Save Our Children 2008!

Semalam aku dan hyatt menghadiri majlis penutup iSina School Holidays Reading Programme 2008 di Anjung Rahmat, Gombak. Kami bertolak agak awal sebab takut sesat walaupun Gombak dengan UK taklah jauh mana. Akhirnya, kami tiba pun awal juga. Jumpa dengan kak Lizah, penganjur program ni. Kecil molek orangnya. Lagi kecil daripada aku. Tapi, kami tak sempat berbual panjang sebab kak Lizah sibuk membuat persiapan majlis.

Program ni sebenarnya adalah program membaca untuk kanak-kanak yang menghadapi masalah membaca. Program kali ini adalah untuk membantu kanak-kanak yang kurang bernasib baik iaitu anak yatim piatu, miskin, anak ibu tunggal, anak OKU, anak mualaf, anak daripada keluarga besar dan anak daripada keluarga yang ibu/bapa/adik-beradik berpenyakit.

Penglibatan aku bermula sewaktu aku terima e-mail daripada Zufina November lepas pasal program ni. Bilamana aku baca mengenai ramai budak yang tak reti membaca walaupun dah darjah 6, rasa sedih pun ada, kesian pun ada. Teringat masa aku sekolah kat GRS2 dulu. Ramai juga budak kelas aku yang tak lancar membaca dan menulis walaupun masa tu kami dah darjah 6. Jadi, aku rasa, mereka ni patut dibantu. Nak pergi ajar mereka tu aku tak mampu (mengajar memerlukan tahap kesabaran yang amat tinggi!!). Apa yang termampu, adalah hulurkan sedikit sumbangan $$.

Balik dari majlis tu, aku rasa rugi pula tak war-war dengan bersungguh-sungguh dengan rakan-rakan yang lain sebab ada lagi kanak-kanak yang memerlukan penajaan (untuk program kali ni). Insya-allah, kalau ada umur panjang, tahun ni boleh hulurkan sumbangan lagi.

Di sini aku sertakan sedikit petikan daripada e-mail yang aku terima. Agak panjang, tapi, kalau ada masa bacalah sampai habis. Mana tahu kalau-kalau tahun ni ada lagi program macam ni.

THE iSINA SCHOOL HOLIDAYS READING AND WRITING
PROGRAMME

Assalamu'alaikum wrt wbt. My name is Rahmalizah Ali and I am actively involved in helping children master the skill of reading. For the past three years I've been involved in teaching/training young school going children how to master the skill of reading. It has been an eventful journey and an inspiring one as well; all because of two main reasons:

1) Too many school children in Malaysia suffer the gruesome consequences due to their inability to master the reading skill "in time".

2) No real efforts are taken to seriously understand this problem, thus leaving these children with no future in quality education.

A survey carried out by NUTP (National Union of the Teaching Profession) shows that there are about 5% of school children in most of the country's SK (Sekolah Kebangsaan) who have not mastered the skill of reading and writing. These children are from Standard 2 up to Standard 6. The percentage isbelieved to be much higher in the rural area. The percentage is also much higher if pupils from Std 1 are included. In a survey carried out by the Ministry of Education (April 2006) has revealed a startling fact that more than 35% of std 1 pupils in Peninsular Malaysia were unable to master the reading and writing skills even after 4months of schooling.

The state of Terengganu recently has also declared concern after discovering 7,430 of its Std 1 pupils have not been able to master the skill of reading and writing after months of undergoing school lessons (Utusan : 23 Mei 2008).

It is also a known fact that there are still a big number of secondary students in Malaysia who still have not mastered the reading and writing skills. (NUTP survey shows 2.66%).

HOW I GOT STARTED…

When my own son showed difficulty in mastering the reading skill, I too was dumbfounded. At first I thought it must be the kindy teacher who did not know how to teach. And so, I enrolled him in a reading programme (which was hyped to be the BEST so far method in the country at that time). However,the programme failed to make him read correctly.

