Why I choose to retire at 56 ?

From what I gathered from friends and relatives , I came to know that very few teachers opted for 56. Most of them opted for 58. Just before signing the forms, my sister-in-law rang to ask what age me and my husband opted for, I told her 56 and she was undecided to opt for 56 or 58 since she is older than me. Two days later I heard that she too opted for 58 since most of her colleagues opted for 58 so she followed too.



So I and husband are one of the few who opted for 56. I know you are thinking why I choose 56 instead of earning governemnt $$ for another 2 years. To tell the truth sometimes I just feel very tired not with the students or the teaching ( I like and love teaching and teaching is my vocation), I am really tired with the system.

As form teacher, every beginning of the year we MUST key in the whole class info which includes, Name, IC, home address, Tel.( home and mobile) number of father and mother , father and mother occupation, name of father and mother employers , address of father and mother's employer, salary of father and mother, names of all the siblings, all the assistance the siblings received, age , school and class of siblings plus the student involvements in clubs , uniform bodies and games . This is for each and everyone of our student in our class....

Now we need to key in the same info for SMS, SMM and BMM.

Keying in SMS ( school management system) we all don't mind cos it is very good and useful. This is where we print out class list , report cards , time table, students particulars whenever required and it is undeniably a very good system.


Now for SMM ( Sistem Maklumat Murid) which is required by the Education Department we still do not complain and key in patiently all the "low so" particulars there despite of very user unfriendly system where after keying in we need to "export" into a diskette( who on earth still uses diskette???) And many of us after keying in the info for the whole night found that the info is no where to be found when we reopen the file, isn't that frustrating????
But we are told that the Department is basing on what we key in to give assistance to students like free uniform, scholarships, free tuition etc etc . So for the students' sake we painfully trying to key in as accurate as we can from all the incomplete forms that we got back from the students.



The worst one is BMM ( Borang Maklumat Murid) . It comes together with SMM but all the data are not transferable within the system except for the names of student and IC number. Hence we as teachers have to key in from the very beginning all the particulars from A to Z all over again......can die lar like this....and worst thing is, this BMM is not used at all ...but we still need to key in....ALAMAK...

Beside all these we still have TOV ( Take off value ) ETR ( ???) analysis to do for every examination....and we have 3 examinations a year...

This is the main reason I opted for 56 without a second thought....even though I know that by 56 I will only have half of my basic pay left if I still live to that age.