Building bridges

He looked away while mumbling really quickly, ashamed to keep eye-contact with me. He waited until I was distracted before blurting out some unintelligible sounds.

“Tengok cikgu, saya sudah bagitau.” He said, accusing me of not being wanting to hear what he answered.

Why would he be so embarrassed? All I asked was “Apa cita-cita kamu?” To be honest, I really thought he was going to answer that he wanted to be a WWE wrestler or something along those lines. I mean, it makes sense for a 12-year old boy to have those dreams.

After relentless persuading, he finally gave in and mumbled engineer; he would later spell it as injiner, but I digress. An engineer felt like such a commonplace ambition (read: typical Asian kid ambition) for me while I was growing up, so why the hesitancy?

It was interesting to found out that as a kid growing up in a high-need, low-income community, that was a rarity. He was the odd duckling, and it was something that he was perhaps teased for.  In this journey of teaching, I am still finding out the crazy number of things that I take for granted.

The forgotten others

We were on a road trip once, and we had about three or four cars in a convoy. I was sitting in the second car, when I noticed the lead car swerving dangerously and seemingly losing control. I called in to the lead car’s passengers and asked what was going on, and they said one of the passengers (Person A) had pissed the driver (Person B) off and they’re going to drop him off as soon as possible. This was the story in that car. Person B was of mixed ethnicity from East Malaysia, and Person A, being the usual dungu, decided to ask Person B if their I/C’s ethnicity was “Dan Lain-Lain”. And yes, Person A did get kicked out of the car as soon as we reached a place that wasn’t so narrow and dangerous to stop.

Ethnicity – the sore subject that still divides our nation. We refuse to move past these labels and look at ourselves at think, “I’m a Malaysian”. Not I’m a Malaysian first, [insert ethnicity here] second. I am Malaysian, period. We continue to allow it to define us, and to pit us against each other. We allow it to colour our perspectives, and to bring about prejudice and hatred towards “The Other”.

The news is all about our nation’s leaders decrying the treatment towards the Rohingya in Myanmar, yet I hear about the plight of stateless people in our own country that the same leaders have turned a blind eye to, and it saddens me. I hear of how the Sulu people in Sabah, who have grown up all their lives in the coasts of Sabah, but are bullied and harassed by law enforcement because their ancestors were too illiterate to register for citizenship, and now they have nowhere to go, but live in perpetual fear. I hear about the straight A student in SPM, but because of an administrative issue at his birth, has no I/C and therefore cannot apply to any universities in Malaysia. Again and again, we hear all these stories, and yet we turn a deaf ear because they are “The Others”.

54 years as a nation, and still a nation divided.

Of adding numbers.

Some days there would be classes that I would have to “babysit” – i.e. the actual teacher is unavailable, or half the students are somewhere else and I can’t really move on with the syllabus. These are times that make me very restless, because the kid inside me wants them to have fun and do whatever they want, but the teacher inside me knows that if they make too much noise, everyone loses. So every now and then I come up with number challenges just to kill time.

Yes, number challenges. Mostly because I am comfortable with numbers (even though I teach history). The other is because sequential number questions are pretty easy to set. For example: 1, 2, 3, x, 5. What is x?

I would randomly set questions, and always found it amusing to see students struggle to figure out the missing numbers. But these were also times where I would see the students that teachers normally consider “lousy” shine. There were students that could only speak Mandarin, but because they were taught by a non-Mandarin speaking teacher, they were never afforded the chance to shine. I would eavesdrop on their conversations with their friends, or spy on their calculations, and always end up amazed at the creativity they have in solving the problem. Sometimes I would get them to come up and explain it to their class, and then you see a student that is normally disinterested in class, wouldn’t answer a single question, doesn’t do homework and all the usual “bad student” syndrome, come alive and take charge.

There were a few times where I was just messing around, making them count straightforward but large numbers, and get under their nerves by showing them that I can do it without a calculator within ten seconds. Stuff like what’s two to the power of ten, or what’s 1+2+3+4+…+100 and the like.

