Challenging the pupils

Hmm...Voon, thanks for the comment but you didn't try typing it out. :P

See, what happened was I was teaching a chapter in Bahasa Melayu about lagu kebangsaan. And I think although I could write the lyrics out since my primary years, it was not until my secondary school years that I truly knew what the songs really meant. It is disheartening that Malaysians forget the lyrics to the national anthem after leaving school. Yup, don't deny it...how many of us can actually remember the entire song and our state song if we have not been singing it for years? (I'm glad that both my parents who are in their 60s could still remember the lyrics. I tested on them so many times!)

I digress. Anyway, I was teaching that chapter and the song lyrics were there for all to see. So, I tried my best to explain the lyrics to the Year 6 children and tried to instil in them the love for our country through an understanding of the song lyrics. After explaining the lyrics, I challenged them to write the lyrics of the Selangor song. The pupils were excited. Some started singing the song the moment I challenged them.They have been singing it for 6 years every week, no problem! My old school in a small town had problem after the first two lines and would start to murmur. The headmistress had to hold a competition to make them memorize the lyrics. This school, they didn't have problem with the lyrics, as far as I could see, they just had problem with the pronunciation of one or two unfamiliar words (or so I thought, how naive!).

So, the class of 33 pupils, 19 boys and 14 girls competed to write out the lyrics on the board. All 33 pupils did not get it right. The girls had a good start and wrote the first few lines well but the final 2 sentences were disastrous. The boys were rather hopeless from start to finish. I was laughing my head off. After correcting the lyrics and explaining the meanings, I erased the board and asked them to rewrite in their exercise books. I think many of them cheated, but still, there were still the few over-confident, don't want to listen in class, and do cincai work boys who produced the below for me. Take a look:

Pening oh...