masterwordsmith-unplugged

I am really thankful my son did not take the PT3 this year. I would have died even before he took te exam...died from worrying!

This year, six from his school had straight As. Apparently, 83 in Malaysia scored straight As. @_@

Here's a letter written to The Star.

AFTER the recent UPSR fiasco and its ensuing results, I think it’s time for us, parents of students who sat for the PT3 examination, to air our grievances.

The results were made available this morning (Monday) and needless to say there were tears and heartbreak when some students saw their grades.

For those who have scored straight As in their mid-year and also their trial examinations respectively, not obtaining straight As for the actual examination was a big blow to them, especially for those who intended to apply to fully residential schools which required grade A for both Mathematics and Science.

I have not done an official survey nor do I know the actual statistics but from asking around friends and family members in other schools and states, there appears to be a discrepancy in the results.

A “good” school in state A only had eight students with straight As compared to 14 straight As in an “average school” in State B. Not to mention another “good” school with one straight As student!

Does that mean those high performing students, who have worked hard since Form 1, have suddenly done so badly in the actual examination? Or perhaps schools with a higher number of straight As students obtained easier sets of questions from the question bank? Or the marking is inconsistent? Which central body or agency rechecks all the results submitted by the schools before preparing the national graph?

And if it is true that only 83 students obtained straight As in the whole of Malaysia, then something is obviously not right somewhere.

There are so many questions playing on the parents and also the students minds at the moment.

Questions, which I’m sure, if and when answered by the relevant authorities, are not going to change the results.

The Education Minister has a legal and moral duty to explain this “mystery” to parents and students who sat for the PT3 examination.

I’m all for introducing a new system if it brings more benefits to the students as a whole, but if the implementation is irresolute from the very beginning, then don’t make the students pay the price.

They should be given the benefit of the doubt and not be penalised by strict or non-standardised marking.

Anyone conducting a pilot project would surely know the do’s and don’ts of introducing something new.

When we question the sorry state of our education system or when we send our children to international school, whether local or abroad, we risk being accused of being unpatriotic.

A letter “Students not prepared for ‘HOTS’ questions” (The Star, Dec 19) also seems to indicate that something is not right with the way the SPM examination was conducted this year.

Any change in a system should be well thought out and implemented gradually and not abruptly.

Anything done in haste is destined for failure and the casualty will be the children who are the future of this nation.

Since the PT3 results cannot be changed, I hope that the ministry and other relevant authorities, such as Mara, will reconsider the entry requirements for fully residential schools.

As for SPM, please spare a thought for the students’ future when grading their papers.

Don’t ruin their future just to prove a point that whatever system being implemented is right. No one will end up a winner.

SHARIFAH SAEEDAH SYED MOHAMED

Shah Alam

Nearly 9.8 million Chinese high school students took the National College Entrance Exam, called gaokao, on June 7 and 8.

The emphasis on a two-day test has sparked criticism from some educators because of the incredible amount of pressure it places on students leading up to just one test.

CLICK HERE for more.

Thanks to Mr TSK for sharing.

Thanks to Mr LYK for sharing this interesting post.

CLICK HERE to find out how you can multiply numbers by drawing lines.

We can learn as we sleep, new research suggests.

A study found that the body is able to take in new information while it sleeps and unconsciously modify the waking behaviour.

Sleep learning experiments are notoriously difficult to conduct, not least because the researchers need to be sure that the subjects are actually asleep throughout.

Several studies have shown the importance of sleep for learning - but none had demonstrated actual learning during the sleeping period, reports Nature Neuroscience.

Now scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science say they have shown sleep learning is possible.

Prod Noam Sobel and his team exposed sleeping subjects to a tone followed by a smell, neither of which woke them up.

This type of conditioning involves the hippocampus, which is also used in memory formation.

CLICK HERE for more.

Thanks to Mr TSK for sharing this information from Yahoo News.

