2B or not 2B?

That is the question —  
 Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer  
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,  
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,  
And by opposing end them?
- William Shakespeare (Hamlet) 

Our Kid who will be sitting the SMA national exam today, tomorrow and Wednesday, and will therefore be coming to the end of a dozen years of suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous schooling. It is certain that he has enough pencils to fill in rows of circles marked A, B, C and D, because that is all he's been doing during the current school year.

He hasn't learnt anything new because everything has been geared to reinforcing the sets of knowledge inculcated by his teachers in the past school years in order to maximise his grades.Taken from umpteen practice tests, teachers use these for assessment purposes and we parents are handed computer printouts which give percentages of each tested subject.

That Our Kid has a stash of 2B pencils is but one indication of how well schooled he has become, much like the performing monkeys, the tethered topeng monyet now banned by Jokowi from Jakarta's streets. The most creative part of his 'education' has been in working out the intentions of the test setters in writing the questions.

Because he's on the cusp of being free to leave the family nest, and Our Kid becomes Our Lad, my immediate role is to teach him how to fly in safety. There's a big wide world to explore, and I want him to go where he will and where the wind blows him with his mind's eye wide open. We can but wish him a good life, full of curiosity, creativity and communality.

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From my standpoint as a both a teacher and a parent I have often - too often - posted criticisms here of what I came to call the ujian monyet. I hope that this is my final rant against anti-standardised tests, but suspect it won't be.

However, I'd be happy to leave the subject to others. 

We need to stop thinking of our brains as filing cabinets, and treat them more like the creative, indulgent creatures that they are.
- Tristan Verboven, editor in chief of The Class Struggle. 

The entire schooling system with its emphasis on assessment and marking is geared towards the end result: the grade rather than the content, and this inevitability led to a feeling I would have been better off going home to study independently.
- Harry Cunningham, currently studying English at Loughborough University in the UK.

Therry says that "the education system in [Indonesia] has taught us all to do things as told. There is too much time spent copying down and memorising useless facts, [but] not to do things because we are passionate about it; or because we want to know how and why things work. "We are never taught to think, to solve problems, to question, to wonder, to challenge and to argue [against] what is already there." 

In the USA, teachers are banding together to boycott standardised tests. Many "can no longer implement policies that seek to transform the broad promises of public education into a narrow obsession with the ranking and sorting of children.” 

See FairTest for similar campaigns.

The goal needs to shift from one of making a system that teaches children a curriculum more efficiently to one of making the system more effective by inspiring lifelong learning in students, so that they are able to have full and productive lives in a rapidly shifting economy.
- Steve Denning

If we first teach children how to learn, they will not only learn the 'basics' but more and in much greater depth.
- Tony Buzan, inventor of mind maps

 

Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything learned in school.
- Albert Einstein

Graduation Day

Published in the Guardian

 

These senior high school students in Medan, North Sumatra, completed their national exams on Thursday.

Compared to previous years, they had something extra to celebrate: they actually took the ujian monyet.

Students in 11 provinces were unable to sit the exams, set by the Ministry of Education and Culture, because the papers hadn't been delivered.

Police are investigating whether "the delays were only due to technical error or possible criminal acts.”

Junior high school students start their national exams on Monday.

What's Wrong With This?

I'm not referring to the mix of English and Indonesian, but there's a marketing ploy in this package which justifies its inclusion in the Boggles category.

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And this?

Regular readers of Jakartass will be aware that I take great care with sentence structure and punctuation. None of us are perfect, so if I spot an error in a post, however old it is, I correct it.

It was with some trepidation, therefore, that I did the sample grammar and punctuation test in today's Guardian. Thankfully, I got 14 out of 14 correct. Apparently, year 6 pupils in the UK will be taking something similar in June as they sit their 11+ exams, or whatever they're called now.

This past week I've been helping Year 9s with 'simulasi' (practice) English tests as they prepare to take their ujian monyet  exams which they have to pass if they are to graduate and enter senior high school. There are practice books available from book stores, but this illustration is from an official simulasi provided by the Jakarta Education department last year.

