If someone were to tell you, "I teach in a school in Selangor-the most developed state in Malaysia-and I have students who can hardly read and write", what would your reaction be?
It was during my 5th day in school that I realized something about the class I was teaching – nearly half of my students did not understand Bahasa Malaysia, the national language that every student is taught. It was really then that I realized how far behind many of the kids in my school really were.
The blows came hard and fast – finding out some students couldn't read or write one day, and a student who could not subtract numbers, even using his fingers the next. A few weeks later, I had to teach a boy how to write a simple sentence in English for an hour. He was 17. He couldn't spell properly and had trouble writing letters even after I had read them out one by one. The thought that came to my mind was that: this is Malaysia, not some war torn Third World country. This boy’s gone through 10+ years of formal education and he still couldn't write! This, in effect, is the result of having kids who are so far behind that they never have the chance to learn anything in school.
What are their futures going to be like? I’ll be frank – we know that many of our students drop out and join gangs, participating in snatch thefts and robberies that you hear about each day. Look at the root causes, and you find a child that comes from a broken family, one that never got the education he/she deserved and had no option but to join a gang to sustain themselves, if not their families.
Along the way, we found that personal attention works wonders when it came to our students learning, with some of our students jumping 2-3 grade levels within the span of 3 months if given proper personal attention. We also knew that our school had a massive problem: 200 of our students had failed a basic literacy test, and the scale of the issue was too large for the teachers in the school to solve alone.
It was then that we realized that we would need help from as many people as possible who were willing to volunteer and give their time to close the gap for our students; to free our students from the vicious cycle that they find themselves in through no fault of their own. Thus the extra classes were born.
