In the olden days...

The new curriculum in Sabah is trying to push a more learner-centred way of teaching. Part of this is that exams shouldn't be given anymore - a welcome change, as last year I saw more than enough tiny 6-year-olds sitting at a desk for 1.5 hours writing an exam they couldn't understand. I've been trying to push this idea with my teachers, and generally they're keen to do more ongoing assessment, but they have lots of other stakeholders to convince too - headteachers, heads of departments, non-English teachers, parents, the district office... There are a lot of people whose minds and hearts need changing! (The general attitude amongst those in power is, "This is the way I learnt, what's wrong with it?")

So this year I set up a few workshops on assessment for my mentees. 

Last week was assessment week for all the schools. Assuming that Years 1 and 2 would be having regular lessons while the older kids (under the old curriculum) sat exams, I turned up to schools as usual.

The little kids were sitting exams.

My approach of discussing the issue with my mentee and then suggesting they follow through with other non-English teachers had failed, so in the end, I set up discussion groups at each school with all the new curriculum teachers, and tried to make amends. Hopefully this will be fruitful when we get to the end-of-year exam time!

All this examination meant a lot of invigilating. And so it was at one school I found myself with no available teachers, but a very chatty headteacher. He's a lovely man, and I found myself completely absorbed by his story for nearly two hours. (And by the way, for those entire two hours, during which I barely got a word in, he constantly apologised for his lack of English...) One reason his English was reasonably good was that he was in almost the last batch of Malaysian children to attend school in English. His headmaster was Malaysian, but every single teacher was foreign, and his mother tongue was banned in school. He tells me that he managed to get through six years of high school without speaking a word - he was afraid to speak English and wasn't allowed to speak Malay - and passed his exams by studying every night in Malay!

But what I found really interesting was his story of his first few years as a teacher.

He was placed first in a rural school in Ranau district. This school was rural. And when I mean rural, I don't mean my own experience of rural Malinsau, but rural. He had to catch a minibus an hour from Ranau. It dropped him off by the side of the road, and then from there he walked to the school. "The children they stay at night because very far from their homes. Sixteen hours!" 

"Sixteen hours walking?" I said. "You walked for sixteen hours to get to school?"

"Oh no," he said, smiling, "I didn't walk for sixteen hours, that was the children and the parents. No, no, I only had to walk for nine hours to get there."

I just sat in silence. This man used to walk nine hours to school. And by walk, mind you, he doesn't mean a gentle stroll down a wooded path - he means nine hours through wet, muddy, dangerous, hilly rainforest. In the days before serious deforestation.

I finally asked, "So did all the teachers make this journey every weekend?"

"Oh no, once I was out there I stayed for the whole term and only came back to town in the long holiday. Oh, and also, I was the only teacher there. The headmaster met me on the first day, then he went back to town for the rest of the year, and there was nobody else."

I asked how many children he was teaching, all on his own, out in the rainforest, on his very first job out of college.

"Not too many. I had only 16 children from Year 1 to Year 6. I taught one class, then gave them work, then I went to teach another class..."

And so on.

People are pretty remarkable sometimes... 

Birthday Celebrations

Last weekend, Ranau played host to Sabah's Wesak celebration. This was quite an honour, as it hasn't been celebrated in Sabah since the 1980s; the precise date and place was determined by Chinese astrologers (in combination, says the cynical side of me, with the commercial need to have it on a weekend in a large town...) and Ranau came out best. The Chinese Buddhist temple has been undergoing a thorough spring cleaning over the past month or so, and on Saturday night it looked radiant. Temples in Sabah pale in comparison with the richly painted Korean temples, and are mere toddlers in the scheme of things - I believe this one dates back a few decades, while some of the Korean ones I visited were centuries old. But Ranau's temple has some beautiful paintings inside, and on the outside some impressive statues, and it's kept spotlessly bright and cheerful by volunteers. And I like the way that it stands at the top of a very short street that also accommodates an Anglican church and the town mosque. We watched the parade standing across the road from the mosque, and were thus constantly reminded of the balance between the national religion and others.

So. Wesak Day. Wesak Day is also known as Buddha's Birthday, and it's generally a public holiday across most of Asia, time for Buddhists to meditate on his teachings and life.

In Ranau it was time for a great big assault on the senses - incense, drums, shouting, whistles, bright neon lights all had their parts to play. The Lion Dance made another appearance too; they leapt and growled and shook at the front of each section of the procession.

In the heat of the late afternoon, the dancers took it in turns. When not dancing, they took over as musicians, still dressed in the lions' legs. The pink pom-poms on toes were particularly appealing.

The noise was astounding - Fiona and I had to shout to each other to be heard sometimes over the drums and tambourines and whistles. 