The education ministry of the country has always been considered as a storehouse of power and is seen as a stepping stone for the future Prime ministers with only Tunku Abdul Razak (1955-57) being an exception. The ministry has always been headed by highly educated people – doctors, lawyers, educationists to specify a few. Looking briefly at the education ministers and their educational backgrounds:

CLICK HERE for more.

For students deciding on what should they study, it would be interesting to look into what the richest people in Malaysia studied and how it added to their unmatched success. we bring to you an infographic highlighting the education of Malaysian billionaires.

CLICK HERE for more.

This is such an inspiring post from Huffington Post.

Excerpt:

One retired high school teacher in Canada has a surprise for his former students that is 20 years in the making.

In 1994, Bruce Farrer's ninth grade English class at Bert Fox Community High School in Saskatchewan, got a special assignment, reported the National Post. Farrer asked his students to write a 10-page letter to their future selves, which he then promised to mail to them 20 years later.

Farrer kept his promise to those students, as well as the thousands of others he taught during his more than 40-year career.

"I was trying to think of some assignment that would be special, and it just sort of came up that, well, I'll try this assignment," Farrer said on CBC Morning Edition.

Although Farrer retired in 2002, he took several boxes of the letters from his former students with him, and began the long and difficult process of tracking them down and mailing the letters.

One former student, Scott Fulton, became a teacher himself and even taught for a while at the high school he went to as a teenager, according to CBC News. He got his letter last week.

"I was just feeling honored and grateful," Fulton told the outlet about receiving the handwritten letter. "Amazed and inspired at the work of Mr. Farrer."

CLICK HERE for more.

Mr. Farrer has my highest respect. I am sure he put in a lot of effort to trace those students. More importantly, he touched their lives and I am sure they will in turn, teach others the true meaning of commitment and keeping to their words/promises. May he be blessed always.

Thanks to Angela for this interesting article. I googled for it and discovered it was published two days ago here.

Excerpt:

Genes are a bigger influence on exam results than teachers, schools or the family, new British research has shown.

Scientists studied the extent to which genetics contributes to academic success in the equivalent of Year 11 exams in more than 11,000 identical and non-identical 16-year-old twins.

They concluded that the DNA a child is born with accounts for more of the differences seen in exam scores than what happens in the classroom or at home.

Genetic effects explained almost 60 per cent of the variation seen in core subject English, mathematics and science grades.

In contrast, 29 per cent was attributable to shared environmental factors such as schools, neighbourhoods and households.

Non-shared environmental influences, unique to each individual, accounted for the remaining differences.

CLICK HERE for more.

Recently, Mr TSK shared the following post which (according to the email) was written by Datuk Dr Agoes Salim. Thanks, Mr. TSK!

I googled to find out more about this brilliant mind and discovered that many sites said that he is an an economist and first secretary-general of the National Unity Ministry. He is also former chairman of Bank Pertanian. He was on the public service secretariat of the National Operations Council following the riots and helped draw up both the Rukun Negara and the NEP.

This post was also hosted by FMT here.

Here goes.....

The objective of SPM is to pass people?

How do you explain the fact that 87% of the students passed the exams of the Sijil Peperiksaan Malaysia (SPM)

Are students getting smarter? Or are SPM questions getting easier?

Let me put things in their proper perspective.

During your grandfather's time, they would ask exam questions like:
"In what year did Parameswara find the kingdom of Melaka?"
The correct answer was "1402" , and they found that only 10% of the students managed to answer the question correctly.. This didn't go down too well with the authorities, because the objective of the exams was to pass people.

I mean, what's the point of having exams if people fail?

So later, they found another way to ask the same question:

"Parameswara founded the  kingdom of Melaka in the year:

(a) 2001
(b) 2004
(c) 1986
(d) 1975
(e) 1402

Tick the correct answer."

The results were better  in that 20% of the students passed. But it was still not good enough, so the authorities tried a different tactic a few years later.

"Parameswara founded the kingdom of Melaka in the year 1402. True or false?"
Well, half of the students guessed "True" and the other half  guessed "False".

