I hitched 50 mins along a straight road to Keningau. I tracked down Chai to the local sportsground where he was coaching Chinese children in tennis. It was good to meet up with him again and of course all the students thrashed me at tennis.

We ate at the local night market a traditionally called a "Tawau" in Sabah. Seems this down cos of it's industry of agriculture and logging has a fair few Philippenos and Indonesians. Actually when you check the map you can see the first Philipoeno islands are less than an hour from Sabah, so a many islands are nearer to KK than to Manilla. We passed the school and met the pioneering principal who was working late, we agreed that I would teach a couple of classes the next day.

teacher_chai

.. 5.45am got up went to school I actually taught 3 classes. Chai normally only teaches until 10.30am on Friday and then heads back to his home in KK .

The system is quite different from the UK . In Malaysia the early starts mean they only have school 4.5 days a week. Other schools follow a system whereby half the pupils have classes in the morning and the other half come in the afternoon.

This school instead of stopping for lunch the kids have breakfast at the school then classes then go home. Chai's school is a Chinese language school with some government funding. So the classes are quite large 40 plus, but the kids well behaved. In fact I would have said that in typical Malaysian style rules were not rigorously enforced. To my surprise in my first class I was covering for teacher who was not there, but I winged it. Then a double class lecture. Then, I took over a math's teaches class , sorry, but the principals method is that he wants teachers to inspire the children rather than just teach, so I did my best to be more dynamic than the normally shy Malaysian teachers.

One of the mottos:
Normal teachers ... teach
Good Teachers ... teach well
Great Teachers ... Inspire !