A start of a journey

In the news today, it is reported that vase area of Johor was flooded. The state of Johor was the first state where I started my career as an ESL teacher. It is still fresh in my mind some of the events happened. One of the events gave me a major impact where I made up my mind to continue my study in UPSI. I felt that I need more knowledge to be a better teacher. I felt that 3 years in Teacher’s training college were insufficient for me to be a good language teacher. Let me tell you the story…

It was the first class that I had to enter on that day since it was also the first day of the new school session began. As usual, with the gadget that we call a record book, in it there was a fully prepared lesson note; I entered the class with full of confidence. The class was occupied by 34 pupils; 8 girls and 26 boys. I started the lesson by using teachers ‘common ritual’ which is called the set induction. The set induction was related to the topic that I was going teach which was ‘Personal Details’. I began introducing my name and a little background of mine. I believed it was the simplest way to relate it with the topic. After that it was their turn to tell their details. It was a big shocked! The response was negative. In fact it could be no response at all (at least some of them provide me with simple facial expression, smiling.)They did not even know the meaning of the word ‘name’. They only knew the meaning after I spoke to them using the ‘apache’s language’ like what a Red Indian chief used to talk to white settlers in cowboy movies… i.e. “Me, Farish. You what?” plus a little bit of hand signals. My set induction took me about 80 percent of the lesson. It was no more a set induction. Then only I realised that they learnt no English since they were in Year 1. According to a reliable source, their ESL teacher was fed up because she felt that the syllabus for Year 1 were not suitable. The syllabus itself ‘assumed’ that the all students were able to read and write. The students knew no alphabets when they were in Year 1. Therefore, she felt teaching new ‘alien language’ by following the syllabus was irrelevant because the students could not read and write in their first language. This incident made me put a thinking hat but the only solution that I had was I had to put aside the Year 5 syllabus and started to teach them with my own ‘modified’ Year 1 syllabus. Don’t ask me the content of it. I just taught them to get them to know certain meaning of words in English and shape their interest in learning the language. I believed that it was the best way that I could help them with. Starting from that moment the desire to further my study was getting stronger. I filled up the form and now here I am at UPSI in Semester 6.