Teaching of Science and Mathematics in BM year 2012

[joyce_limyp]

“Only 19.2% of secondary teachers and 9.96% of primary teachers were sufficiently proficient in English,” he said, explaining the Government’s decision to revert to the old system.


then should send the teachers for training, if not, choose more qualified students to undergo teacher's training every year! instead of solving the root of the problem, they take it as a blame. just imagine, especially the students who are in form 1 this year. they will be learning Maths and Science in English now until form3. then the sudden change to Malay for spm. how are they going to adapt? i myself had trouble adapting when going form6. it took me months to adapt. not to brag here, but a person who is quite fluent in english, it was quite tough for me. just imagine those with english basic not that good. and having to try to adapt again in english when doing pre-u, im sure they'll have all the headaches.


again, IM SO AGAINST THIS!

[Hanqing]

Originally Posted by joyce_limyp

?Only 19.2% of secondary teachers and 9.96% of primary teachers were sufficiently proficient in English,? he said, explaining the Government?s decision to revert to the old system.


then should send the teachers for training, if not, choose more qualified students to undergo teacher's training every year! instead of solving the root of the problem, they take it as a blame. just imagine, especially the students who are in form 1 this year. they will be learning Maths and Science in English now until form3. then the sudden change to Malay for spm. how are they going to adapt? i myself had trouble adapting when going form6. it took me months to adapt. not to brag here, but a person who is quite fluent in english, it was quite tough for me. just imagine those with english basic not that good. and having to try to adapt again in english when doing pre-u, im sure they'll have all the headaches.


again, IM SO AGAINST THIS!

yea instead of blaming others, they should revise their very own teachers' quality and also their education system...it is again upsetting the whole purpose of education.

[mehul91]

Well can the malaysia education system get any worse now. God bless them

[markwongsk]

Originally Posted by bluez_aspic

Very impressive statistical juggling!

*applause*

Encore?

ENCORE FROM MARKWONGSK!!!!! NOT......

Well, the government wants to show the people that it is "doing something"... deteriorating moral values and they implement Pendidikan Moral; then comes PSK, it's always changing for the "better"... of course, what to expect? Everytime a minister of education changes, we'll be in for a nice series of revolutionary ideas... NOT haha... the ed system in Malaysia sucks big time

[lawteoh]

So, if I am not mistaken, with this new system, Form 1 pupils next year will still be learning in English until PMR (2012) and then in Form 4, they revert to BM? Just want somebody to clarify this..

[joyce_limyp]

ya, thats what gonna happen.

[way]

y back to bm,i really dun understand,the students still hav to study the subjcts in english later in the pre-u or u!!!!and its the waste of tax payer's money by changing back to bm cause they need to re write all the text book and etc.its really waste of energy,time and moneywinknotrustnuts

[lawteoh]

Yeah, the system is indeed bad now. They are just going backwards now when instead, they should be moving forward..

Come to think of it, this system won't bring any harm to those students who are good right? I believe that the students who are really bright could do good in the 2 subjects regardless of the language used..

However, the sad thing is... lots of energy, time and money are wasted, just like what Way said. Since the DPM already make his decision like this, what can we say? Even if we protest, I doubt he would even listen to what we are going to say.. so, yeah, that's Malaysia now.

Allow me to lift this article which originates from http://educationmalaysia.blogspot.co...ght-in-bm.html.

This is horrible. But anything which had a realistic chance of happening would be almost as bad.

In a perfect world, students would be learning all subjects in the best language for them individually, and also learning Malay and English perfectly fine regardless. But we do not live in that perfect world. In the next best world, we would have a consistent policy (sticking to either English or Malay for Science and Maths, if not all subjects) and competent teachers able to implement this policy.

This being Malaysia, and our politics being our politics, what we got was a silly compromise that made nobody very happy, and a paralysed bureaucracy uninterested in making this policy work. One of the most telling graphs in the link to The Star above is the last one, which shows only 20% and 10% of secondary and primary school science and maths teachers respectively scored 67 or higher on an evaluation of their English proficiency.

The fact is, this policy failed. But was the old policy working? As far as I can tell, no. That's why we tried this policy in the first place. Our students were not doing as well as they could in science and maths, and their English was atrocious. So our politicians got this bright idea to try teaching them science and maths in English.

But the execution was fatally cocked up. The Education Minister says that now they will try a different approach to enhance English learning: English literature will be reintroduced as a subject, along with grammar and composition. (I wonder if that is a misquote by The Star, because that would make a total of four subjects for the English language alone.) The Minister also said that they would rehire retirees and foreigners if necessary to supply more English teachers.

All these are things which should have been done before! In particular, it's not like the government had no idea our science and maths teachers were so fatally flawed in the English department. Rather, they completely ignored this, and rammed through this ill-thought-out policy anyway.

Maybe teaching science and maths in English is a fatally flawed idea, but we have no way of telling that from this six-year experiment, because the government so thoroughly messed up its implementation! (There is also the counter-argument that teaching these subjects in English worked perfectly fine for thousands of schoolkids before we switched to Malay as the national medium of instruction in the 1970s.)

What really angers me about this decision is that the government virtually knowingly had this cock-up of a policy going for six years, when they should have bloody well known their science and maths teachers could not teach in English. So we had a whole generation of students undergoing this massive change, all for naught. And now we will have another generation of pain as thousands of kids get stuck in educational limbo while the government phases out this failure of a policy.

All this was completely unnecessary. The government could have at least tried to make PPSMI (Pelajaran dan Pembelajaran Sains dan Math dalam Bahasa Inggeris) a success by not virtually sabotaging it, but they did not. They could have increased the allocation of time to English, refocused the curriculum, and hired professional English teachers six years ago, but they did not.

More importantly, the government could have avoided all this and successfully transitioned to teaching science and maths in English if only it had been patient and first prepared the teachers to use English in the classroom. But they did not. They pushed through the policy when it was plainly not ready.

In short, we spent six years spinning our wheels doing absolutely balls, and we have nothing to show for it. It is infuriating, but I don't blame the government for ending this now. I do blame the government for keeping up this ridiculous charade for six years, when it was obvious to almost everyone -- even people who might have otherwise favoured this policy -- that this could never have worked with the way they rammed it through.

Graphs from The Star: http://thestar.com.my/archives/2009/...0708144354.pdf

[Miracle_seed]

While science-related courses in local public universities are already taught in English, there is no reason for maths and science of secondary school to be still taught in BM. If students from Chinese/Tamil primary schools can adapt to learning science and maths in BM in secondary school, I don't see why those from national schools cannot take a turn to English. If science and maths of secondary school are to be taught in English, students from national type school shouldn't have much problem, it's just a matter of left turn, or right turn. The problem lies with national school students, it has been a highway for them, till they face a barricade at university level, if they never try to improve themselves. However if they take a turn earlier, they may not have such difficulty later. Poor English standard is not an excuse, if we keep saying we are poor in certain aspect, but never try to improve, sorry then, we'll be "Jaguh Kampung" forever.

[youngyew]

Originally Posted by vikraman

mods attention merge with other thread.

Please kindly use the "report post" button (at the left bottom of each post) to notify moderators. We don't patrol every thread regularly and if you just say "mods attention" then we wouldn't necessarily see it.

Anyway, modified the title to make the thread content clearer (I didn't know what PPSMI was, and I assume this is the reason many redundant threads were created)