SPM anxiety

Soo...It's exam results season again. I'm sure all of us who went to school in former British colonies remember that.

SPM results are coming out/have come out today. I'm hoping the kids I was teaching bio to last year did okay. It was at a little kampung school where I was volunteering out of sheer boredom during the months I was at home unemployed.

It was my first teaching experience, and my Malay was pretty rotten after five years of disuse, and I'd forgotten all the methods of "spotting" (prognosticating) SPM questions that my classmates had come up with, and I'd forgotten what kind of answers examiners wanted. Malaysian public education is a damned bloody stupid mind game, really.

I had my father's dictum in mind, though (he taught Form Six chemistry for several years): "If a few students fail, it's the students' fault. If the whole class fails, it's the teacher's fault."

One of the more depressing things about the school was that they'd hung bunting saying things like "5P and 3P [the top classes in Form 5 and Form 3], You Are Our Hope". This is what I really don't like about streaming: kids in the lower classes are automatically assumed to be not worth the bother.

Fussy parents can always make the argument that their precious babies will be bored if they're in a class with dumbos, but that's the case anyway. If your kid is that freaking smart they should be smart enough to ignore the bad teachers and teach/entertain themselves. Like me =D Also on a more serious note, I think learning humility and appreciating other people for non-quantifiable talents is part of an education in being a decent human being.

I'd like to apply to be a TA next semester...I want to learn to teach. Tutoring one or a few is something I enjoy, but talking in front of a whole class is a different story, as I learned. Lesson planning, encouraging participation, holding people's attention...

My little Mousie did very well in her A-levels. The family's proud of her.