Once I tried it out in the Peralihan (remove) class. I asked them what’s 1+2+3+…+10. And they did it. Then I went to 20. Then 30. 40. 100. You could see students starting to give up because the calculator was too tedious, or they would lose track of their calculations. But I realized there was this one student (one who normally sits at the back of the class and doesn't say much) that was on fire, commanding his classmates to be quiet, and seemed like he was mentally calculating everything. And as the numbers got bigger, I noticed that he stumbled upon something. And so I got him to come up to the front and explain what was going on in his head. And lo and behold, he created his own mathematical formula to compute the series.

Yes, it wasn’t the most efficient way of computing series – he used 1+2+…+10 = 55, and then added multiples of 10s to 55 in order to get the final answer, e.g. 1+2+... +20 = 55 + (10x10). The fastest way I know is [(a + l) x (n/2)].

But here was a kid in Peralihan, a class where teachers normally write the students off before they even step in to teach. Here was a kid who could only speak Mandarin to voice his thoughts, and the school would probably never realize his math potential due to the language barrier. Here was a kid, who like many other kids, didn’t fit in the system, whose talents and potential would remain buried forever.

It pains my heart that so many talents fall through the system; not because they weren’t good enough, but because the system failed them.

Love #3

Forgive and forget. Some say to forgive is easier than to forget. You might have forgiven the person that wronged you, but every time you look at the fler’s face, the sour memories come back to haunt you. What then?

But we’re humans. We screw up all the time. We will screw up, and when we decide to own up to our mistakes and seek forgiveness, we would naturally hope the other party would forgive us. If so, we should accord others the same treatment we seek.

Love keeps no record of wrong.

When you really think about this statement, you’ll realize how ridiculously hard it is to keep no record. Somewhere deep down, we have this sense of entitlement to “justice”, that there is a scoreboard and because the other fler screwed up, we are in the lead and the onus is on them to make up for it. We hold the wrong of the fler over their head whenever we have the opportunity.

But I think the same quote makes sense – “Love does not need to be fair or equal. It just needs to be real”. Yes, the other person messed up. But holding it over their head is not going to help them. Imagine for a moment your son is playing by the swimming pool, and you tell him to stay away or he’ll fall in. He doesn’t listen and slips in and starts to drown. You decide at that moment to “forgive” him, i.e. dive in and save him. But imagine sometime in the future he wants to learn to swim, and you keep bringing up the same issue.

Humans are natural learners. I like to think that we can also learn how not to continuously be idiots. If so, then we should give others the benefit of doubt, that we move on from the previous mistake committed.

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Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut, doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others, isn’t always “me first,
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others.

Love #2

I used to be the chinaman of all chinamans. When I was growing up in school, I wouldn’t even spend money on food for myself; much less even think of belanja-ing others. I used to walk around in shoes taped up with masking tape to prolong its already doomed lifespan. And this was not for the lack of money, but the kiamsiap-ness in dealing with money.

But while I was teaching, (and it’s true that teachers’ pay is really quite sad) there were plenty of my friends who were willing to take me out and pay for my meals, out of the kindness of their hearts. And it was not because I did something for them, or that they owed anything to me. I didn’t complain to them saying no money (maybe to some), but it was a very voluntary process on their part. And it wasn’t just food. The amount of things that people have blessed my life with, from providing furniture and transportation and all, it made me realize one thing:

The natural response when you have received so much love is express that same love to others. I suppose that is why the Paying It Forward thing is such a powerful movement. When you receive love, loving others becomes a very natural response.

How do I know? I found myself going to JB to visit other teachers, and the thought of belanja-ing the teachers there was something I wanted to do. Wanted. Not like kena paksa or something. This coming from the guy who would leech off free food whenever possible.

And I think it’s the same with our relationship with God. If we truly believe that God has loved us so much, and we keep it all to ourselves and not pass it on, then something has gone wrong somewhere.

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All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.

Love #1

“Show me how to love, like You have loved me.”

