So Not A Complaint Post

I received the letter shown above yesterday. After 3 years, I am finally part of the civil service, but I ain’t jumping completely out of joy.

While I am thankful and grateful that I have a stable job, I am doing something very decent in life, but I see that things do not seem to rosy in my line of job.

Power struggle, new policies and too many systems are slowly dampening any interest I have left in the job.  After 3 years, I feel that my job has lost its focus. No, not MY job, but the teaching profession. And I’m not the only one, because the National Union of the Teaching Profession (NUTP) last week called on teachers do demonstrate over extra workloads. (Read about it here and here)

Obviously when the a union wants to hold nationwide demos, there must be something, right?

This is not a complaint post.  Read on if you do not believe me.

I think everyone has probably lost count on the type of schools we have in Malaysia. As it stands, we have cluster schools, we have technical schools, we have prime schools, high achieving schools and the list goes on. I wonder is Sekolah Bestari still exist?

Owh well, it’s not actually a taboo when teachers claim they are now almost like clerks in schools. Take example where I work. We have 3 systems which are supposed to help improve students performance. We have the FlexSi, SAPP and GeLi… and at the end of the day, it all involves us keying in marks, doing reports, and submitting reports to the authorities concern, which is not actually a bad thing considering that that we do not get to use much of our brains because, like the GeLi, I am required to check all the students papers, and key in one by one into the system which question the students had wrong, and mark it with a ‘1’ for a correct answer, and a ‘0’ if they got it wrong.  Last year, I had 40 objective questions from 2 classes of about 40 students. It was fun looking at all the ‘1’ and ‘0’ stacked up as below:

Don’t get me started on the structured and essay questions because that was just poetry… until most of us had sleepless nights just overjoyed doing it. That’s the reality of the job which everyone claims to be easy, which is actually true considering we get to push ‘0’ and ‘1’ a lot of times in a day 😛

And NO! , contrary to popular belief, shouting, screaming and smacking students for any wrong doings is not part of the job anymore.  Worst case scenario, is that you could be sued for doing so.

But like I said, this is not a complaint post, and I think there is a slight possibility that maybe the teachers in Malaysia are just bored, and the union suggested some extra curricular activities to enlighten them up… say like holding placards and banners at demonstrations.  After all, it does seem that demonstrations have sort of become Malaysia’s way of life. Owh.. at least in the Malaysian peninsular that is.