Short Lived Teaching Appointments 2

or, What's it all about, Alfie?

Alfian being removed from his job as a teacher. That guy is a real lightning rod. And there are endless speculations about why it happened.

Most of these explanations have to do with who he is: that he’s gay (not 100% confirmed), Malay, a rebellious playwright, criticised the government in the past.

From what I have heard of him, there’s nothing to suggest that he’d be anything other than a good teacher. He knows how to reach out to his students, doesn’t condescend them.

Then there are people who said that what did him in was blogging about work. I dismissed it out of hand once. I thought that if they were to fire him because of that they would have told him and made it look less sinister. But that doesn’t mean it has nothing to do with a blog. But the fact is that he named the school he was teaching in. That could have been a big mistake.

But I still don't think it's serious enough to warrant sacking even a relief teacher. Sacking relief teachers are almost unheard of - it's like sacking a day job labourer - why not just let their time run out, and you can stop hiring them?

I have a theory that you can get plenty of crazy people to teach people in elite schools, since you know that they will be on the straight and narrow anyway. Put them together with a crazy teacher, and it will be “enrichment”, it will be “interesting”, but in the end the students will fall in line. In contrast, put a firebrand in a neighbourhood school, and he will incite people to rise up against the system. Tell them that the system is unjust, not to take things lying down.

I think they had considered him a threat to the system. But maybe this is giving them too much credit, because it actually implies they gave this matter some thought. Equally likely it was just "I don't like the looks of him", and out he went. And consider the circumstances in which he went in there – he wanted to go see what it was like teaching in a neighbourhood school. What might he have done? Blogging about it is one thing, would he have written a play that would paint the MOE in a very bad light?

My impression of the theatre scene in Singapore – no matter how much they purport to be against the system, or “daring” or “subversive”, it’s invariably populated by elites. The wall that separates the elites and the common man in Singapore is still intact, and with the construction of the Esplanade, it has become a fortress. It’s “say what you want, do what you like, but keep it in the family”.

The other thing is that somebody who was a top scorer in the “O” and “A” levels would actually go and teach in a neighbourhood school. He was all but breaching the divide that separates the elite schools from the bad. How were they going to stand for it?

He said that he was there to learn about what being in a neighbourhood school was like. Would that have counted against him? Wouldn’t they rather he be teaching? But I don’t doubt his teaching ability. It’s just that they can use that against him.

Would he have had an opposition party candidate on their hands? So in the end, I guess, they just got rid of him. If you looked at it from another point of view, he was a most unsuitable candidate, with all these minuses against him.

There are other theories about his sacking which are not so favourable towards him. Somebody analysed his blog entry accounts of his teaching at the school, and concluded that it was "orientalist" and condescending. Like a member of the elite looking at neighbourhood school students as though they were animals at the zoo. I took this one seriously for about all of 5 seconds. It's judging those writings very harshly if you want to go down that road.

Some people say that he engineered this all along. I can only expect that he will not be that surprised if they were to sack him, given how vociferously he had criticised the government in the past. And for him to have in mind what he was to do in the event of a sacking, as a contingent plan (ie this entry), that's possible. But to say that his intention of applying for the job had not been to gain the experience of teaching, but to embarrass the government in the event of his inevitable sacking, is ridiculous. He's a playwright first, and only incidentally a politician. No matter how political some of his writings are, they aren't, were never the main point.

I once had a teacher who taught me 6 months. Call him Bouncy. He was the director of a prominent theatre group in Singapore. But he left eventually. Never connected with the kids to the extent that Buddha did, you could say that Buddha was more of an extrovert. But sometimes I wonder if people in that line feel that you can’t really be too much your own person. One of my teachers was a transsexual. Call him / her Dragula. Don’t ask me how Dragula got the job. But at the end, she said to a friend of mine: don’t teach. Don’t be a fool. Not long after, she left for a corporate job and is now doing quite well. Even managed to get herself married.

I guess if you have this environment in the teaching service, you got to wonder if it’s healthy for the nation. I’m sure that many teachers get disillusioned in the end. All these well meaning people who fall by the wayside.