WTF

I found a letter in my mail box last week. It was from mysterious phantom dude. All right, dude is not exactly mysterious because I actually know full his name and student ID number, and if I want to I can access his registration and academic records (and do what?).

Dude wrote that he experienced some problem with the network connection and forgot to save after dropping my class in the online registration system. My thought went back to why he didn’t print a confirmation slip (?). However, when I showed the letter to other staff members at the kulliyyah, they zoomed in on the saving part. The system immediately deregisters a student from a class once they click on the drop button. There is no save button. So whatcha saying, dude?

His second excuse is that he received a last minute notice to go for umrah. Strange, I thought. Umrah, the small pilgrimage, can be performed at any time during the year so you get to choose when to go. Having made plans to perform the umrah, even if the exact dates weren’t confirmed, dude shouldn’t have registered for the optional short semester in the first place.

Hmmm…

One thing, though, his letter was quite unexpectedly well-written with very few grammatical mistakes. So dude can write. The letters I received from students before were quite invariably so horribly written I wondered how they passed SPM English. Some of the letters were in fact in Malay, though again so horrible Malay I wondered how they passed SPM Malay.

So when the Education Minister asked recently whether English should be made a must-pass subject in SPM to improve our school-leavers’ proficiency in the language I thought, “WTF?!” These students whose letters I read and whose answer scripts I mark already passed SPM English and still their English is horrible.

Making English a compulsory and must-pass subject in SPM will not necessarily improve our English. Teaching mathematics and science in English won’t improve our English too but that’s for another day. The only way to improve command of the language is to improve teaching of the language itself. I was so shocked to read in the newspapers that grammar is no longer taught in schools. No wonder we are so frakked.