what? a day care centre?

today, i entered the staffroom and was greeted with some outburst from the teachers. i asked my colleague, and she told me our PM has suggested that the school hours be extended until 4 pm!!! what????

and so there was an angry outburst, and i guess not only in my staffroom, but also in all staffrooms all over malaysia. okay, so we understand that this is the direct result of nurin's kidnapping and murder. but to extend school hours for more that 8 hours??? that's absurd. why should the teachers be saddled with extra work of being babysitters to the students? students have less attention span, and obviously the teachers too. the rest of the govt officers might say that they work for 8 hours. but they dont deal with teenagers. they dont deal with peer pressure or truancy. we deal at an average of 150 students per week. that can mean around 90 students a day. and we teach the students, which means using our brain - a lot of it. then comes the checking of the exercises - we still use a great deal of thinking. as for me, i have to correct the grammar of my students' essays, and this isnt 10 words of composition, we re talking about an average of 200 words essay for lower secondary and 350 words essay for upper secondary.

some schools have started extending the school hours until 3.30 (in what was supposed to be "pioneer project" but it was just an ambition of one PPD officer), but none lasted. if we, as university students, complain when we have classes from 8-4pm, can you imagine the children and the teenagers? if we have to extend until 3.30, i'm pretty sure we will still have school activities on friday and saturday (which is a common scenario here). and what about 2-session schools who have more than 2000 students? and where do we put our families then? we are not only teachers, but we are also wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, daughters and sons.

the school is a place for seeking knowledge, and not a day care centre. what the authorities should do is to go to the root cause, and not burden us with this. nurin was kidnapped at night. does this mean the school should be extended until night time?

think. we're only humans. we need rest too.

what we need, after a 6-hour schooling, is some rest, away from the essays or math sums. we need time to regenerate, just like our students, who also need time on their own to develop into individuals.