My Student's Rugby Haka Youtube Video

This is a video I made of two of the students at my school, SERATAS (Sekolah Menengah Sains Raja Tun Azlan Shah), in Taiping Perak, Malaysia. I am the Project English Teacher there. They are members of the debate team, who were bored and didn't have anything else to do. So they decided to do their version of the New Zealand rugby team Haka. I guess they are practicing it so that they can do it before the debate, and scare the hell out of the other teams, or make them helpless with laughter!

I told them I would put them on Youtube, but I don't think they believed me. They will crack up when they see this!!!



The next video I made by accident. These are some of my form 2 students. They were in class waiting for the parent-teacher meeting to end, and are dressed in the batik uniform shirts they have to wear when they leave the school. You can see the school name in the design of the shirt. When the meeting is over, their parents will meet with the teacher in charge of the class, pick up their test scores, and then the students will go home for the weekend. Our school is a boarding school, and the students, except for emergencies or special occasions, only get to go home once every couple of months or so. So these guys are excited to be going home, and anxious for the meeting to end.

In the clip, they see me and come out of class to have their picture taken. I forgot I had the camera on movie mode instead of picture mode, and took a couple of seconds of video instead. There's not much there, I know, but since they always watch Youtube, I figured I would put it on there, and see if they find it.




This is how the picture came out:



The kid on the left of the front row, I can't remember his name, is a real wiseass with a smart mouth. I've had to throw him out of class a couple times and make him stand outside against the wall. Meor, the chubby kid in the middle of the front row who looks so serious, is actually one of the jolliest and most easy going kids around. He always has a smile on his face, except for this picture. The one on the right of the front row, well, seems to be in a permanent narcoleptic state. According to the kids, he even falls asleep at the mosque during prayer time.

The kid on the back row left, is a quiet, easygoing joker. The other two next to him, they are too quiet. It's hard to get them to say two words in English total between the two of them.

So yeah, these are my students, some of the top students in Malaysia. They are under a really rigid schedule that leaves them no free time, and lots of pressure to perform well by their families. That's why I'm not a real hardass in class, unless I have to be. I never give them homework, because they already have more than they can handle from their regular teachers. They already have it tough enough, without me making it worse.

Zooomr test - Monkeyproof Trash

Ok, there's this photo sharing site called Zooomr that is promising a free pro account totaling 2.4 gigs of storage for bloggers if you put an image of yours they are hosting on your blog. OK, I'm game. So far I haven't been impressed with their service. It is in Beta, but still- I uploaded an image at work, and now, when I signed in here at the Internet cafe, it was gone! I tried uploading some more images, but after getting an "upload successful" message, I kept getting a 404 error message, and no pics uploaded. I don't know if my pics will still be there after I sign out, but what the hell! I need more frustration and things to get pissed at in my life, right?

HA!

Ok, so what the hell, here goes:

Monkey Hosted on Zooomr

This is a trash can in the parking lot of the Taiping Zoo. The MPT stands for the Municipal Council of Taiping, or something like that. Hopefully, though, it stands for "MonkeyProof Trash"!

I was doing a lesson with my Form 1 students. We were going over descriptive adjectives to describe places. I explained that the suffix -ful meant "full of ____ ". Beautiful means "full of beauty", peaceful means "full of peace", etc. So when I asked them to describe the school, they said it was "monkeyful"! Yup, monkeys tend to be all over the place, whole troops of macaques going through the trash, climbing up to the roof of the classrooms during class, and rummaging through the girls dorms. For some reason, though, they won't go near the boys dorms. Maybe it is too "odorful" in there.

My New Orang Asli Student

Today, Saturday, there was a new student in my 1u class. That's her, in the red shirt, with her family, and Perak State Education Director Datuk Mohammed Zakaria Mohd Noor on the left. They are at her family home near Tapah. Her name is Has Hariff, and she is an Orang Asli. "Orang Asli" means "original people". They are the indigenous people on the Malay peninsula. The Malays consider them backwards, and do very little for them, other than try to exploit them and steal their land.

Her story originally hit the papers last year, when she achieved 5 A's in her UPSR examinations. This despite her father earning only 300 Ringgit a month (about $86) as a rubber tapper, and her having to study by candlelight.

She wanted to get into one of the government schools for special students. An offer was extended to her, but she turned it down, because it would take her too far from her family. She wanted to go to the school where I teach, Sekolah Menegah Sains Raja Azlan Shah (SERATAS) in Taiping, because she has relatives who live in the area. Of course, since she is an Orang Asli, her application was put on hold.

The reason given by the education minister pictured smiling with her family in the photo op above? According to the Malaysian Star:

He said getting into the school was not easy as about 96,000 applicants were vying for the 6,000 places available there.

SERATAS does not have 6,000 students. There are a little over 600 students. If there were 6,000 students, they'd be living in tents in the Lake Gardens, and we'd be having classes in the parking deck at the new market downtown. I also doubt that there are 96,000 students fighting to get into SERATAS. 9,600? OK, maybe. 960? that might be a little too low. Obviously Mr. Zakaria was greatly inflating things to cover himself and the Education Departments indifference.

It wasn't until an article ran in the Malaysian Star on January 25th that something was done. On Friday, she was waiting in the staff room with her relatives. They looked at me curiously when I walked in after my last class, and they were told that I am the native english teacher. As I headed to the library to use the computers there, they were being shown around, then Has was taken care of by an upper form girl.

Usually we don't have to work on Saturdays, but we are going to be taking two extra days off for Chinese New Year, so we can have a nine day holiday. We have to make up those days in advance, and today was one of those days. We were only told as we were walking out the door yesterday that today was a makeup day, and would be on a Friday schedule. So I walk into my first class, 1U, and she is sitting there in the second row. Since it was 7:20 am on a Saturday, I didn't want to bombard them with a lot of information, so we played a spelling game. She was curious at first, then seemed to be having some trouble understanding me, from what I could see on her face.

I hope she can come in and do well. There is a lot of pressure on the students in this school, and they have a very rigid and difficult schedule. The new principal has made things even tougher than they were before, and some of the students are already starting to crack from the pressure.

Ten girls had to be sent to Taiping Hospital with hysteria, from all the stress, work, and lack of sleep. I hope she can handle all the stress, and do well.

Has has struggled to overcome her circumstances, and has big dreams. It will be interesting to have her in class, and watch her progress in fulfilling those dreams. I am rooting for her to have the kind of life she wants for herself and her family.