PDK Semenyih Visit

Before anything, I would like to mention that this was not my first visit to a special needs center. I have been to two different special needs center before this, which were PDK (Pusat Dalam Komuniti) Bukit Changgang and Sekolah Khas Klang. However, to say that I did not gain anything from the visit would also be incorrect. I learned lots of new things regarding the PDK as a whole and also the differences between the two PDKs that I visited.

My first impression about the center would be that it was pretty big for a PDK and it housed considerably more students and staffs as well. The PDK also had more proper facilities than the one I had visited previously. It has a swimming pool for physiotherapy purposes used by the cerebral palsy students every tuesday and also a visual therapy room with air-conditioning to boot. It also had a proper kitchen and two average-sized bathrooms and the building was quite big compared to PDK Bukit Changgang. The main reason for this would be that PDK Semenyih had lots of people adding facilities to the PDK itself as PDK Semenyih was more renowned in terms of publicity. From what I observed around the office, there were lots of newspaper articles showing the PDK students' achievements in the musical field. It is due to this that PDK Semenyih had more people funding it rather than other PDKs which only made connections with the local society such as PDK Bukit Changgang.

As for the staff, there were about eight of them assigned to the PDK and their work started at 8 o'clock in the morning and finishes at 2 o'clock n the afternoon. This was also new to me as PDK Bukit Changgang had less staff, that is four to five people per day and their work hours was shorter which was from 8 o'clock in the morning until either 11 to 12 o'clock in the noon depending on the students' availability. I also took this chance to actually talk to one of the staff about the specifics of PDKs in general. The PDKs are actually non-governmental organisations created by the Jabatan Kebajikan Masyarakat (JKM) and all the staff are chosen by the JKM. An interesting fact that I found out while interviewing one of the staff was that the staffs are picked by JKM with the minimum requirement of having an SPM (Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia) and no more than that. This means that the staff that works in PDKs have only the bare minimum knowledge in handling special needs individuals as they were only given basic training after being drafted during recruitment.

Now, I will focus on the observations I have made during the visit. On the day of the visit, most of the students were absent as they had gone to the PDK Convention in Berjaya Times Square in Kuala Lumpur and the students of PDK Semenyih were asked to perform at the convention as well. The ones that came during our visit were the ones not performing during the convention. The staffs who had no rest whatsoever came to work as usual and they did activities with the remaining students who came without neglecting their duties. The activities carried out by the staffs were simple ones such as singing and dancing and a little bit of art. As I said earlier, most of the students were absent so not much activity were carried out that day. Even the students who came on our visiting day were to leave earlier than they normally do. Most of the students responded well to the art activity but only half of them followed when one of the staff conducted the sing and dance session.

Some may see them as not being serious with their work or not being diligent enough when carrying out their duties. It may be due to the way they spoke or their expressions but being a native malay speaker, I see it as a way they interact with the students. I am emphasizing this point as when we had the debriefing with the year 2 students, one of them maybe had a misconception that what the staffs did as being lazy or not being serious with their work. I did not voice my opinion then and there but I think I should at least make it clear in this reflection that the staffs were being as dedicated as they can in caring for the students in the PDK.

Further inquiries led me to the fact that PDK Semenyih was established during the 90's which means that this project had started long ago. I also asked one of the staff about the mission and vision of PDK Semenyih. The staff was a bit shocked by my very practical question and told me that in general, the PDKs' mission would be to at least make the students able to take care of themselves and the vision would be for the students to be able to function in societies. PDK Semenyih does have a specific mission and vision on paper but this should be the general idea on why PDKs exist.

In my opinion, PDKs in general need to be given more attention and need to be restructured so that they become more organised to better suit special needs students. They should have more specialized teachers rather than caretakers who barely pass the minimum requirement for employment. I will not deny that all the staffs in the PDK are very dedicated and caring towards the students but just that would not be enough to improve and bring about the students abilities as human beings. As one of the year 2 students said, the PDK might be well-funded compared to other PDKs but even that is still not enough for the PDK to provide for the students in it.

2nd Visit

For the second week of the visit to the school, the group allocated half of the visit to doing activities and the other half for completing a scrapbook for presentation purposes during the closing week. First of all, let me start by saying that the second week visit was quite packed and full of miscalculations which made it a very hectic one.

For the first half, we had one of our group members teach the whole class on the three tenses which are the present tense, past tense and continuous present tense. Two problems rose from this. One was that the group member assigned to teaching the students was a Hong Kong student, so the teaching style was very fast paced and some of the slower learners in the class could not catch up to the group member’s pace. This led to some of the students having confusions about the lesson as we had them do a worksheet to assess their understanding of the topic. The other problem was that the group member assigned to teaching had mistakenly taught another type of tense and grouped it under one of the three tenses when teaching. This had also caused confusions in some of the students who actually knew that the tense that the group member was not supposed to be one of the three tenses. In our small group, we were able to clear up the misunderstanding but I don’t know about the other groups as we all had our hands full at that time and did not have time to inform the others about it.

