CHOICE

Choose one of these: “you fight and become a looser but then you get information, very useful information for the next fighting. Or you just stay home, not fighting. Not becoming a looser or a winner.
I hope you will choose the right choice.

LOOSER

My students attended an English competition.
And they didn’t win it. They looked very disappointed.
What should I say to relieve them?
I said:
“You had tried. And you had tried your best. God gives us a time to win so we can taste victory. And God also gives us a time to loose so we can taste failure.”
“Soon we will realize that the most perfect is God”
I hope they will be relieved.

DEBATE CONTEST

Becoming an adjudicator in an english debate contest makes me aware. Two groups which are in the debate stage should explore the topic deeply and equip themselves with various valid data. If not, one of them will be the looser.

LAZINESS

Most of my students are lazy to study. They have many reasons when I ask why. Anytime I ask them to study even in fifteen minutes. I think it is better than never. I hope they will listen and do what I ask them to do.

GOOD JAVANESE OR GOOD INDONESIAN

We are Javanese. Among the Javanese, we show our respects to older people by using higher lever of Java language (krama inggil) when we talk to them. Often my students can’t use the proper Javanese when they talk to their teachers.
So, often I say:
“Students, say it in good Javanese. If you can’t, use your good Indonesian. Okay?!”

MY STUDENT, SUPARMAN

On a bus which took me to the school, I heard someone called me; he was my student when I still taught high school students, Suparman. Soon, we talked anything, from the past things to the present. I knew that he had had a five months pregnant wife. And he told me that now he sold banana to get money.
Suparman’s house is about five kilometers from my school. So he got out the bus before me. Before getting the bus he told me about an advice I ever told him that he mustn’t be timid of becoming a farmer even though they got high education.
Becoming a civil servant isn’t the best occupation. Farmer is also a good job. Why must we shy of becoming a farmer or a seller?
Silently, I am proud of him.

Inilah Aku

Aku seorang guru di sebuah kota kecil, Pacitan. Sekolah dimana aku mengajar berada di sebuah desa yang terpencil. Pacitan kota terpencil, desa dimana sekolahku berada adalah daerah terpencil yang ada di sebuah kota terpencil. Mengajar di sana penuh tantangan. Banyak suka duka. Inilah awal dari yang akan aku ceritakan padamu semua. Semoga ada gunanya untuk kita semua.

Comic for Education

Comic book is getting more popular nowadays. Children and also adults like reading it. Modern comic book was inadvertently born by two employees at the Eastern Color Printing Company who collected a number of popular newspaper comic strips and arranged them into a tabloid-sized magazine (Wright, 2001). Since 1933, the year when the two employees gave birth to the modern comic, comic has become more and more popular.
Music and film have been commonly used as media in learning process. But comic has not. Although comic is relished by many people of different ages, hundreds of people believe that comic is not good for children. Most comics, indeed, contain bad things that parents are worry if their children will imitate the bad attitude they find in them.
But then, many experiments show contrary view. According to Gene Yang (2003) comic has five strengths to use in education. Those strengths are:
1. Motivating
Hutchinson (1949) found as the result of his experiment that 74% of teachers surveyed found comics "helpful for motivation".
2. Visual
Sones (1944) noted that students of "low and middle intelligence levels" were especially helped by comics' visual quality.
3. Permanent
Using comic as learning media is much different with using film or animation. If students don’t understand a scene of a film or animation, they cannot repeat the unknown scene. But we can do this if we use comic.
4. Intermediary
Karl Koenke (1981) suggests that comics can lead students towards the discipline of reading, especially those who don't enjoy reading or have a fear of failure.
5. Popular
Timothy Morrison, Gregory Bryan, and George Chilcoat (2002) suggest that, by incorporating popular culture (comic, for instance) into the curriculum, teachers can bridge the separation many students feel between their lives in and out of school.
Comic can be an alternative media to learn English. Just try it.