Great Crystal International School Surabaya. After ten years...

Great Crystal International School Surabaya.

After ten years in Indonesia I thought I had heard all the *beep* from schools, but GCIS takes the cake. It’s too long a story to tell here, just post your email and I will send all the details. Suffice it to say I lost almost 2 juta and 2 good Aussie textbooks I loaned to a teacher there. Probably the most amazing thing was when I took over a Primary One class to help them as they were short of teachers. It was the first day of the new semester and many students didn’t have books so I just started playing games like “I Spy” with them, with a small twist, after the word was guessed they had to write it on the whiteboard. All was going well with words like desk and pencil, but one student spelled table “TABEL” I corrected the spelling but was immediately told by the Principal that I should not have done so and hadn’t I heard of “Creative Spelling” near enough is good enough. The Principal was an American woman who has been in Indonesia for 2 years, she still didn’t realize that the student wasn’t being ”Creative” at all, just spelling in Bahasa Indonesia. I wonder what the parents will say when they find out they are paying lots of money for their children to learn to spell in Indonesian and not English. When you teach a young child a mistake, they often carry that mistake for the rest of their lives.