Fully 50% passed.

The results were getting pretty acceptable by now but still not good enough. Most other countries would be satisfied with a 50% passing  rate, but not us.

We are a better country, because we are a boleh country.  The authorities then cracked their headsand then came out with this one:

Read the following sentence carefully.

"Parameswara, the cousin of Proton-Iswara, founded the kingdom of Melaka in the year 1402. Underline the name of the person who founded Melaka."

60% underlined "Parameswara", 30% underlined "Proton-Iswara" and 10% underlined "1402".

Yeah!!!!.... 60% managed to pass! So krever!

But for some reason, the authorities were still not contented.

So last year, they came out with this gem:

"One day in the year 1402, Parameswara founded the kingdom of Melaka.
Then he went home to have dinner. What did he eat?"

13% (smart students) handed in blank answers, 57% wrote "Maggi Mee", 10% wrote "Kentucky Fried Chicken" and 20% wrote "Nasi Lemak".

The correct answer was anything concerning "Food" of course!

After the marking was over, it was found that 87% of the students had passed.

87%!!!!!............ now that's pretty impressive!

So it's true.  So now the authorities are very happy that the students are indeed getting smarter.

Well done!

Perhaps, this is why we have a host of students withan impressive string of 'As' who can hardly construct a decent sentence!

Neow mind, our super-duper gomen can find a job for us one.

Duh…

Another post by the same writer can be read AT THIS LINK.

This post is specially for those who have children with learning difficulties or those who are teaching LD kids.

It is obvious our education system does not provide a conducive environment for the development of powerful thinking skills.

The following video (kindly shared by Mr LYK) shows how even a crow can use its brains to accomplish its mission.

Dr. Tony Wagner, co-director of Harvard's Change Leadership Group has identified what he calls a "global achievement gap," which is the leap between what even our best schools are teaching, and the must-have skills of the future:

* Critical thinking and problem-solving
* Collaboration across networks and leading by influence
* Agility and adaptability
* Initiative and entrepreneurialism
* Effective oral and written communication
* Accessing and analyzing information
* Curiosity and imagination

CLICK HERE to watch this excellent video. Thanks to Mr LYK who kindly shared this link.

Don't forget to check out the comments.

Here's Michael Roth's review of “Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters” by Mark Edmunson as featured in NYT. Thanks to Angela who shared this link.

Excerpt:

When young people starting their college careers ask me what they should look for when they get to campus, I tell them: find out who the great teachers are. It doesn’t matter much what the subject is. Find a real teacher, and you may open yourself to transformation — to discovering who you might become. This can be the great gift of a liberal education.

Yes, I sometimes get puzzled looks. Or eye rolls.

If I meet any students heading to the University of Virginia, I will tell them to seek out Mark Edmundson, an English professor and the author of a new collection of essays called “Why Teach?” For Mr. Edmundson, teaching is a calling, an urgent endeavor in which the lives — he says the souls — of students are at stake.

Mr. Edmundson loves to teach, but he hates the conditions under which much teaching takes place today, even at an elite university like Virginia. These conditions — the consumer mentality of students and their families, the efforts of administrators to provide a full spa experience and the rush of faculty to escape from the classroom into esoteric research — make real teachers an endangered species in the academic ecosystem. In this context, Mr. Edmundson reminds us of the power strong teachers have to make students rethink who they are and who they might become. This is what a real education is all about.

Mr. Edmundson made this discovery himself just before graduating from high school. In his working-class family, college was not something taken for granted. When he told his father that he probably “should be prelaw,” his old man warned him not to waste his life studying something he thought he was supposed to be interested in. Unless he was sure about reincarnation, his father thundered, he had better make the most out of this opportunity to pursue subjects that were meaningful to him. Mr. Edmundson found his inspiration in Malcolm X, and in Emerson, Blake, Dickinson and Freud.