Being an IT professional/ analyst, I began to start analysing the problem. I began doing my own little research in 1999. I bought all the reading programmes (Bahasa Malaysia) and books to teach him myself and found that his response to all of them were still very poor. I began analysing reading (english) methods and Iqra' (arabic) methods and found some alarming facts about the skill of reading and what traditional methods in Bahasa Melayu have been doing to a big minority of our children today.

Before I knew it, in 2006, I published my first book. It is a step-by-stepguide for parent/teacher to start teaching the reading skill (Bahasa Melayu) to a young child. It was not meant to be commercialized. We printed the book because it was cheaper to print than to photocopy the programme and distribute to friends and family members with similar problems. The programme was alhamdulillah,… successful so far. The objective of theprogramme was to enable MAJORITY of the children to understand and master the reading skill, with ease, efficiency and speed. I needed a name to distinguish the method from others, so I called it i-Sina; taken from
the famous ibnu Sina.

Soon, more parents came for my help. By end of 2006, I have developed another method to assist "confused" children to unravel their misconceptionof reading to a proper approach to understanding and correcting their way of reading through a series of remedial exercises. I call it the Kaedah Pemulihan i-Sina.

Through this method, my team and I have assisted many school children.I was alarmingly surprised and pleased to find that my years of research had paid off and all the children responded well to the programme in such short periods of time. We were pleasantly surprised that more than 80% of the"pemulihan" students, showed positive responses and were progressing well within 2 to 4 weeks of coaching and training. The best part was we even helped many dyslexia children to overcome their difficulty in reading and writing after their many unsuccessful attempts of special lessons elsewhere.

I have even developed a fast method to teach writing to these special children. Contrary to the belief that once you can read, you can write; I found that most of these children who have just mastered reading, still cannot write. The fact is reading and writing are two separate skills andboth require different set of exercises (eg: one can read the Quranic verseswell but can he write them as efficiently?). For a dyslexic child with severe sequencing problem, writing (penulisan) is a nightmare!! With the Kaedah Penulisan iSina, we help special children to master the skill of writing efficiently. Not writing letters…. But writing words and building sentences on their own.

Of course you need to be able to read first before you can write. That was why the first command of Allah SWT that came down to Rasulullah SAW was"IQRA'"…. Read!

THE MISSION

So many children in Malaysia suffer from inproficiency in reading. Some of them appear to be able to read, but because they are reading incorrectly or too slowly, thus they still are unable to comprehend what they read, resulting in poor understanding and eventually poor examination results. Children coming from the average and above average income family are luckier than their counterparts, having options to be sent to extra tuitions and special lessons. However, the under-privileged children are not so lucky.

I have met several children who fall under the "poor" category and are unable to get themselves out of their illiteracy condition without help. Their parents are too busy getting food on the table and the state ofilliteracy of their children are not prioritized. Heck, even their neighbours' children are like that, so why bother? It is even more sad to see parents with disabilities such as blindness, deaf and dumb, etc who are concerned about their children but are unable to assist them in any way.

The only way out for these children to a prosperous formal education is via their "remedial" teacher (cikgu pemulihan) in their school. If luck is on their side, they will get a concerned, sincere and creative teacher who can pull them out of their dark world into a world of literacy. Else, they will remain blind to letters for years to come. Excellence in education is beyond their reach and their future remain dim. Unfortunately, this is the case inmost remedial classes; the teachers do not care; and even the ones that do, do not know what to do to help. Thus, majority of these children remain illiterate.

Hence, my mission began. I started the sponsor-a-child programme in Nov2007 and approached my friends and families to support these under-privileged children to give them the reading and writing skills they so urgently require to ensure a better future in their education. During the school holidays in 2007, we held a 26 days programme and helped 49 out of 59 children to read and write and almost all of them were taken out of their remedial classes beginning of the school year 2008, alhamdulillah. Since then I have started a class to continue assisting under-privileged children; about 10 to 15 children every month.

