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So it seems that Science and Maths will soon be thought back in BM. Well in our view it's a bit like taking a step back to where we were in the start. After all, when we were in school all this was thought in BM, no?

Then again, we do remember back in our Form 4 and 5 days where we'd actually looked up the English translation of whatever we'd learned (yes, we were pro-English back then already). Not as if there was anywhere we could have used English terminology - we would have thought that answering a Chemistry Paper 2 in English back then would have automatically earned us a duck's egg, or severely low marks because the examiner would have thought us incapable of spelling as he circles every electrons and corrects them as elektron among other things.

Physics and Maths wasn't so bad as it was all mainly formulas. Of course, we can't remember what was the Malay term for differentiation and integration now, although admittedly even doing an integration problem might take some time now since it's all so rusty. Of course for Physics it's more than just formulas as there were quite a fair bit of terminologies too, and more explainations such like how sound can be viewed as waves and how these waves move both horizontally and vertically and the likes...

It's not as if we're such a snob that we support English all the way. It's just that, somehow, whatever we hear in a different language, be it Malay or a Chinese dialect, gets translated into English as we register it. Honest! Which is why sometimes when someone speaks to us in Chinese we can interpret it wrongly (what more our deplorable Chinese vocabulary).

Already we had the Chief correct our Cantonese at one point when we told the Chief's mum that we were leaving, and the Chief said that us saying, "Ngor hui xin," (which, to us, translates directly to "I'm going first,") was used in context of passing away, and that we should have used, "Ngor zhau xin," ("We're running away first," to us, which we thought less polite somehow) which was more appropriate.

Anyways, back to the topic at hand. There's the argument that, "We've studied Maths and Science in BM back in our days and we'd no problems what," and we could say the same for us, except in our case we did look up the English terms and translations and so when it came to our college and university years things were smooth sailing. We guess it's only when you're fair fluent in only one language when this becomes an issue, otherwise we'll think the move to switch teaching a subject from one language to another would be shrugged off.

And in our parents' time they were still studying everything in English!

And there's stuff like this to make you wonder.

We're not sure how it goes but if tertiary education and universities will be teaching said subjects in English, having the subject taught in English at an earlier level would be much more useful, no? And you'll be practising your English at the same time too. We just think it more important that we build up our proficiency of English so that others don't make fun of us and we'll stop getting foreigners telling us that their surprised we speak rather good English.

Oh well we would have suggested the subject be thought in both languages (and the exam papers to be in both languages where the students can answer in whichever language) but we think teachers all around would kill us for the extra work.