faulker059

Much appreciation to Firdaus, who in the comments of Kian Ming's post on the new Deputy Education Minister pointed us to the news that the UPSR and potentially PMR and SPM too will no longer be the last word on pupils' performance . This is a dramatic change in our education system, and it seems to be new Education Minister Muhyiddin Yassin's attempt to make his mark. Unfortunately, I don't think we have enough information on this policy change to draw conclusions regarding its worthiness. In the abstract, it's a good enough idea: the notion that two or three exams should forever define your school years is ridiculous, because even in our mostly dreary education system, you get so much out of school beyond just knowing how to pass exams. But even when I was in school, it was understood that the UPSR, PMR and SPM were not the be-all and end-all: you had to do well on the tests and exams routinely meted out in school too. Of course, they weren't as important as t...

This post is from Gabrielle and it is dedicated to a very special teacher by the name of Ms Liew. I think after reading this, we will all agree that we need more teachers like Ms Liew. Today (April 19) is Ms Liew’s birthday, and this note is dedicated to her. (from Gabrielle Chong) Back in secondary school, I hated Teacher’s Day. I hated the extravagant celebrations in my humid school hall. I hated the pretentious song dedications. I hated the students’ awful, half-baked attempts at performing, err, titillating pop dances (it was an all-girls school). Most of all, I hated the fact that while the entire school of over a hundred teachers and over two thousand students would sit down comfortably inside the hall to savor the show, the one teacher that I loved most happened to be the discipline teacher, and she would spend every Teacher’s Day (and Report Card Day, and Graduation Day, and ABC Teacher’s Retirement Day, and…) breaking out in sweat, manning the school compound, singling out tr...

Read this story on the Star about how the new Deputy Higher Education Minister, Saifuddin Abdullah, is using facebook to reach out to his 'constituents'. The Star reported that: "University students who wish to bring up grievances regarding their tertiary institutions can do so by directly contacting Deputy Higher Education Minister Datuk Saifuddin Abdullah through Facebook. Datuk Saifuddin said that he will be live on the social networking website on the first and third Wednesdays of each month, from 10 to 11 pm." I applaud the new Deputy Minister for Higher Education for using the internet and social networking sites such as facebook to reach out to students at the tertiary level. I'm a little bit more skeptical as to how effective going 'live' on facebook will be since the chat function on FB isn't really very good. I think the new Deputy Minister deserves close attention. I've been aware of him ever since M Bakri Musa wrote a review about a b...

So our Prime Minister has reshuffled his Cabinet, and our new Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin is now also our new Education Minister. Unfortunately, my sense of things is that this probably will not mark a significant change in direction for Malaysian education. Datuk Hishammuddin Hussein didn't really turn things around, if you ask me; Kian Ming is impressed by his administrative competency and I would agree that he probably kept things from getting worse. But I think it is very hard to say that things improved under Hisham. The government took some very tentative steps towards tinkering with the school system, but nearly every complaint that held water five years ago is still valid today. I am not optimistic about Muhyiddin because the Education Ministry seems to have become a political football; you often become Education Minister because you're expected to eventually become Prime Minister, and this certainly seems to be true in this case. There is still littl...