The ceiling fan above the blackboard spun with a lazy, rhythmic creak—a heartbeat that matched the ticking of the clock. It was 2:45 PM on a Tuesday at Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan Taman Damai, the sticky time of day when the smell of fried noodles from the canteen drifted into the classrooms and settled into the pores of the students' white uniforms.
These schools use Mandarin or Tamil as the medium of instruction, with Malay as a compulsory second language. They are famous for two things: discipline and heavy homework loads.
Faizal had seen him. The man, Cikgu Tan, was an anomaly. He was Chinese, but spoke Bahasa Melayu with a thick, almost rural Kedah accent. He wore sandals. And during the Sejarah period, instead of making them copy notes from the textbook, he had drawn a squiggly line on the whiteboard.
The “Baiduri” Class: In many national schools, non-Muslim students leave the classroom for Moral Studies while Muslim students attend Islamic Studies.
Structure of the Malaysian Education System