According to “Why Teach?,” inspiration is in short supply these days on campus. In the book’s first section, Mr. Edmundson describes the growth since the mid-1990s of a more commercial, profit-oriented university culture. Like many other contemporary commentators, he sees a confluence of forces in higher education leading to greater conformity and consumerism at the expense of inquiry, inspiration and challenge. Mr. Edmundson’s critique is both personal and idealistic, drawing on his deep belief in the democratic mission of liberal education and on his practical experience as a teacher.

He knows the studies showing that students spend less time than ever on their classwork, and he writes of an implicit pact between undergraduates and professors in which teachers give high grades and thin assignments, and students reward them with positive evaluations. After all, given all the other amenities available through the university, the idea that “the courses you take should be the primary objective of going to college is tacitly considered absurd.”

After describing this unhappy shift, Mr. Edmundson’s remaining essays are devoted to “fellow students” and “fellow teachers.” He’s hard on both groups, but underneath the curmudgeonly rhetoric he is desperate to remind them of why real learning and teaching aren’t so much luxuries as necessities.

MORE HERE.

If you have read my previous post, you would know how frustrated I have been feeling about the state of affairs in the education sector.

This morning, I decided to Google for problems that other lecturers face to see if others in the education industry have faced similar problems. Well, I feel much better now :-) because truly, it is most comforting to know I am not the only one...

If you don't believe me, check out the following posts that provide evidence that demands a verdict!

1. THIS POST written by a professor of biochemistry (Warning: Lots of expletives) - Must read cos in many ways, I feel like that and most unfortunately, I cannot write that way out of respect for my husband and sons would flip and also to my beloved former students who have never or at least seldom heard my cuss.

2. THIS POST written by 'an instructor who has made the rounds at major universities, community colleges, and small liberal arts colleges. Bitter? Perhaps. Truthful? You bet.'

3. THIS POST

4. This hilarious Facebook page.

I am not saying I am smart. I am not. All I am saying or was saying in my previous post HERE that something is wrong - and to be realistic, the system is not wholly to be blamed but also consider:

• the entire system
• the school system
• teachers
• parents
• the student's attitude, work habit, reading habit, IQ level, willingness to learn
• the impact of technology on learning
• peer group
• level of competition in the playing field
• motivation
• reading habit
• level of general knowledge
• maturity of thinking
• etc

Regular readers and subscribers would have noticed I have not been blogging as often as I used to do.

This sudden change in posting is NOT due to me attending ceramahs or doing stuff related to the GE 13. God forbid! No way! I deal with enough balderdash in my own backyard and certainly don't want to contend with more.

Rather, it is because of two reasons:

a. Recently, I discovered a fantastic website with over two million ebooks and 20 million scientific journals and articles which means that I have reading endlessly to the extent that my vision has blurred. Hence, I have to use Chrome's Speak it widget whereby all I have to do is to highlight the whole page and the application reads it to me. I can just lie on my bed and listen to the story/article being read out to me. Sheer bliss! Besides, I also get to choose the nationality and gender of the reader. Pretty cool huh...

b. I am being driven insane by the horrible standard of work by some students and I am not joking when I tell you that the past two weeks alone, i dropped 5 pounds from exasperation.

One of them is my friend's son who has a very serious learning disability and attitude problem. She asked me to help him because he will be going to Canada to join his brother in 2015. Even though he has a serious learning disability, it is really frustrating to see how he tries to wriggle out of doing work seriously and carefully.

He actually paid a friend to do my homework which was just a simple essay on the Hokkien Chinese New Year. We had worked on the points, the outline and I had sent him various links for him to pick out some relevant historical points but no - he had to pay someone to do the essay for him - a one page essay. On top of paying his friend, he did five pages of his friend's Maths homework. And the best part is when I asked him who wrote the essay for him, he claimed he did it himself and the 'slight' variation of handwriting was because he used a new pencil and did it in the school library (God knows how a change in physical environment can cause a change in handwriting). And round and round we went - one denial after another, one silly claim/rationale after another till I burst and said - For heaven's sake, if you want to cheat, please look at me. Do I look like the kind of woman you can cheat easily? He shook his head.