However hectic the first half, the second one was more. I had dreaded the scrapbook part since the last visit because based on my own personal experience going to special needs schools for two semesters when I was doing International Baccalaureate, I had never preferred to carry out artistic activities. I had a ‘personal assistant’ to do that for me. My worries turned out to be true. During the activity, I had exactly no idea which goes where and when the students ask me on the decoration of the scrapbook, I practically asked them back what they were talking about. The students were better at art that I was. I had to actually ask around for opinions on how to do some of the decorations on the scrapbook from the leader and also, unexpectedly, Dr. Tida who was passing by also gave some opinions. In the end we managed to finish the scrapbook eventhough it took us a bit more time than the other groups. I admit that I could not do art that much but if I had researched a bit on decorating scrapbooks and such I would not have had that much problem as I had for the second day.

In a nutshell, the second visit made me think that planning thoroughly is something very vital in conducting activities. Truth be told, the second week visit was without much planning. Not as much as the first visit. The only planned part would be the tenses lesson part and that was only planned by the person teaching the tenses. The group member did not inform us of anything or gave us any layout of how the activity was going to be carried out so the group hardly did any error checking on that. For the scrapbook half, I think if I had planned a bit earlier on how to decorate some parts of the scrapbook it would have gone off without much complications. It was purely my weakness on that part.

1st Visit (10/10/14)

When I did International Baccalaureate back in pre-u there was a requirement for us to participate in the community. It was called Creative, Action, Service. In short, CAS. There is also a requirement for us to make reflections for every single participation so the writing of reflections is not something new to me. However, an experience of having activities with these SJK(T) Ladang Semenyih kids is a new one as I never did activities with school kids before.

After arriving there first thing in the morning, all of us introduced ourselves to the class we were assigned to. The first activity that we did was the "Ball Throwing Game". The name in itself is self-explanatory that it involves throwing balls around. The rationale of this activity is to let the students familiarize themselves with the teachers and their peers as they have to call the person's name as they throw the ball. As trivial as it seems, the activity does help a lot in terms of student-teacher interaction. I experienced this firsthand as after the activity the students approached the teachers more and often called upon them too.

The next activity was the "Signature Bingo" where the students need to fill in boxes filled with specific points by searching for other students with the points stated in the bingo boxes. The teachers also took part in this activity by giving one statement of their own that fits some of the points in the bingo. This activity aims to make the students communicate with each other and make them use proper sentences in asking others of the points in the bingo.

"Fear in a hat", another ice-breaking activity that we did was very insightful in my perspective. The activity was for the students to each write their fears of going into secondary schools on a piece of paper and fold them before putting them into a hat. What intrigued me were the students' answers to some of their fears. When the teacher asked whether they would miss their primary school friends, they said they have facebook. When we asked them whether they would miss their primary school teachers, some said no because the teacher was always scolding them. Right after that, we did "dreams and ideals" with them. This activity requires them to draw and write their dream job, school, and things they want to have when they grow up. This activity also got me thinking that children nowadays are being more and more creative in the way they perceive things. The boy who would not miss his teachers earlier wanted to be a photographer and he wanted his dream school to be that without teachers. I, for one would never even think about it when I was in primary six. There are also lots of other unique things that the students come up with during this activity.

Before recess, we did "connecting stories" with the students. We gave them a theme to start a sentence and each student in the group was to continue the sentences to make a story. It was during this activity that I saw some students are weaker than the others in constructing sentences and speaking in english as each student has to contribute a sentence to the story. However, as we introduced a lighter and more general theme for the story which was to start the sentence with "Once upon a time", the students in the group participated more in connecting the story. This may be due to the fact that its easier for them all to connect to a general theme rather than a specific one.

After recess, we used most of the time to brief the students about the scrapbook project that we are going to do with them on our next visit and to be presented when they come to the university two weeks after that. Here, again I would like to repeat what I said earlier above that these students are very creative. The group that I was with was assigned to do the "Fears" part and as we were discussing on the arrangements of the material, one student suggested something very interesting. He suggested that we do a pop-up version of a hat and as the scrapbook opens up, the materials inside would pop out of the hat as well. I was very amazed at his idea on the scrapbook.

Another peculiar thing that I found out about the class that we were assigned to was that there is this one particular kid who was very excellent in both his communication skills and his writing. When everyone else were busy doing the acivity, he had finished first and went around doing other stuff as in my opinion, it is not that he lost interest. It is just that he was too advanced already. When How was speaking to him about robotics, he listened eagerly and he understood the complicated things that How was explaining to him. It turns out that his father was an engineer and he had learned all those stuff from his father as well. This really shows to me that a person's personal upbringing really affects how they do in schools to a certain extent. I know, it has been proven in research but to see it for myself is quite the experience.

There was only one thing that I think is lacking in the way that we conducted these activities and that is obviously the abundance of students. The activities that we carried out does have to have active participation by the students but too many students participating in the activities decreases the effectiveness as some more passive students would just be concealed by the crowd of active students. The number of students also made it quite hard for us to control them at times and these would be during the times where the activities involved lots of action like the "Signature Bingo" game. The classroom practically became a hive full of bees, buzzing as they flew around. In terms of speech, there were no problems as the students were able to fully communicate with the teachers in english. They only sometimes communicate with their friends in their native language. That being said, I hope during the next visit I get to experience more and more of these students' creative minds.