The under-privileged children that we have helped came from around Kuala Lumpur (believe it or not). They are from the PPR (projek Perumahan Rakyat) and PPRT (projek Perumahan Rakyat Termiskin) DBKL homes/flats and most of them come from very poor families. Our criteria for under-privilegedchildren are:

1) orphans

2) children of single mothers

3) children of disabled parents (eg: blind, deaf and dumb)

4) children of mu'alaf

5) children of poor-income families (household income of RM1500 and below)

6) children from big families and many dependants (eg: 8 and above children plus old grandparents)

7) children from family with illness (parents or other siblings with illness)

FACTS TO BE CONCERNED

When I started this mission to teach children how to read, I have discovereda few startling facts.

1) Most of these children who can't read in schools are Malay Muslim BOYS. Through
our experience, more than 65% of the remedial students in schools are boys. No wonder there is a major apprehension concerning the scarcity of qualified male undergraduates enrolled in our local universities. No wonder there are so many boys influenced by sordid unislamic cultures that tend to drain out their faith in Islam. No wonder the "mat rempits" are doubling in number by the year and juvenile crimes are in the rise.

2) Most of these children DO NOT suffer from learning disabilities such asDyslexia, or ADHD, and can be easily trained to read. They just don't UNDERSTAND the correct way of reading, and traditional methods DO NOT help. These traditional methods also contribute to many students NOT being able toread the english language efficiently.

3) By the time the children reach Year 4 (primary level) and still can't read, it is HIGHLY UNLIKELY for them to achieve quality learning (excellence is out of the question) in the remaining years of their formal education, and VERY LIKELY to start playing truant and perform other unbeneficial activities. What kind of future do you think lies for these unfortunatechildren?

4) Time is very crucial. We need to get these children to read ASAP (AS SOONAS POSSIBLE)!! Most of the teaching/training methods used in schools are not effective and poorly handled. As a result of that, these children remained in their "REMEDIAL (PEMULIHAN KHAS)" classes for months and even years, wasting precious time. Imagine if your child could only master the reading skill at year 2 primary, then he would have missed and have to catch up at least one year of his formal school lessons. What if the child started reading at level 6? How many years of lessons would he need to catch up?

5) Once these children have mastered reading much later than intended, probably in year 2 and above, their journey in formal education had just started; thus a training in "efficient-reading" , "comprehension" and "efficient-writing" needs to take place so that the children can "catch up"with their lessons in class. Otherwise, they can just read and yet, still perform poorly in school.

6) Most teachers liaising with these children (such as pemulihan khas, BM and class teachers) in primary level do not contribute to making things better (sorry if I've offended anyone), by calling and labeling these children as lazy, stupid, idiots etc… These children then begin to hate school and start to rebel by the time they reach secondary level. By then, any efforts to instill good learning behaviour is probably useless. Eventhough they can already read as early as in Year 3, to catch up is not entirely possible without help. So who will help them?

WHAT WE NEED TO DO

Please spread the word around. There's a school holiday programme that we conduct every year end. This year is no execption. Please help by sponsoring a child that needs help. If your own child needs help, please also let us know of how we can help. You can also sponsor your own child into the programme. We only assist to help you help more children.

I am looking for very generous sponsors with high understanding of performing amal jariah in this form. Education is the BEST form of amal jariah as it carries through even long after our death, insyaAllah. Imagine every beneficial word that a sponsored child reads and writes will too benefit us all. And every beneficial actions that the child performed from his reading and writing, will continue to nurture us. And as long as the"ilmu" continues to grow and flourish, we will be getting its fruits. InsyaAllah.

We are also seriously thinking into partnering with other parties to take this programme to other states to help more children. Seriously, if we don't do something now, we will have 5% of the nation's population consisting of uneducated and even illiterate youths. God knows we are probably facing it sooner than we think, looking at the juvenile cases already taking place in our schools.

For those who sincerely want to help out and support my mission and those who have generously helped out last year and the past few months, I sincerely hope one day Allah SWT will repay your kindness and generosity multiple times over. I thank all of you for your precious time.

Wassalam 'alaikum wrt.

RAHMALIZAH ALI