Spring rolls, fish balls, and sausages

I'm exhausted, I lost my voice and I'm watching the England vs. Ecuador match with an uninterested mind. Today's was a super busy day, not only for me, but the whole school. Enthusiastic parents have been buzzing around in school as early as 7 a.m. selling food and drinks that they donated for the fundraising event. The funds are for the new buildings to cater for the increasing students' population. Every teacher is entitled to a stall to sell some goods. What do I sell? Spring rolls, fish balls and sausages… all deep fried, unhealthy yet tempting to the mouth of little children. That's right, the ultimate Malaysian children's favorite, and as expected; everything was sold off in a surprisingly fast time… God, I felt proud of myself and the parents who were helping at the stall. Even though, I felt a pinch of guilt in selling unhealthy food

It has been 2 weeks since I started teaching. While it’s not a new thing to me, as I have been teaching on and off for the past few years, the urge to give the best to the students has been much stronger this time. I pitied them for needing to experience the changes of teachers throughout the year. There’s this sensitive issue of Chinese and Tamil schools being victimized by the education system. While there’s abundance of teachers in national schools, teachers have been lacking in the other types of school.

While national schools have facilities provided fully by government, we, the Chinese schools have to sell spring rolls, fish balls, and sausages to raise funds to build new classes. Our headmistress told us before that the education department’s officers haven’t been kind to us, when we tried to ask for more teachers in the school. Their response was more or less like,

“If you don’t have enough teachers, don’t accept that many students lah!”
“It’s your problem if you don’t have enough teachers or classes for your students.”

What a good answer. So where do you aspect the students will go? Probably they were hoping that parents will choose to send their kids to national school instead. Didn’t they stop and think for awhile... Why do parents want to send their kids to Chinese schools? Mind you that we’re not even talking about Chinese students, but there are Malays and Indians students as well in our school. Simple reasoning: They just want to master a third language to enhance their chances in the future where China is controlling the world economy. What’s wrong with that?? Shouldn’t the government support the enthusiasms of parents about their children’s education, no matter which school they chose?

Probably, you would think that I’m grumbling and complaining because of the exhaustion of selling fried spring rolls, fish balls and sausages. Honestly, I don’t mind doing that; it’s just this inequality that we’re put on to, it’s sort of too much for me to bear it. Wonder what’s next for us, for the Chinese schools and for Chinese education? I told my students to be grateful of their chances to learn Chinese. And yet, many of them don’t understand the battle we’re fighting. Well, they are just kids after all. Hope that they’ll understand our efforts someday...

By the way, England won the match, 1-0 through a free-kick by the dehydrated Beckham. Disappointing performance by England though.