan, meaningless paperwork, discrimination when it comes to promotion.
As an ex-teacher I feel for those struggling to do a good job in the classes they teach. As a homeschooling parent, I am relieved that my child doesn’t have to go through the tiresome system , fighting battles not of their own making.
(Sorry this is kind of long! but this is one issue close to my heart !)
Anna Says:
15 June 2009 at 11:37 am.
I agree very much with Sh. The teachers in our society today are only teachers because that’s their last resort.
A college lecturer once told me, she said, “Those days, parents would say to their kids, “If you don’t study hard and do well in school, you will end up becoming a rubbish man.” But times have changed. Today, parents say, “If you don’t study hard and do well in school, you will end up becoming a teacher.” ‘ “
Carolyn Says:
25 September 2009 at 1:48 am.
I wonder if school teachers know they are talked about as “flunkers” and the government only picks them for a lack of good geng-geng? (longan) I once met a cikgu on the bus to Penang and asked why she became a teacher. To which she replied, “In other jobs it’s hard to keep taking maternity leave, sick leave, get school holidays,etc. What happens when the kids are sick or we get tired? Teaching is the best option to get a good income and be able to raise a family (with lots of flexibility?).”
It sounds legitimate to me. (Is it?)