Day Around Town

I am reproducing my blog posts at gothenburg09.misi.se, a site for foreign students in Sweden. So you will find completely unnecessary details such as shop names and sometimes even directions, if I'm too lazy to edit. Just take it as good to know, in case you ever decide to visit Göteborg.

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Our day of sight-seeing started with a drive around town. A friend I met at church gave us a full tour of the city in her car, and drove us to the Asian supermarket. We wowed at all the different products the shop had, mostly from China and Southeast Asia, then settled for the things we missed the most: rice, ginger and oyster sauce (we already have soya sauce).

This is Masthuggskyrkan, a beautiful brick church situated on top of a rocky point. We would not have known about it, had it not been for my friend. It's great to know a local (or in this case, a Singaporean Chinese residing in Goteborg who claims to never have met people from her region here before). We had a great view of the city and the harbour below from this point.

Then we took a walk around Haga, the old town district. Here you find cafés with tables spilling out onto the pretty cobblestone streets and antique shops stocked with curios from past times. My poor attempt at imitating Henri Cartier-Bresson:

Bicycles are very common around here, and many students buy second hand ones to get around the city without paying for the transport card. It's fine in summer, but in fall and winter you have to get used to cycling in the rain or in slush--snow around here is not the fine, beautiful powdery stuff you get in the movies, according to the locals. Hence my decision to stick with the more expensive but infinitely convenient transport card.

And it is a very rainy city in September. If it's not rainy it is at least cloudy. Many of the locals go outside prepared with hooded rainjackets and/or umbrellas. As I type this now it is raining outside. I can hear the wind blowing the rain about.

Lunch was at Salluhallen, the market hall where traders sell meat, cheese, vegetables, specialty teas and bread. I had panbiff med lök sås och potatis, which was meatballs and potatoes. You thought IKEA had the best meatballs?

Those two beef patties, the serveur tells us, are meatballs.

We waited out the rain by shopping at the second-hand shop, Emmaus, at Linnegatan. The clothes were in decent condition and really great for us students from far away who couldn't bring so many things with us, and who won't use the clothes for more than a season. My buddies bought scarves and cardigans. I bought a winter jacket. It was from Mango and in good condition, only missing a belt. Didn't bother with a new one as I will only use it for this trip. I wore it back to Olofs, and it felt great, just like being back home because I was so warm and toasty, though it was overkill for late summer. I might as well have walked around with a big sign, "I am newly arrived and I have failed to acclimatize."

Finally we headed over to the student club Parken, having dinner at their free buffet. We went early on purpose, because we missed the food last week, and we wanted a taste of it this week. After the food, the tables were cleared to make space for a dance floor, and a DJ started up the music. The DJ mixed the music very well. At one point I recognized the strains of the Imperial Death March from Star Wars mixed in with some other rhythm. I'm not much into music, but this nerd thinks the ability to turn that into dance music is the criteria for a skilled DJ. The dance floor got really crowded, and people were stilling queuing to get into the club at 11pm. We missed our usual bunch of friends, though, so we left pretty early. We ended the day with hot chocolate at my room. It was great, except for this nagging at the back of my mind, that I have not started my essay yet...exchange students do need to get work done at some point.

Week One in Goteborg

How's Sweden? It's great! It's the expected answer for the typical question people back home ask me. What else can one say? What they really mean is: how are you, and how do you find Sweden? We never really ask what we mean to ask, with a question. It's one of my pet peeves about communication.

So how is Sweden?

# I notice myself hunching sometimes because of the cold. 11-28 degree weather for summer.

# There's broken glass all around the student housing area from last night's party, when people got so drunk they started smashing things or dropping bottles. Iusually leave before that happens, though.

# Goteborg is rainy. Intermittently rainy, which is bad in that the weather is unpredictable, but good because bad weather is over quickly. But there will be more rain.

# It's expensive (duh!). The cheapest groceries are slightly more expensive than buying food in Singapore, but some things are very expensive. Fresh fish is at least RM50 per kg, and even more for salmon.

# Everything comes in XL size--the wildlife, the vegetables and the people. We bought an onion larger than both my fists put together. Here' s my RM1.30 white button mushroom, known as champignon at the local markets. It's a medium-sized one of the day's pick, by the way.

# People are friendly. They offer help whenever they see you lost and staring at a map to figure out the 11 different tram lines.

# Goteborg University has one of the best exchange student programs, with special courses for exchange students (because everything else is in Swedish), student buddies who actually organize things, dedicated administrative officers who reply emails on time, and even a special welcome dinner from the city council. This is what the cheapest student housing looks like (all furniture from IKEA). The armchair was originally just draped in white cloth, but I found a throw left behind by my predecessor, among other useful things. Of course, it's relatively the cheapest. I'm paying the equivalent of a fully furnished room in Singapore. The plus side is, this is student housing, so we get to cook and have parties.

