Surabaya- This is my officially first working day whereby my internship at this organization – Tunas Hijau – dealing with environmental matters got under its way. The first school to target any potential findings and problems was the SMP 5 Surabaya, a junior high school. The obvious differences between educational systems in Europe and Australia and the one in Indonesia are easy to notice at first sight. Right from the beginning of my tour I was heading to the Garden section, students study the aspects of nature without any textbooks and the entire Nature lecturing is structured as it goes. This area also lacks necessary aspects of safety ranging from not maintained pathways and the like.
When it comes to classrooms, they are not always equipped with pertinent equipment that is deemed as indispensable in western countries such as over head projectors and basic visual and audio equipment in order to lead smooth teaching activities. All classrooms ought to obtain necessary fans or other means of ventilation that allows students to focus on their studying responsibilities. The library that is available for students suffers from an obvious lack of information resources such as Internet access and computer stations for students to search information online.
This library also should support students who are willing to further educate themselves with adequate book sources from various fields. Library is the place to study and seek additional information; therefore there should not be any barriers to propel this behavior. To foster any other further steps in the future, these students need to be given proper equipment that would actually allow them to gather pertinent data, establish appropriate communication channels worldwide and also to deliver this betterment observed from other places around the world into their institutions. Right this worldwide experience is the means of change brought into a certain country.
However, a positive side of the SMP5 Surabaya School is the fact that they managed to deal with other environmental matters precisely as opposed to those ones in western countries. I witnessed students who showed their creativity and capability of dealing with rubbish and turned it out towards certain useful products that could be potentially used in the future in Surabaya or elsewhere. These students attempted to come up with determined notions and showed an ability to comprehend that these threats concerning the environment we are currently living in nowadays can not be overlooked for everyone’s sake.
In this regard, the SMP5 Surabaya School should seriously consider some sort of competition when it comes to the students’ creativity in this field. Thus their efforts would be further encouraged and fostered. On the other hand, these students who comprehended aforementioned matters to a certain extent concurrently failed to undertake such a basic responsibility such as separating rubbish into organic and non-organic. All rubbish bins throughout this school were not separated despite its obvious and colorful marks. This is the basic step to accomplish in order to propel other more complicated accomplishments. To ensure proper rubbish separation there should be certain pictures sticked on a rubbish bin to make it easily distinguished which one is the right one.
All things considered, the students of the SMP5 Surabaya School are well aware of the magnitude with regard to clean environment and are also determined to continue with their actual efforts. To encourage and support their willingness to learn further and to accomplish their main goal to become the most environmentally friendly school in a national level as I was told, they ought to strive towards better learning conditions, smoother learning activities and more importantly increasing their international involvement.
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