Education: England vs Indonesia

Assalaamu’alaikum everyone!

As requested by a dear friend Muhammad Firmansyah Kasim, S.T., D.Phil (cand), I will share some experiences I had in my early education.

Infant 1-2, St. Marks Church of England Primary School, Manchester, England (1992-1994)

–          One day during a free play session I gathered my friends to make a Power Rangers formation short-drama. I told my teacher “Mrs Robinson, we could make a robot!”. She called the entire class to stop whatever they were doing, and announced that “Adin (this was my name when I was in England) and his friends have something to show you!” . We performed the short drama, then the entire class applauded.

–          One day, my mom taught me to make a simple cartoon. Two pieces of paper, page 1 shows a man with hands up, page two shows the same man with hands down. I just flick page one back and forth, and you can see a man moving his hands up and down. When I showed this to my teacher, she took me around the school from class to class to show them what I can do.

–          In talking about social rules or other stuff, somehow everyone was noisy to share our opinions, or given small group projects, etc. Yes, we were 5-6 years old. Imagine how “critical” we were. It was fun, though.

Grade 2 SDN Percobaan IKIP, Rawamangun, Republik Indonesia (1994-1995)

–          One day during breaktime I gathered my friends to make a Power Rangers formation short-drama. I told my teacher “Mrs xxx, we could make a robot!”. She did not look away from the paper she was reading, and said “Oh, okay.” Then continued reading.

–          One day in an exam, a question was “what do you do if a thief was beaten up in the market?”. The correct answer according to the text was “stop them”. Being 7-8 years old, imagining a scene where grown up men were beating each other, I wrote “I will tell my dad”. My answer was marked as “incorrect” because “stopping them is the correct thing to do”

–          One day in an exam, a question was “how do you prevent flies from getting to your food?”. In England, we did not have flies except in long-unattended rubbish bins (which doesnt happen since the rubbish collecting system was good) or food just left for a very long period of time (this never happened. We either ate it, or threw it). It was less than one year since I returned from living 5 years in England, and the use of “tudung saji” (a thing we use to cover the food) was completely foreign to me. I answered the most obvious answer: “finish the food”. It was marked “incorrect”

–          It was Pendidikan Moral Pancasila class. The class was divided into some who were copying what the teacher was saying/writing on the board, some who were drawing random pictures on their books, others who are chatting with each other, and a few less fortunate ones who were standing infront of class as punishment for chatting with each other.

How cute <3