# For photography, natural light can be very harsh. I had problems taking landscape photos when facing west in the afternoon, and when facing east in the morning (whether or not the sun was in the picture). Note the glare from the window in the first photo above. I had to draw the curtains to get a decent result for the second photo, and that was the light from a southeastern window on a sunny morning.

# It's beautiful, and the houses are pretty. The red house with the slate roof is typical of houses in the countryside. I have yet to see a building with peeling or weathered paint.

# The world has expanded. I learn that Nazis still exist in Germany (as a tiny and vehemently opposed minority), find out where all the police are hiding in Sweden, and realise that most European countries do not hold parades involving the military.

Malaysian Student Leader's Summit

The MSLS was a two-day conference which brought together Malaysian students from campuses worldwide to listen to and discuss perspectives on education, the arts, politics, and socio-economic issues in Malaysia. Highlights included a heated debate on the PPSMI issue, light verbal sparring between Khairy Jamaluddin and Tian Chua, and a forum on Article 153 (which protects the status and special rights of Bumiputeras and more specifically, the Malay race).

So much was discussed that I eventually ended up with 23 pages of notes (relax. I used an A6 notebook). Over the next few days I'll post my thoughts on the "topik-topik hangat" which were discussed.

On PPSMI

"Bahasa Melayu mesti dimartabatkan." ~Dato' Saifudin bin Abdullah, deputy minister of higher education

"What are you going to do with a language whose value ends at KLIA or LCCT?" ~Wong Chun Wai, chief editor, The Star

My discussion group examined this issue. We decided that the government could have maintained the bilingual version of PPSMI while working on recruiting and training more English teachers. Teaching Maths and Science in English was not going to devalue the Malay language or produce students less proficient in Malay, as the Malay language syllabus is of a very high standard. We also decided that PPSMI failed to produce results because it was not planned and implemented in a wholistic manner, taking into account all the factors necessary for such a large-scale change.

The education system as a whole suffers from a huge problem in human resources and quality control measures. The system has failed to attract sufficient numbers, to adequately train and correctly deploy the teachers, whether in English or other subjects. Thus, change was far too sudden for teachers and students to be able to cope. On hindsight, the ministry might have commenced in stages, from educating the teachers to teach in English (starting from the training colleges, not through crash courses), raising the numbers of English teachers and the overall standard of English education, and then switching Maths and Science to English. Special care would need to be taken with allocating greater resources and more teachers to rural areas

Admittedly, though, this is easy to say only in hindsight. The original purpose of the switch lies in the murky regions between a desire to raise the standard of Maths and Science education and a desire to raise the standard of English education. Unfortunately teaching in English only helped widen the urban-rural divide as urbanites could choose to work in Malay or English, while rural students still depended on learning in Malay.

In my view (not my group's view), the question of which language to learn in is less important than the larger problems of teaching quality and student quality. The problems with human resources I have stated above. As for quality of students, the grade curves are toggled to the point that the passing mark can be as low as 20%, and the grades for As unbelievably low, producing A-students who sometimes can barely qualify for anything other than a public university. We need to recover the integrity of our education system and be brave enough to face the fact that it is failing to produce results in students, instead of tweaking the results to look good.

Finally, reverting the PPSMI is a wise choice if one has evaluated that the urban-rural divide has indeed widened, and if this effect is deemed to weigh more heavily against the arguments for keeping PPSMI. This seemed to be Dato' Saiful's justification of the decision. It is one which I actually accept, as urban students can afford the sacrifice more than rural students can afford another ten years of struggling in English while the government rushes to increase their standard of English--no easy task, when teachers are unwilling to be deployed to rural areas. It may be a step back, but if "they," whoever they are, can define a direction to take and stick to it after this, I wouldn't be so worried. The thing is, nobody knows who really studied the matter and who had a hand in the issue. The mess in human resource allocation is not just in the implementation but in the planning as well. Is the government relying on experts and academics in the field who can produce unbiased statistical data? Most likely not. If they are, then they aren't making the most of it by publishing the reports and communicating with more transparency. The habit of tweaking results is widespread. It's not just in our grades, it's in statistics and "investigations". So right now the decision to cancel PPSMI just looks politically motivated and nobody knows what "they" are going to decide next, and what "they" want to do with the education system in Malaysia. The lack of transparency and the shackles which bind educational policies to national politics worry me more than reverting to Bahasa Melayu.