(Of the 50 questions students are expected to answer, just 17 were in 'good English, and three of them were so simple that they could have been answered by anyone who's never had an English lesson.)

"What does the caution mean?"

It obviously means that those charged with raising academic standards are incompetent.

U.M. Time - Again

Yep, it's that time of year when elementary, junior and senior high school students face the dreaded Ujian Monyet, the multi-choice exams set by regional and national education authorities.

The tests set by the national Department of Education, which in its (lack of) wisdom or vision has emasculated the English language teaching sector, are sat by students throughout the country. Local governments set 'tryout' practice tests, and students in grades 6, 9 and 10 spend an eternity, which several months can seem to be, learning little new, or of practical use for their futures.

This is what Iqbal Widastomo said three years ago.

We need to change the mindset of many of our educators to first become critical thinkers themselves before they can develop and encourage critical thinking in the schoolchildren.

Our continuing obsession with discipline and strict order in schools creates a problem for our students and this problem leaves them and us at a disadvantage in the international community. Too often they are being left behind because they have not been taught to think.

They have not been given a chance to think and explore as they naturally should have as children growing up and learning. But they need to be able to think and question and challenge ideas for themselves. Our schools, however, still do not encourage this but instead continue to emphasize memorization rather than actual thinking.

I don't believe we should over-blame the schools. It's only been fourteen years since the abdication of Suharto and changing the mindsets of the powers-that-be takes a generation or two. That the élites in the legislatures and their bureaucracies are the self-perpetuating hangovers is a matter for the electorate to determine - and hopefully as soon as possible. However, teachers and parents of current school students are 'victims' of the Suharto era and, with a few notable exceptions, have yet to change their mindsets.

What gets my goat more than anything is that the tests themselves, both locally and nationally derived are flawed. Or, to put it more bluntly, are riddled with errors.

Last year, Our Kid graduated from grade 9 and is now settled in the senior high school regime. He goes to a school which bills itself as a 'National Plus', a private fee-paying school. These schools need a continued intake in order to survive as a commercial enterprise, and recruits qualified, experienced and caring teachers in order to ensure a 100% pass rate.

Image is everything. (That this year's annual wall calendar highlights various teachers including those who are awarded for their "Pucntuality" (sic) is somewhat unfortunate.) However, I do still feel a sense of resentment fostered at his graduation ceremony last year.

Our Kid came home after sitting the English exam and told me that he'd answered two answers (out of fifty) incorrectly. He'd made a note of the questions and the four possible answer.choices, and yes, he had got them wrong. But hey, 96% is an excellent result in my book.

At the graduation ceremony a lass was praised and awarded a month's free tuition for getting 100%. A couple of months later, the official certificate came through and it turned out that Our Kid had been awarded 98%.

Now, given that certificates are computer-generated, I can only surmise that one of the questions Our Kid had got 'wrong', had been a 'bad' question, i.e. had the wrong answer in the marking key. Therefore, the lass had given the 'right' answer according to the government, but was in fact 'wrong' and therefore did not actually achieve 100%.

If you've followed my convoluted thinking so far, consider this question set by Jakarta's (lack of) Education Dept. for this past week's tryout exams for this year's batch of grade 9s.

Q. When will the wedding anniversary be held?

.....A. In the afternoon. ......C. In the evening.

.....B. In the morning. .......-D. At night.

There's nothing wrong with the English, but the question ...?

How can you 'hold' an anniversary? The occasion is on a particular day or date, and is therefore of 24 hours duration, so none of the answers are correct. Surely it's a party, a get-together, or soiree that will be held at 8pm.

Then there is the matter of interpretation. 8pm in Indonesian is 'malam', i.e. night, yet to an Englishman such as myself, it's the evening, the gap between work obligations and bedtime.

Finally, the text preceding the one above is below. Your task is to work out how many mistakes you can find in the fourteen words.

We are not alone in Indonesia. Ruth Ann Dandrea has written A Teacher's Open Letter to Her 8th Grade Students: 'A Test You Need to Fail'


"…it doesn’t matter how well you write, or what you think. I’d been feeling [for] the past few years of my tenure in public education, that there was something or somebody out there, a power of a sort, that doesn’t really want you kids to be educated. I felt a force that wants you ignorant and pliable, and that needs you able to fill in the boxes and follow instructions."

