It has been one looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong Saturday morning and I am fully convinced I have lost at least one kilo from frustration.
One of them attends an international school in Penang. Last week, I asked him to study a table of irregular verbs and I tested him this morning. I nearly had a massive cardiac arrest when I marked his answers. Here's a selection of some of his 'unforgettable answers'. After writing this post, I must check my floor to see how much hair I have lost from the shock of it all. :-(
1. awake : He wrote awaked (past tense) and awaken (past participle).
Correct answer: awake-awoke-awakened
2. bear: He wrote beared (past tense) and beared (past participle).
Correct answer: bear-bore-borne
3. begin: He wrote began (past tense) and begar (past participle).
Correct answer: begin-began-begun
4. bend: He wrote bended (past tense) and ben (past participle).
Correct answer: bend-bent-bent
5. bleed: He wrote blead (past tense) and blead (past participle).
Correct answer: bleed-bled-bled
6. break: He wrote breaked (past tense) and broke (past participle).
Correct answer: break-broke-broken
7. drive: He wrote drove (past tense) and droven (past participle).
Correct answer: drive-drove-driven
8. kneel: He wrote kneeled (past tense) and kneel (past participle).
Correct answer: kneel-knelt-knelt
9. shake: He wrote shoke (past tense) and shaken (past participle).
Correct answer: shake-shook-shaken
10. swell: He wrote swelt (past tense) and swellen (past participle).
Correct answer: swell- swelled-swollen
MOST UNFORGETTABLE ANSWER OF THE CENTURY:
11. keep: He wrote kept (past tense) and kepten (past participle).
Correct answer: keep - kept - kept
As if this was not enough, he told me that the previous weekend, he was at Pulau Song Song with some PSC members and how two girls were attacked by sea sergeants.
Sea sergeants?
Having been to Pulau Song Song a couple of times during my snorkelling/diving days decades ago, I asked if he meant sea urchins and then he smiled and nodded.
Sighs.
A few weeks earlier, another friend's son who is a fourth former at a premier school wrote:
The car slew down before it reached the traffic lights.
Slew? Sarcastically, I asked him what he meant. Quite confidently, he said 'slew' is the past tense of 'slow'!!!
So I told him it is 'slowed' and he pronounced it as 'slow-ed' in two syllables.
"Slow-d? Got such a word meh?" he asked in typical Manglish.
Just yesterday, I spent thirty minutes teaching a Year 3 student from a premier local school all about the apostrophe. She did not know how to write contractions and it was an ordeal for both of us.
Even after I explained many times and wrote the rules clearly, highlighted the apostrophe etc, she wrote:
did'nt
didn'ot
didno't
didnt
It was only the fifth attempt that she got it right.
If you think all this is incorrigible, I had a college student who misinterpreted a past year question on how super powers have impacted the world negatively. She wrote about the horrors the world might have experienced if Hitler had the powers of Spiderman. I am not joking. After I explained why her answer was wrong, I asked her to either a) re-write that essay (with the correct approach) or b) to choose another question and then send me the answer. Unbelievably, she sent me a corrected version of the original essay with a short message saying she followed the rules I taught in class etc and how she hoped that even though it was largely nonsense, she hoped I would mark it. She dropped out of my class.
The sad reality is that many school students do not have the ability to think for themselves. I have written about this tragic scenario so many times that I am sick and tired of it. Suffice to say that our country is likely to be in dire straits in the future for there is little that workers/graduates can offer. In terms of knowledge, discipline, innovation, quality of human/natural resources, we have fallen way behind that of our neighbours.
A significant number of my acquaintances are making big bucks in Indonesia/India and some have migrated there, started business there and keep telling me that 80% of the urban population is largely middle class and how despite the existence of similar problems, the populace is well aware of the need to invest the best in education to be on par with or better than neighbouring countries.
There are so many horror stories I have seen for myself and heard from my friends in education, even in industry(horrible slide presentations filled with grammatical/spelling errors and presenters who cannot pronounce words correctly) and in the legal sector (e.g. Can you told us what you saw?).
With the deplorable standard in education, teaching standards, curriculum and the lack of fluency in English, it will be a long, winding and rocky road ahead.....
Pardon my pessimism but while such problems worsen, many are still fighting as to who will win the next GE.
As for me, it does not matter who will win because either way, we are on a downward spiral....
Bunny hello ms pessimist, is it that time of the month again?