FasiLINUS

Ini adalah pengalaman ku. Selama terlibat dalam LINUS, bermula  sebagai seorang guru dan kemudian mengikuti latihan dan program, akhirnya membawa aku menjadi seorang FasiLINUS. FasiLINUS - jawatan yang tiada dalam minda sesiapa. Jawatan  dan peranan yang sukar diterangkan. Tapi aku mengambil keputusan untuk menjadi seorang FasiLINUS kerana sewaktu aku menjadi guru, seseorang berkata padaku “seorang guru bole melakar nama tapi seorang pegawai hanya mampu menerima arahan sahaja”. Mungkin pengalaman tidak mematangkan aku dan aku terima jawatan ini sebagai satu cabaran. Niat dihati adalah satu, ingin membantu para guru. Itu sahaja. I don’t take this as a way to escape cause I got nothing to escape from. I just want to help.

Tapi itu la, susah kalau nak membantu dengan tiada siapa yang ingin menerima bantuan. Tahun pertama aku di office, I literally start from nothing. There is no one to guide for what I should do with English language. Itu la cabarannya. For every program, I make it by myself. I learn, re-learn and read alot just so that I could do well. It’s hard. To be young and sell your ideas to basically people that make a living with teaching. U can’t really lie and u need to be educated to know that experiences and ideas are two world apart. Seorang pegawai yang hanya ada 2 tahun pengalaman mengajar nak bercerita tentang teori dan mendengar keluhan guru yang lain. It’s crazy.

I know who I am. And that help me alot. Push aside all the drama and all the negative comments, I survived my first year as Fasi. The second year, shit is real. Here I sense that no one really understand the purpose of this program. The teacher and Fasi themselves are apart in their notion and goals. Don’t talk about KPM, JPN, BPSH, PADU and Lembaga Peperiksaan - they are total madness. I say to myself - I need to be different. I abolish the KPI shit, I help my teacher with their timetable situation, I try to lets them see different type of exam paper for Primary kids. Do everyone like what I do? Well, I don’t know- the shitt that fuck up that year is when people basically don’t want to understand me and my intention. I got bunch of negativity from teachers and administration especially with the regard of the exam paper. It’s ok. The year end, and I kinda feel relief.

The third year, well… its just a queer year. No one respect the program. LINUS is like in shit hole and to be honest, I used alot of my own pocket money to survived feeding new material and knowledge  to my teachers. It a struggle especially when your bos don’t even valued your work and the only comment he could say “ you don’t dress appropriately”. This  is the year that I realize I need to help build up foundation for my teachers to have their own community. I can’t be selfish. I can’t be working with the lower primary without realizing that the core struggle for quality in education is on the shit we call “UPSR”. This is the year, I start to read and research stuff to help the teachers. I would give a talk and really study the curriculum so that I could be ahead of each changes that happen. I can’t believed that I actually read that BLUEPRINT book. The best comment I heard that year was that "Afzal tu bukannya tahu apa pun, takde guna dengar cakap dia dan bukannya dia pernah mengajar macam kita...". 

Certain time, people think voices don’t echo if you are not in that particular place, but to be real demon make sure everything negative is being deliver to you so that your self worth is down. Here again, I thought I was helping teachers and I got all this shit around me. But I don’t care. I like when I see a teacher teaches in classroom and pupils talk about their teachers. I don’t care if there is no learning taking place, for me what is important is the interaction and both side being human in that situation. In 3 years of being a FasiLINUS, the hardest part for me to see is a teacher being a human in the classroom. I even witness a teacher that basically fill with anger teaching toward kids. 

It funny how we demand teacher to teach but yet make them feel like less of a human. I feel sad for teacher cause most of the time, they are afraid. You don’t need to be fearful, a student who cannot read or write is not a teacher fault. In a school of 100 pupils, there are literally 100 individuals and if you are the only English teacher, the system can’t be mad at you if 50 pupils not performing well. English is a language not a mere knowledge learn by memorizing. It come with culture and the art of literature. If you are an English teacher, stop being fearful and act confidently.

The fourth year of being a FasiLINUS really show me the reality of our education system. Its a system to feed goodness toward the high ranks officers. They can’t do any wrong and they are the one shaping policies that no one understand. If someone understand it and actually doing it without regarding it to their success, its meaningless. If you are a teacher and you are able to make changes to your school, you are being celebrated and your input is being put forward, it so glamours and overwhelming and that u failed to realize they just using you. I feel sad knowing this, and I refuse to do this. I don’t want any success of any teachers to be a mandate of my success. If a student get an A, its not cause teacher teach it, if a teacher able to make a good lesson, its got nothing to do with PPD or JPN and if the standard of education improved, no one in KPM should validated it as their achievement. Its sad to realize more and more people who get involve with education are not promoting education as a social need but selling it to buy future and fame. LINUS ended not because its a waste and failure, its ended cause of ego and fame is no longer come with it. If for every program there is a negativity, its goes viral and society basically call it out. That is not education. The idea need to stop, teacher should be teaching and learning, PPD and JPN need new philosophy and principal - its can’t be goal oriented cause that will clash with the idea of skipping exam. And KPM should be a institution that celebrate education and promoting natural educational ground to everyone. I still can’t believed we have 3 separate minister in education, national, chinese/tamil and preaches school ( islamic or non- islamic). Its education. I should be living in a world that knowledge is not being segregate by what school I am in. Yet in Malaysia, its normal. This is why LINUS failed. This is why we failed to emphasis on the need for basic learning. We are not united. If this continued, no matter how far we go, we still create a failure in education.

This is my last year. Technically I stop working with LINUS this year. If my teacher notice, I stop to care about LINUS starting on April. I still love English so I still work my way around that subject but I don’t pay much attention to the LINUS as a programmed. Nothing much you can do to the dying LINUS. The thing that throw me away is that I always viewed myself as an academic person. I love knowledge and learning. It hurt me that I might not being able to work with what I love the most. English open up a lot of dimension in my life. It take me to know the world and help me to discover not just the language but culture of the whole world. I learn to respect and protect  Bahasa by discovering English. Education is not about being right, or have a standardize principal. Its about understanding, you can be learning a lot and yet still at lost. So as this job about to end, I discover that LINUS create a lot of dimension in my perception about what is education. When I was a teacher, I could only understand the view of education from the perspective of a teacher and pupils, now I can see that curriculum is a dimension that most teacher fail to understand and organization such as PPD and JPN are dying. KPM can really be a bullshit cause trust me, educated people won’t segregated school based on their principal. To be honest, Iqra is real. Read! That the only way to understand education is by reading. Read and if you think you know enough about it, read again.