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Remember
Isaac Newton did poorly in grade school.
Winston Churchill struggled in school and failed the sixth grade.
Einstein was four years old before he could speak and seven before he could read.

National Exams are A-U-D-F-C-K-E-G

This week, six million grade 12 senior high school students have been undergoing the unnecessary yet ritual torture of 'graduation' tests.

Our Kid is at home today, as are most grades 7 and 8 junior high school students. He'll be at home all next week as well because grade 9s have to go through the same robotic hell, using a 2B pencil to fill in little circles which are scanned by computer.

Unnecessary? Of course they are because the only teaching of 'relevance' these students receive in the preceding months is geared to answering the test questions, many of which are, as I've often noted, badly formulated with possible multiple correct answers or none at all.

The following headlines gleaned from the Jakarta Post tell the tale.

Tuesday 23 March
- Despite 'leaks', first day of national exams goes smoothly.
- Leaks, problems mar national final exam

Wednesday 24 March
- National exams still problematic*

Thursday 25 March
- Schools urged to have post-exam cooldown period
(for students suffering stress.)

Friday 26 March
- Students from across the country to take UGM tests.

Yogya's University of Gadjah Mada will hold entrance exams on Sunday, thus demonstrating that the national exams are of no value in determining who goes on to further education.

*The same problems crop up every year. These include misdirected packages of exam papers, sets of answers being sold, answers being sent by text message, teachers changing students' answer sheets, and students unable to take test due to sickness or pregnancy  and uncertain whether they can take them at a later date. .

Fellow blogger, Harry Nizam, has suggested that my posts are rarely positive but, hey, here's a positive suggestion for the cooling down period.

Let them play games and Countdown, a popular TV game show which tests vocabulary and maths, can be easily adapted for classroom use.

This is a screengrab from Tuesday's show.

Examining The Examiners

The following is an edited version of a post on Jakartass.

Ignorant and Arrogant Kalla

Once again, the Vice President Yusuf Kalla, that mastermind of educational standards, has been taking potshots at parents and teachers. This time he has been talking about the Ujian Nasional (National Examinations).

These are set and administered by the Ministry of Education's Badan Standar Nasional Pendidikan (Institute/Board for National Education Standards). These are taken in SD (Elementary School, Grade 6, 11+), SMP (Junior High, Grade 9, 14+) and SMA (Senior High, Grade 12). In order to 'graduate' to the next level, which is university in the case of Grade 12 students, they must achieve a minimum average score of 5.25 in as many as six subjects, of which three, Maths, Indonesian and English are compulsory. Given regional ties and geopolitics, I do wonder why Mandarin isn't a higher priority.

Kalla says that the passing grade at 5.25 is still too low. After all, in Singapore it's 7.00 and in Malaysia it's 8.00.

Well, so ......?

As I've already stated, the national exams, being multi-choice, are designed for automatons trained in the art of guessing, although maybe it's not an art but a technology because it's not as if there are moves in education circles towards a population trained to be critical in their thinking.

Society is being trained to be acquiescent so that the likes of Kalla, Bakrie and other family conglomerates seemingly concerned with 'welfare' can enrich themselves at our expense. And we get the blame for the almighty cock-ups they've perpetrated on our behalf.

According to the Post, Kalla also says that teachers should teach the content that will be tested and students should know what is going to be tested. This could be interpreted as a licence to cheat.

However, I'll be fair and merely test one test.

I have a copy of this year's Junior High Ujian Nasional prepared for SMP. It is riddled with errors, too many to count, errors of collocation, syntax, spelling, punctuation, verb tenses and more. I reckon it's a good thing that the pass mark is "too low". And after all that, it merely tests basic reading skills and knowledge of synonyms. There are no writing, listening or oral components, which is probably just as well.

After all, if even the examiners can't pass it ....

Have a look at Question 7, which I've copied verbatim. What do you think is the correct answer?
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Read the following notice. It's put on the wall.




