The New 'Open-market' System

Today marks my second week as a PISMP (Program Ijazah Sarjana Muda Pendidikan) student semester 1. So far, the lecturers are good, giving us positive motivations all the time and nothing much works to do yet. My group and I have successfully presented the first topic of Philosophy in Education (I know my classmates were bored, luckily we’ve prepared a set of questions for them to find out during the presentation, so we knew they were paying attention) today although I was a bit nervous for I didn’t speak any English words during the holidays.

This semester, we have Bahasa Malaysia as one of our subjects. I'm not saying that I cannot speak or understand Malay, but it was quite a struggle to balance my Malay speaking skills after becoming so much blended with English words, if you know what I mean! But I know I’ll be just fine. I speak Malay everyday anyway, except not the standard one. Sabahan malay.LOL.

Oh, btw, IPG (Institut Pendidikan Guru) now has a new system about posting. Teachers from IPG will be put in open-market together with the teachers from Universities, except our choices are limited to Primary Schools only. Therefore there’s no such thing such as ‘secured job’ anymore. Only the high-performance teachers will be posted to schools and I say it is a real challenge to stand out in IPG!

Why a challenge? Because, you need to get an impressive CGPA of 3.5 and above, which is very hard to get if you are a TESL student in an English-centered institute (and we are! darn it), you must have a good leadership quality, active in co-curriculum activities, and yes, no discipline problems. Still the competition is very-very tough although you have all these qualities because there are too many clever+talented people in IPG and Universities. It really gives me goose bumps!

Anyway, I’ll try the best I can. I just need to be a little more hard working than before and leave all my bad behaviours behind!