Home Thoughts From Abroad

These last two days – the weekend – have been recruitment days at our college. Parents come in to inquire about schooling for what is still called A-levels in Malaysia. We are an A-level school, although we do not use that term; we call it pre-university, which is more generic.

Generally I enjoy the conversations I get with parents and students. Having been here for four years I know pretty much everything you can ask me about the various programs here, and I like promoting our particular Canadian brand of education, which according to the PISA test carried out by UN’s OECD is among the best in the world. (http://www.cmec.ca/Press/2010/Pages/2010-12-07.aspx)

I do pretty good at it too, judging by the numbers I recruit and the positive feedback I get from my peers and superiors. In fact I’ve garnered a bit of a reputation for my effective presentations. But this blog is actually more about my weaknesses than my strengths. What do you notice about the picture above? Well there are two things I could point out. One is that there is nobody here: not parents, not counselors, not even cleaning staff. This is because it was 8 o’clock in the morning when I took this picture, and the session doesn’t start until 9.

That’s my weakness. You see after all these years I have come to understand that I am a little bit OCD (my family and colleagues could have told you that years ago). This is why I wake up at 4 am so I can leave the house by 7, and why I am at work at 7.30 when my first class is at 10:30. I have tried staying home, but I just can’t: it eats at me. When the kids were little and we had to drive somewhere I would load them into the car in their jammies at 5 am so I could get going. My poor family!

You think this is normal? Have another look at the picture. Do you see that all the chairs around each table are one colour? If you looked closely you would see the chair legs each straddle the table legs. I did that. Took about twenty minutes (yes, I was here at 7:30) to sort out the colours, which as any sane person would have left the way they were, with the colours all mixed up. Do you see what I mean now? I have a problem.

When I worked at Locke’s I would start coming in about mid-August. I would turn every table upside down, clean out all the gum and stuffed paper notes, right the tables and clean them, and then put them all in order. Next was the drawers and cupboards. Every door got realigned, every door handle tightened. Then I would sort out the bookshelves and finally the science equipment. By the time classes started I could tell you where every book and test tube was in the entire facility.

Some of this is useful. Knowing where all the equipment was would save me hours of looking for whatever another staff member wanted. It also saved the school considerable expense. Nothing was ever stolen, either in science or shop equipment for all the years I worked in the Board. That is because I would do a tool or equipment check at the end of every period. If anything was missing, I could see the space.

How bad is my OCD? Not bad. All the chairs are mixed up again, and I have no inclination to straighten them out. Pam is constantly messing up the cupboards, and I don’t ever say anything to her (although I do straighten them up when she goes away). I don’t think it is getting any worse, as I age, in other words. But I will probably be a weird old man. Someday. (Oh yeah, the title of the post? What do the initials say? LOL! I’m sick!)

Another year, another term over. It went so fast I hardly had time to take it all in. I’m pretty sure I enjoyed it, I generally do. This term had some really nice kids. It also had its share of trouble. For some reason you get to like the ones that cause you the most grief the most. I was also very happy to get some students from the previous term back for a second round. Some of them even asked to be transfered into my class, if you can believe it! Gluttons for punishment, I suppose. Some on leaving did me the great honour of thanking me for affecting their lives for the better. For this I labour.

Yesterday was the final exam. Three hours of sheer terror for the kids, writing until their wrists were sore. I don’t know why we feel we have to subject our kids to this torture in order to assess them. I already have a pretty good idea of where they all stand. But rules are rules, and even after all these years, education hasn’t changed much in this one fundamental area. At least in our program the exam is only worth 30%. In the Cambridge A-Level program it is worth 100%. Now that is REAL terror!

Yesterday I got five hours of marking in before my brain started to wander. This morning I intend to start as soon as I have this post up and try to get in ten hours. That will not finish the stack, but it will be a good way through it, I hope. I wish all my students well on the coming week’s worth of exams. Study hard, write loads, and stay off that silly Facebook!

Former student Edmund Mok is back in Malaysia after his first year in Engineering at the University of Toronto. He and I went for lunch today so I could pick his brain about what the year was like for him. Here are his insights into that year, which I post here for my students who will shortly be headed to Canada for their first year.

Canada is a great country (I could have told him that!) and Toronto is a great city for university. There is a lot of variety in a very short distance. Spadina Road is fantastic; you can get almost any kind of food in the world there. The libraries are amazing; they are everywhere and there is a huge number of books available. Even the architecture is worth looking at. He loved the parks and intends to get a bicycle on his return for second year so he can see more of the city.

The climate is really not a problem. You quickly get used to it. The first snowfall was an incredible experience. The whole landscape is transformed.

Residence is definitely the way to go. There are a lot of problems with setting up on your own: phone, internet, TV, electricity bills, cooking and transportation. All of that is taken care of in residence. He was at New College and had twenty Malaysian friends, mostly from CPU on his floor and the adjacent floor. They would travel together and just hang out.

Having study buddies in your course of study is really important to success at university. The work load is huge and it is almost all assignment based, like it was at CPU. He felt that the Canadian program really helped him to prepare for what he has done this year.

The allowance that his sponsor provided was enough for him to set aside money for his return fare to Malaysia this summer. A lot of students spent it all on things, and couldn’t get home for the summer. It is really worth it to save up for the airfare.

Living in a foreign country has taught him a lot about himself; his strengths and weakness. He has matured a lot over the year and is looking forward to the second year now that he has a better handle of what is takes to live in Canada. It has been a great experience.

The highlight of the year was renting a bus so he and twenty friends could travel to Niagara in the spring and see the Falls. The only regret was that the Maid of the Mist, a boat that goes right up under the Falls, wasn’t running that day. He intends to go back next year.

It was great seeing Edmund again. I enjoyed his company and am encouraged to think that our program has helped students like him to seize the future and make their way in the world. Yes, I do need a salary to pay the rent and support my wife’s ministry, but my student’s success means so much more to me than the money I receive for doing this job. It is one of my great joys in life.

At the end of the term our students have to demonstrate what they have learned in a final project that is worth about a third of their overall mark. Understandably there is some anxiety about this project. In English they have to read two novels and three supplementary texts, cite nine secondary sources and use proper MLA format in writing a two thousand word essay. Then they have to present the result of all this work to their class, and defend it from questions from their peers and teacher. None of them have had to do any of this before they got to our program, and it is a huge mountain of new material to climb in just one year.

It is a credit to how effective this program is, and the drive of our students to master the curriculum that they do as well as I have seen over the last two weeks. The novels have ranged from Chinua Achebe to V.S. Naipaul, from Dickens to Dostoevsky and have a wide range of topics from archetypical heroes to the problems of racism in modern societies. Presentations must be accompanied by slide shows illustrating the topic and then the student must demonstrate competence by answering questions from the class, some of which can get quite pointed.

For two weeks I get to sit back and listen to my students teach, and assess their work. For the most part I have been very impressed. I don’t have a single student who was unable to present, and given the weight of this project, that means that I will probably see every student pass my course; a great relief to me as I hate to see students fail. Given that English is the second and in some cases the third language these kids have had to learn, that in itself is a huge accomplishment. I am extraordinarily proud of their efforts, and trust that the whole experience, from essay outline to presentation, will prove to have been useful in their future academic careers.