It means ...
-------A.----the place is special for you as visitors.
-------B.----this is a place for you to wait.
-------C.----you cannot wait anyone here.
-------D.----you should not stay here.
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Ignoring the fact that 'the' wall is not specified and the word 'for' is omitted from C, it seems obvious that C and D are not the right answers.

You'd probably correctly answer B, however, given that there are too many horrendous errors, that in one reading passage "Komala drowned ... and all of her guards could not save her" and that in another passage we are informed that there will be a wedding on "Friday, the thirthteenth of June", is A actually wrong?

So, Mr. Kalla, don't criticise parents who sue the Ministry of Education for failing their children, and don't criticise those teachers - again - who are really pissed off at being employed by a bunch of bureaucrats who think they have all the answers.

Which they probably do.

For a price.
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Among the responses to the above post was this comment by Dr. Bruce:
The amount of classroom time that is spent on preparing for these things is amazing, but then the US is not exactly a standard to match either as so many schools waste so much time teaching for the test.

It's not just in the US, although it could be argued that it is the transplanted US practices which are partly responsible for the debacles both here and elsewhere, including the UK.

Educational Testing Services (ETS), known here for ToEFL and ToEIC exams, those multiple-choice monstrosities which pay absolutely no heed to cultural differences outside the white middle-classes of middle-America, have a five year contract with the UK's Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.

This has turned into a "fiasco".

Problems first began to emerge in October last year when some senior markers resigned over new approaches to the way the so-called Key Stage tests would be marked.

By early spring this year, teachers were reporting a series of administrative problems, including ETS failing to register their contract details, delays in training and the failure of a vetting system for English markers. To compound problems, completed papers were delayed in being sent to markers.

Incidentally, on this page, you're asked 'Who Is ETS?'

Not the correct 'Who Are ETS?' or 'What Is ETS?'
Answer: Educational Testing Service (ETS) is the largest private educational measurement organisation in the world today.

A Balls Up

That was in the lead up to the Scholarship Aptitude Tests taken by 11+ and 14+ year-olds this year. What has followed as a result is even worse, bearing in mind that entry to the next level of schooling is generally dependent on test results.

Thousands of schoolchildren may have to wait until the autumn for key test results after a company brought in to administer the tests failed to deliver on time.

The schools secretary, Ed Balls, has been forced to delay the publication of test results for 1.2 million pupils and set up an urgent independent inquiry to document the errors which have disrupted the marking of national SATs for 11- and 14-year-olds. Results had been expected at schools by Tuesday (July 1st). Most will now be a week late, but ministers last night admitted some pupils will not get their marks until after the summer holidays (in early September).

Education for Greed, Not Need

I became a teacher because I hated secondary school. I was a bright pupil in my primary school and the only blight I can recall was that Art was limited to one class taught by a Mr. Pasha and I was excluded.

My boys-only grammar school teachers were generally ex-armed forces personnel with that particular approach to discipline, one I hated. I can recall only two teachers who I recall as being 'enlightened'. The history teacher gave us the social context of events; unfortunately this wasn't tested, as key dates in terms of British imperialism were considered more important. The art teacher stretched our cloistered minds and took us took us to cinema clubs to see art films such as Cleo de 5 á 7.

When I graduated from a three year course at a teacher training college, art was my main subject, an interest that has continued, and later my inner-city students won many prizes at national exhibitions. Hopefully I encouraged my students to examine themselves in relation to their community and environment. I encouraged them to realise their innate potential and a self-belief as sensitive human beings giving something to the society they are part of.

Nowadays folk like Kalla would no doubt ask about the value of what I did, where was the profit, to which there is a simple answer.

For society to work, co-operation, rather than competition, is the key, with the main reward being personal satisfaction at a job well done. A level of humility is appropriate, although not obeisance and obsequiousness. It is right to mistrust those who seek to impose their value systems and morality on others, particularly when their own competence can be challenged.

The key is to take responsibility for one's own life - and allow others to do the same. For that, institutions of social control need to be controlled by society rather than those 'market forces' which operate outside society and seek to subvert cultures and communities to their own ends.

These ends too often lead to the end of the identities which bind us together.