Give Kids A Break

Four students have been expelled from a senior high school in Riau, South Sumatra, for 'defaming' their teacher on Facebook. The comments were reportedly of a personal nature and offensive to women.

The school's deputy principal, Yose Rizal, said the students' failure to complete and submit homework assignments to the teacher contributed to the decision to dismiss them. Yose said he hoped the decision would send a strong message to other students that such behavior was not acceptable.

That says a lot about what is wrong with the Indonesia's schooling system, especially as the subject that the teacher was supposedly charged with teaching is 'Life Skills'.

Come to think of it, that is what all teachers (and parents) are responsible for inculcating. As a teacher and parent I do know that adults make 'mistakes', but then there is little guidance for us either.

Competition is praised above co-operation so that societal prerogatives are determined by online social networks rather than leadership for the common good.

Public transport is privately owned, as is the water supply, and garbage isn't properly managed so residents, of all classes, dispose of it willy-nilly.

The current national census cannot be completed as scheduled because rich folks in their enclaves deny access to officials because they have something, their ill-gotten wealth, to hide.

And kids get blamed for not following the rules!

The results of the remedial tests following the senior high school ujian monyet have been announced. Teachers in Yogya are angry because of the "premature announcement", but they are missing the point.

Out of 150,410 students who had to sit the repeat national exams, how come only 11,814 'failed'? How is it possible to master the 'facts' tested in such a short while since the original exams were sat in March? Are these remedial tests easier? If so, why weren't the set of March exams?

One contributing factor is that the educators and bureaucrats responsible for the whole debacle are lacking in any semblance of awareness of how teenagers think. I'm not suggesting that they should be neuro-scientists, but applying the academic skill of research - a skill which their positions of power indicate they should have - would give them a modicum of insight into how teenagers think.

For a start, Dr. Paul Kelley, headteacher of a high school in northern England and author of Making Minds: What's Wrong With Education?, says that creating long-term memories is at the core of education.

In 2005, a key discovery was published in Scientific American explaining how long-term memories are formed in the brain. Douglas Fields, of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and his team in the US not only revealed exactly how long-term memories are formed but also, more significantly for teachers, how they can be created. The biological basis of a memory is a pathway of cells linked within the brain. His team looked at how these pathways were formed and how each cell was "switched on" and became linked to other cells.

Surprisingly, constant stimulation of the cell did not make it switch on. Stimulation had to be separated by gaps when the cell was not stimulated. The breakthrough came when the team began to realise the length of stimulation was not vital, but the gap between stimulations

So Dr. Kelly and his teaching staff established 'spaced learning' which works no matter what subject you are teaching. In spaced learning, you have 10-minute breaks between three intensive sessions of 15-20 minutes teaching. In each of the sessions, you repeat material but present it differently, deepening and extending it.

In the breaks students might juggle, play basketball or model animals out of Play-Doh. These distracter activities leave the cells to carry out chemical processes.

Or access their Facebook accounts?

An English expression has it that 'procrastination is the thief of time', but I prefer to think of an Indonesian cup of coffee in which the grounds take time to settle at the bottom of the cup. That is an apt description of the process of leaning; one must allow time for the absorption of new information, and breaks are certainly one key to successful learning.

A different approach to the 'chalk and talk' methodology is also required. Rather than 'preaching' or lecturing ('hectoring' may be a better word) with theoretical 'knowledge' to be copied from the classroom white/blackboard, teachers need to offer students more opportunities for experiment and for inductive learning.

Allowing socialised discussions between students in the lessons would be a good start!

Further reinforcement for Dr. Kelley's pedagogical approach is offered by more recent research.

According to Dr. Iroise Dumontheil of University College London's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, one of the authors of the research to be published today in the Journal of Neuroscience, "It's not the fault of teenagers that they can't concentrate and are easily distracted. It's to do with the structure of their brains. Adolescents simply don't have the same mental capacities as an adult because teenagers are still children."

I think that's similar to my problem too; although I think like an adult, I remain a kid at heart.