The parade began at sunset with various groups from across Sabah walking down the hill. A lot of them were elderly Chinese men with huge banners proclaiming their origins, who laughed and pointed at us and called out "Welcome to Malaysia!" Other groups were young, wearing Buddha costumes and carrying flags on bamboo poles.

The flags, intricately embroidered with dragons and flowers, were entirely in the lucky colours of reds and oranges, and they absorbed and enhanced the colours of the setting sun. 

As the darkness settled, the celebrations became more intense and religious. There were men walking down the street, seemingly in the grip of seizures, each one surrounded by three more men, holding their arms out, confining the babbling, gesticulating man. This was a more Malaysian version of Buddha's Birthday, and not one I saw in Korea. The central man calls down the spirits, the gods, into his body. They thrash around, using his bamboo whip to lash out at human beings. The three guards are preventing the gods from escaping and wreaking havoc on the town. The procession makes a full circle through the town to keep the balance and to symbolically close the loop of protection that is created by allowing the gods to have their way for a few short hours.

Some groups bore wooden boxes in the shape of temples, lit up in chains of neon lights. The boxes were rocking wildly; the young Buddha was inside, playing, and messing with his carriers. 

Sometimes he made his carriers shoot off out of the procession, careering madly around the roundabout, handily situated at the bottom of the street.

After the procession had made its way around town, we walked up to the temple and sat for a while at the courtyard fountain. Although this was a strictly Chinese Buddhist celebration, there were all sorts of onlookers - kids still in school uniform, elderly women in Malay sarongs, Catholic nuns, and most of Fiona and my students and teachers - walking from A to B took a looooong time as we stopped to chat and say hello.

Inside the temple, men and women lit joss sticks and carried them to pictures of different deities to pray before.

The next day when I drove down the mountain to K.K., I drove the whole way behind a procession of cars billowing silk from the windows and carrying piles of red wooden boxes and bamboo sticks in the back seats.

Cycling? Bah!

Last Monday, I was driving home from school; this was a village school, past Lohan Village. There's one road in and out for the whole area, in which several hundred people live. There are some facilities - a couple of small shops, a few schools, two marketplaces - but for anything else, people drive to Ranau, about 20 minutes away, on the afore-mentioned one road.

So. One road in and out. Several hundred people, several hundred cars. Got it?

The road was closed.

As I came up to the junction with the main Kota Kinabalu-Sandakan road, I slowed to a halt behind about twenty other cars. I couldn't see any obstruction, but I patiently waited to see if we would move. I point out my patience, because I was the only one - everyone else seemed determined to be further forward than everyone else; of course, there's a fundamental flaw in this plan, and what actually happened was that eventually there was no more space between cars, and overtaking cars ended up stalled on the wrong side of the road. After about twenty minutes, I got out and started walking towards the junction. I saw two of my Guru Besars (literally big teacher, or headteachers) talking to each other and stopped to ask if they knew the problem. They did. The road was closed because the first ever Tour of Borneo, a cycling race mimicking the Tour de France, was today coming through Ranau. Apparently it was a surprise for everybody, including the police, who stood around at the junction guarding their yellow tape barrier shrugging their shoulders at angry drivers.

This was at 1:30pm.

At 3pm, we were still standing around.

At 3:30pm, some of us were allowed to drive down the empty road to a supermarket 100m away so that we could buy drinks or food. I stood with some friendly policemen-and-women.

We talked about race, religion, marital status, and age, plus a couple of other banned topics. Just a normal conversation in Malaysia, then. Occasionally we were passed by elderly men and women, traditional cloths wound around their heads and basketry on their backs. I wondered what they made of the wailing support vehicles and empty roads. By the looks on their faces, and their dogged walking, they generally didn't care very much.

At 4pm, the cyclists finally came through. Basically, the road had been closed for 3 hours, so that a hundred cyclists could spend twenty seconds riding down a completely empty road. And I do mean twenty seconds - those guys are fast. The ones towards the back were a little slower - they had after all ridden all the way from Sandakan, up the side of a mountain range - and I nearly caused an accident as one looked up and spotted what was probably the only orang putih he'd seen since Sandakan, swerving towards me. It caused a few chuckles among my policemen friends.

Finally, after four hours of shutting down Sabah's main road, we were allowed to get moving again. The following day being Worker's Day, of course, everybody was travelling somewhere, and so all the hundreds of cars that had been waiting at junctions and in supermarket carparks across the state suddenly flooded the road. My friendly policemen just up and left, with no intention of directing traffic. My usual two hour drive to KK turned into a three hour one, and as I passed some knackered looking cyclists sitting down to dinner in Kundasang, at a cafe overlooking the snarled-up traffic, I felt like shaking my fist and shouting "You did this! You!"

One good thing to come out of the day (apart from cheering on the cyclists with a bunch of bemused villagers, who'd never seen lycra before) was that on my foray into the supermarket I discovered these cleverly marketed crisps.

Really?

(PS. I do actually like cyclists, promise.)