Are We Really The Best?

I was sitting in the teachers' common room this morning when I noticed a colleague marking a student's exercise.  She had been stuck on the same page of the exercise book, red pen in hand poised to make some kind of mark on the student's work.  She explained that she found it difficult to mark the exercise because the student could not even copy simple sentences (in Bahasa Melayu no less!)  She stressed that she had written all the sentences on the board and the class only needed to copy them.  She also found it difficult to comprehend why a student who is now in form one, was not able to spell (or write) well after six years of primary education prior to entering secondary school!

I was forced to lament on all the 'best of everything' that our nation has tried to achieve all these years (and some had actually been achieved!) but still has not managed to ensure that it's younger generations are able to read and write well.  It saddens me to see these students' situation in class, when the high-fliers in their class finishing their work well ahead of them, when they themselves are struggling behind.  These students, after realizing their situation, more often than not merely give up doing the tasks given to them and begin to disturb the class.

It pains me to see my colleagues taking over the task of teaching them to read and write all over again, as if they have never learnt a single thing for the past six years of their schooling lives.  It even pains me more to have the knowledge that we actually have thousands of highly experienced teachers who could have remedied this situation at the students' early age.  

It pains me to see, instead of fully utilizing our local expertise, we need to enlist the aid of other people to do something that our local teachers are more capable of doing.  It pains me to know that the aids are being paid five times more than our local teachers when in fact all they do with the students they are supposed to teach is to talk with them, ignoring the grammatical aspects of the structures the students use during the conversations.  

I will continue to be in pain when I know for a fact that hundreds of our local teachers have been sent abroad to countries like the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, to become better English teachers but have been side-lined in favour of these aids.  And I will continue to be in pain and share in the suffering of these colleagues who will continue to do all the arduous tasks of educating our students while these aids bask in the admiration of people who do not know better and the glory of false achievements.

I guess pain comes naturally to me when I realize local teachers are not given the due recognition that they deserve; teachers who are given scraps under the table while glorified people who are not even fully qualified teachers feast on gastronomic delicacies on lace covered tables.  Surely we will never be the best when others are given the best!