The next week, he copied all the answers for three chapters of a book I use. I prefer not to remove the answers because I expect students to exercise self-discipline. Sadly, this was not to be so for him. And as always, he denied copying the answers many times. So I said, "Fine". Do it again - use my book. And he went pale. Of course he fumbled and failed when he did it again.

Seriously, I have gone beyond the line of duty to help him but I persevered. I asked him to send me a short essay five times a week and I painstakingly typed comments and highlighted the parts that had to be rewritten and gave points as to how each essay could be developed. To cut the long story short, each essay was like a badminton match. Meaning - he would send it to me and I would email my comments almost immediately or within half an hour. This went on for five rounds and on Monday I went through version 6 of each essay and you can see for yourself the horror I have to go through. If not for the fact that his mom is a very good woman, I would not be doing this.... The following is Version 6 of the essay which he emailed to me:


Subject: Pg7 Susan hard earned bicycle
From:
To:
CC: Mami

One day, Susan went OT a complex. She saw a bicycle that looked very cool but it was very expensive. When Susan went home, she asked her mother could she sell fruits from their house to earn money to buy the bicycle.

Susan's mother agreed that Susan was allowed to sell the fruits for her garden. Everyday after school, Susan always collected fruits. Every week one day, she would sold fruits to her neighborhood.

She saved her allowance about a month. Finally, she could able to buy her favorite bicycle. Everyday, she will ride her bicycle when she had free time.

Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, historian, political critic, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. In addition to his work in linguistics, he has written on war, politics, and mass media, and is the author of over 100 books. According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992, and was the eighth most cited source overall. He has been described as a prominent cultural figure, and he was voted the "world's top public intellectual" in a 2005 poll.

The education system in America and most of the rest of the world is a corrupt establishment that does a lot more harm than it does good. The main focus of public education is to mold young minds into accepting authority and to teach them the very basic skills that they will need to be a part of the work force.

Schools do not teach people how to think but only what to think, or more accurately how to remember and regurgitate information which has been fed to them. The useful information that is taught in schools would realistically only take a few months per year to go over, but passing along this information is not what’s important to the public school system. 

What is important to them is the day to day structure of how the school is run which “socializes” and indoctrinates the children. This structure is designed to break the child’s spirit and teach them to be submissive to authority figures. It is also specifically designed to groom working class children for their future jobs, which will be at a corporation or bureaucracy of their choosing.

Demurely dressed in a high-necked jumper on a chilly autumn day, the pretty 20-year-old brunette could be any university student.

But this photograph posted on Facebook shows Xi Mingze, the new 'princess' of China.As the cherished only daughter of China's new president Xi Jinping, Ms Xi, nicknamed Muzi, is being expensively educated in the US, where she has been enrolled under a pseudonym since 2010 at Harvard University, Massachusetts.

'She is a bookworm, very quiet and studious,' one of her acquaintances, a Chinese writer, told The Mail on Sunday last night.

Though she is said to be protected by bodyguards, she has shunned the party lifestyle of another Chinese 'princeling' at Harvard, Bo Guagua.

Mr Bo, whose mother Gu Kailai murdered British businessman Neil Heywood, was renowned at Oxford and Harvard as a playboy. His politician father, Bo Xilai, faces corruption charges.
In contrast, friends of Ms Xi say she devotes herself to her courses, which include political studies. She attended a discussion last spring about the political tumult convulsing China's Communist Party, where she reportedly listened 'intently' from the top row of the lecture hall.

Powerful: Xi Jinping became China's new leader last week

Flamboyant: Xi Mingze's mother Peng Liyuan is a well known singer

Her mother, a flamboyant People's Liberation Army singer, Peng Liyuan, 49, is Mr Xi's second wife.
Ms Xi was said to have been sent to America because her father is an admirer of Western culture.



READ THE REST OF THE ENTRY HERE.

Thanks to Angela who sent me this link.