Days ago, my dad gave me some sheets of paper which apparently were a set of English examination papers for elementary school students. He works as an elementary school and kindergarten supervisor here in my hometown. It is customary that he is in charge of the examination papers proofreading several weeks prior to test. His English is not really good now and then so he asked for my ‘professional’ assistance (I got paid for this, don’t ask the amount, you’ll never believe it, folks).
My dad told me I did not have to work really hard because who made the exam papers was a bunch of certified teachers. He emphasized on the word printed in bold as if it was highly unlikely for me to find errors or mistakes there. I, nonetheless, was challenged to prove my dad wrong.
And I did succeed! It is not something to be bragging about, literally. Quite effortlessly, I (and perhaps some NON-English department freshmen equipped with proper knowledge on basic English) would detect the errors they made. The errors might look trivial yet fundamental. My grammar radar was continually beeping while perusing the papers. Some punctuations were mispositioned, some others were omitted. Capitalization was sometimes ignored, a number of misspellings occured and on top of that, some misconceptions were found. These misconceptions mislead those naive students to a worse understanding of English in the future. That is what we all have to be concerned about.
I gave the papers back to my dad and he of course never expected to find errors as many. He even asked me “Are you sure they made such an unexpectedly high number of mistakes? Some of them are certified, son”.
So this is the conclusion I eventually arrived at. Certainly the word ‘certified’ is utterly overestimated. Being held the title ‘certified’ does not necessarily make someone capable of performing his/her jobs. My dad told me afterwards that some of certified teachers are to get this based on sheer luck. They actually did not do anything impressive or beneficial to the school they are working at. They are just lucky! Then I asked by heart, what’s the point of teachers certification??!
I know being overly critical and pessimist is never good for us but there may be some times when we really have to review what the government is doing. They at times create more problems than they solve. And as a good citizen, I do feel obliged to tell them that some policies they make are far from success. How can we jeopardize the nation’s future by appointing incompetent teachers to teach our children?
Akhlis's Blog 