Feet pampering and how Harry Potter relates to teaching in Malaysia

Orientation continues which means I am still spending most of my day in the MACEE office listening to speakers talk about the country. The past couple of days have focused on the structure of the education system here. The setup of their system is very different than the US system. In fact many of the ETA first reactions to the description of the Malaysian system is skeptical and adversary, mostly because of the extreme philosophical differences between the systems. The Malaysian education system is very exam oriented.

This is a criticism is often made by American teachers in regards to the American system (or at least made by my several teacher friends and family), but the Malaysian system is much more exam focused. They take three big exams one in our equivalent to  6th grade, 9th grade, and 11th grade. Each of these tests are used to stream students into the Math/science, Commerce, Humanities, or Technical tracks. The highest scores are put into Math/science and then commerce and so on. Also, these scores are the only grades that future employers and colleges will ever see. No one cares about how the students do in the classroom, just these three tests. 

If you are trying to picture how the Malaysian school is set up think of Harry Potter. My non-HP readers bear with me on this. So you, a young witch, start Hogwarts studying the 5 basic subjects and then at the end of your primary schooling you choose the electives you want to study for your OWLs. You are supposed to choose the classes you’ll need for your future career so the big 6th grade class will tell you how likely you are to be placed in a certain field. At the end of 3 years you sit for your OWLs and the classes that you pass are the classes that you can choose from to study for your NEWTs. In other words, you are again streamed into further career paths. After 2 more years of taking your NEWT level classes you sit for the NEWTs. You must get a certain number and kind of NEWTs to go to college so the year before taking the NEWT is stress filled studying.  This method limits creativity and deemphasizes the importance of humanities by only memorizing information for tests and by making the humanities the path for only the third tier students. However, this system has been proven to work. It’s the system of much of Europe and Asia. The US values the freedom to change your focus easily and to think creatively. The Malaysian system values creating scientists and  covering as much material as possible. I see the positives and negatives in both systems, not yet having taught in either system. 

Fun fact of the day: Students who attend school in the public schools are required to take a morality class and it is one of the subjects they are tested in for the OWLs.  Also, Home Ec still exists here.  

In the evenings we have been exploring the city. There isn’t a lot to do except for shopping, but as I am still living out of suitcases buying odds and ends isn’t really practical. Instead we have been pampering our feet. Two days ago we got our feet eaten by fish removing all of the dead skin. My reaction went from fear to ticklish to relaxed to ticklish again in the span of 90 seconds. Today we indulged in a Thai foot massage.