T

eachers have said they are in the dark over the new national curriculum in spite of the government'€™s plan to simultaneously implement the new system at over 6,000 schools this coming Monday.

Indonesian teachers Association (PGRI) chairman Sulistyo expressed his doubt over whether teachers would be ready to teach the new curriculum next week, given that they had only started training on Tuesday.

'€œTo be honest, we haven'€™t even received the technical guidelines or all the materials. We don'€™t have a clue about how we'€™re supposed to implement the curriculum,'€ Sulistyo told reporters on Tuesday.

Sulistyo added that the Education and Culture Ministry would distribute the required books and other materials on Tuesday night, only five days before the implementation of the new curriculum.

'€œWe still instruct teachers to try and immediately learn the material despite the short training period. But I doubt that it will run the way the government expects it to,'€ he said.

PGRI deputy secretary-general Dian Mahsunah said that the new national curriculum would require teachers to fill out student report cards with descriptive evaluations, replacing the current scoring system.

Dian said that the system would be especially confusing for 10th grade teachers, whose students would only be taught under the new system for three subjects: math, history and Indonesian.

'€œThe students will receive two report cards by the end of the first semester this year. The first one will assess the new curriculum'€™s courses, while the other one will focus on the older curriculum'€™s courses,'€ Dian said.

As previously reported, only 6,401 schools will implement the new national curriculum this year. The new curriculum will only be implemented in the first, fourth, seventh and 10th grades of schools adhering to highs standards or with superior performance.

The number of schools is much lower than the initial target of 102,053 elementary, junior high and senior high schools. The Education and Culture Ministry deemed the majority of schools unprepared for the new curriculum.

Basyarudin Thoyib, principal of SMA Plus PGRI high school in Cibinong, West Java, said that he had so many unanswered questions about the technical guidelines for the new curriculum.

He said that the new curriculum stipulated that 10th grade students would be required to directly choose their major, natural science or social science, on the first day of school.

'€œThe students will not be given a chance to identify the subjects of those two majors before making a choice,'€ Basyarudin told The Jakarta Post.

'€œI still don'€™t understand what the teachers are supposed to do if the students changed their minds in their second year of high school,'€ he added.

Meanwhile, Education and Culture Ministry spokesperson Ibnu Hamad said that teachers would have ample time to prepare.