on a serious note...

okay after that whole sombre why posting, i feel like i want to write about the state of education in indonesia (yeah... after i lament about my love life now i'm pretending to be the minister of education...)

i think that teachers are underpaid. i know this is something everyone knows and realizes already (heck how come no one's done anything about it then?). but i really believe this is one thing that causes education in indonesia to deteriorate. i mean, parents believe to get good (ie. adequate) education for their children, they have to send their kids to another country (singapore, australia, usa, and canada preferred). or i don't know what's worse, is that good education comes from another country, hence all the popping international schools in indonesia. education doesn't come cheap. but it shouldn't be that way.

and it all comes down to money. the incentive or motivation for people to work is money. don't deny it, we all need money. you need money, i need money. we all need money to survive and we never have enough money. so the song hati senang walaupun tak punya uang..oo... is a bunch of bull. and teachers don't work to become the unsong hero. even heroes need money too.

another reason why teachers don't do such a great job is because they're getting lazy. it's true. and why, you ask? one, because their hard work is not reflected in the amount of money their making (thus my argument #1 can be applied here). second, the pedagogy is flawed. there is no pedagogy. teachers teach what they read in textbooks. they don't have the skills or the background education to apply known tactics in education.

in our school, our motto is the student is always right. if a student is not learning (for whatever reason), it's because the instrution is flawed. we cannot say a student is lazy, a student does not want to learn because the motivation is missing. as a teacher, i would need to figure out what's motivating to the student and use that to motivate the student to learn. we cannot say a student cannot learn because s/he has autism. this is one laaamee excuse. no matter what a student has or does not have, any person can learn given the right teaching methods. so it's our job as teachers to figure out different tactics for different students. education needs to be individualized and teachers need to be held accountable in their students' learning.

that's my soap-box moment. back to moping about relationships...