English Essays (Malaysian Education System)

Today, I received the results for an English essay that I had submitted to my teacher a month ago. I was extremely disappointed with the marks I had received.  I got a 28/30. I know, I know, it seems like it is a very good mark. Before I explain why was I disappointed despite being two marks away from a perfect score, I will explain what I had wrote.

The topic of the essay was "The Person I Admire". Naturally, I wrote about His Eminence Tsem Rinpoche.  The contents included how Rinpoche had influenced my life and a little bit on Rinpoche's history. Despite choosing a religious figure as the person I admire, I still tried to avoid talking too much about religious things as I know that teachers may be offended for some reason when writing regarding religious matters or subjects.

Firstly, I did not have any grammatical errors or spelling errors. I proofread my own essays so I would know if there were any errors. The silly thing that the teacher pointed out as an error was the following words. Regal, Emperor and Laziness. She thought that the word "Regal" was spelt with an "L" at the start and "Emperor" without an "E" at the start. Also, she thought the word
"Laziness" was spelt "Lazyness".  She probably used those words to deduct points. Tomorrow, if I see her I will give her a piece of my mind.

Secondly, I helped some of the students with their essays and taught them great ways to improve their writing skills. I also deliberately lowered the skill involved to make the essays seem more realistic. Despite that, the other students scored higher marks than me, even with obvious grammar mistakes.

Now, let's talk about the Malaysian education system as I live in Malaysia and my school is partially funded by the government. I will only be ranting about the English class in my school because I have no experience with the other subjects as I am not an expert in other subjects. I only have experiences with teaching kids in English and no other language.

First things first, I believe that my English teacher is not qualified enough to teach. My reasons are as follows. She is unable to properly pronounce certain words despite being probably english-educated. This was a pain in the neck when I had to listen to her bad pronunciation when she was giving a dictation. Next, she has an extremely weak mind and she gets angry easily. She does not enforce discipline properly and usually attempts to use a 'poor me' attitude to tackle the students and claims that she has been 'good' to us students by not scolding us. By 'good', she means that she was mostly indifferent. If she does not put us in line, she is just showing that she does not care!

Next, I would like to talk about the syllabus. We are 15-18 years old and we are still learning past and present tense. 'Nuff Said.

I would also like to point out the syllabus for English literature being weak and poorly written. I would take Twilight over the literature syllabus in my school anytime. Heard of "QWERTYUIOP" by Vivien Alcock? Neither had I. I only know about the term QWERTYUIOP when randomly watching stick animations on youtube out of boredom. Ever heard of How I Met Myself by David Hill? Neither had I. This is the only thing I dislike about New Zealand. I love and respect New Zealand as I am part of the country by blood.

Yeah, this crappy badly written cliched piece of rubbish

Why can't the education system provide books that are actually beneficial towards the budding minds of today's youth? If they are stupid enough to say that there are not many good books out there and they have to pick these shitty ones, then here is a list of classics that kids will still enjoy and would learn so much from:

• 1984 - George Orwell
• Animal Farm - George Orwell
• Around the World in 80 Days - Jules Verne
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne
• Journey to The Centre of the Earth - Jules Verne (Heck, they could even show the movie in class) 
• Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Just to let everyone know, I am not putting down ANYONE in this blog post. I personally like school. I am quite a patriot. I do not have anything against the government or my school. I am just stating my feelings and I hope that improvements will be made. Thank you.