This was part of a song that was sung a lot back in high school, and one of the lines that felt very heavy. And like my best friend always says, “Be careful what you challenge God with, after sure kena wan”.

So I never expected to be a teacher, and lagi lah didn’t expect to learn the magnitude of God’s love and how we are expected to love others the way He loves us by being a teacher. But this thought came while I was walking to class one day. Along the corridors of the school, the students have put up a bunch of supposedly motivational quotes (I say supposedly because there was a quote from 1984, the one that goes “Freedom is slavery, strength is ignorance…”). But this one really hit home hard:

Love does not need to be fair or equal. It just needs to be real.

I often think of love as something that should be fair. I love those who love me. I’m friends with those who seem to want to be my friend. I stopped caring as much about the people that seemed distant or couldn’t care less. But Jesus did say, “If you only love those who love you, what better are you than the pagans?” And one major lesson about love that I’ve come to learn over the two years of being a teacher is the part about undeserving love.

I have no attachments to my students. I am neither their father nor their mother. I am not blood related, don’t share their culture, and do not speak their language. In fact, they constantly speak their foreign tongues in front of me so I do not understand them. I am not a permanent teacher, nor am I part of the community. There is no reason that any of these students should deserve my love. Yet I do, for the trivial reason that I am their teacher.

They screw up daily; there’s those that are rude, those that are lazy, those that challenge me and disobey me, the ones that break the rules and the ones that hate me. Yes, I had a student who called me “female private parts” and asked if I wanted to be slapped, and another class that tried to intimidate me with their parents. But yet if any of these kids come to me with their troubles, there is a part of my brain that will go “Sure, what’s up? How can I help you?”. Yes, even the kid who wanted to slap me. Every time I see them in class, they intentionally try to get under my skin, and yet if they were to twist their ankle, I’d be the first teacher there to patch them up.

There is no reason why God should love us. We’ve messed up so bad in life. Yet He does. Love does not need to be fair or equal. It just needs to be real.

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Grace, what have You done?
Murdered for me on that cross
Accused in absence of wrong
My sin washed away in Your blood

Too much to make sense of it all
I know that Your love breaks my fall
The scandal of grace, You died in my place
So my soul will live

What's a teacher?

I am a teacher. But not really.

Yes I do teach, but what is teaching?

Does it happen when kids in uniforms listen?

Is it still teaching if no one listens?

I teach history. But not really either.

I tell them of things in the past, but also of things yet to come.

I tell them of Gandhi and Soekarno,

but also that one day they'll be the leaders.

I'm a storyteller, a fact rambler,

The old uncle that talks about the same thing again and again.

I am Siri, I am Google Maps,

I am Wikipedia,

and sometimes I'm just clueless.

But I'm also an artist, a coach, a writer.

I'm a question asker, and a problem solver.

I'm a motivator, a realist,

one that tells them to dreams,

and other times bring them back to earth.

I'm the one who offers them help,

but also the one to tell them to walk on their own.

I'm a slave driver, and also a slave.

I'm a clerk, a driver, a cameraman, an emcee.

I plan events, arrange chairs, do backdrops, fiddle with sound systems.

I'm the repairman, the rat catcher, the snake killer, the food for mosquitoes.

I'm the one who stays up all night,

Setting exams and grading homework,

The one watching them while they sleep in tents,

The one tending to their bruises and wounds,

The one who wraps their sprained ankles.

The one shouting at them when they run too slow,

The one telling them "Not good enough" when they win gold.

I'm an unstoppable force in class,

An immovable object too.

Or maybe that's what I think I am.

Maybe I'm just blowing my own horn.

I wear many hats,

but my head is not just a hat rack.

My brain, your brain, our brains.

Our nation's greatest resource.

For such a time as this,

Gathered here, we are.

Our nation's future, 

Forever changed by your dedication.

And the journey has only just begun.

Whatever we choose tomorrow, 

It will not be for us.

It will be for the nation.

It will be your legacy,

Your footprint, etched in history.