Disclaimer: In Real Life is a platform for everyday people to share their experiences and voices. All articles are personal stories and do not necessarily echo In Real Life’s sentiments.
I remember the day they released our UPSR results.
Our class teachers disclosed them to us one by one – most of them anyway. The results of the students who did well were obviously announced loudly and celebrated in the class. The handful of us who did not get good results, weren’t. You can imagine the embarrassment, especially with our parents waiting outside of our class.
Me failing my BM paper came as a surprise to me. As a young 12-year-old boy I had ambitious dreams, and finding out I’d be held back a year crushed my confidence. Needless to say, I went home and cried all night after all the scolding.
It felt like the end of the world.
On the first day of secondary school, the embarrassment did not get any better
A class of 25 of us were separated from the other Form 1 kids at the beginning of the next school year. I remember being in the assembly hall of my new school for the first time: there was a very distinct segregation between the peralihan kids and the upper forms. You get all these dirty looks from not only the students, but surprisingly also the teachers.
I guess being held in a “remove” class isn’t the best first impression you can make, especially in a new setting. Every time someone I knew back in primary school came up to me and asked what class I was in, I had to tell them with shame.
We were treated by the teachers poorly at a young age
I remember there was a lecture in one of the first few classes I had in high school, where the discipline teacher came in and kept us in check by constantly reminding us of how much we messed up. We were told that we were already in the slumps of the school by being a year behind everyone, and to stay out of trouble as we were already labeled the “bad batch”.
That kind of hostility wasn’t a one off thing – it was like that for us throughout the rest of the year. As kids, we were made to look up to teachers and respect them as they were supposed to be our foundational educators and they play a crucial role for us growing up. But I didn’t know how to accept the discrimation from my teachers.
The punishments inflicted onto us peralihan kids were also always more severe when compared to the others. I remember the perfect example being one of my friends from primary school in Form 1 forgetting to bring a textbook and got off with a simple reminder and allowed to share a textbook as class went on. But when a similar infringement was committed by one of my classmates, he ended up receiving a slap from the same teacher.
Of course, we didn’t get the same hostile treatment from everyone
Don’t get me wrong, the incidents I mentioned above were the extremes among the extreme. We were also fortunate enough to have the good in the bad. There were a handful of teachers who treated us as equal to the other classes and never let any discrimination get in the way of their teaching.
Some took the time to put in extra effort for a few of us who needed a little bit more guidance, while others put up with us with more patience. The kids obviously responded a lot better to that energy as compared to the teachers who were more hostile.
This made me question whether the entire school system was designed against us, or if it was just a few specific teachers who had a personal problem with us remove kids.
Moving in to Form 1, I was put in a class of kids younger than me
No one really discloses to the classes that me or the other peralihan kids were already in the school a year before or that we were a year older. Except that us peralihan kids already had our name tags from the year before, while the fresh form 1 kids hadn’t. That was the first thing I noticed on the first day of my Form 1 class as a 14-year-old.
We were a fresh face in the class just like everyone else, but with name tags already on our uniforms. This made me feel both a little more uncomfortable at the same time, simply because it felt like another year of embarrassment was ahead of me.
But I slowly learned to embrace my identity and I made sure I did my best
I slowly understood that being a year older than my classmates just meant that I had an advantage more than anything, and that I didn’t really have too much to be ashamed of anymore.
So the next 5 years were nothing short of hard work for me as I told myself I didn’t want to have anything to be embarrassed of anymore. You can say I was using my self determination to make something of myself. I wanted to prove to myself that I was still the same ambitious kid that I was before secondary school.
I ended Form 5 with a bang, by scoring 6 A’s for SPM, and I carried that work ethic with me to Form 6 too where I secured a 3.95 GPA.
I was eventually able to get into Universiti Malaya, my dream school.
Being in peralihan doesn’t make you any less accomplished
After more than 10 years, I still wish that someone had come up to me back then and told me this. Instead, I wasted a good couple of years being too ashamed of myself and I believe it really stunted my personal growth. Looking back, it was the social hierarchy more than anything, but eventually I’ve come to realise that one year of being held back in school just meant that I had a whole extra year to grow at my own pace.
If there was advice I’d give to the peralihan kids today, it’s that any early stages in secondary school won’t determine the path of your life. It might seem like an embarrassment, but at the end of the day it’s how you recover from the hits you take in life.
It’s a marathon anyway, not a sprint.
For more stories like this, read: 3 Culture Shocks I Felt After Going From An SRJK(C) To An SMK School and What It’s Like Going To A Chinese School In Malaysia As A Malay
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