The Talent Acquisition team, dressed smartly in shirts, ties and baju kurung, have transformed the Teach For Malaysia (TFM) office into an assessment centre, ready to sniff out the best of the best among the would-be teachers.

Among them, standing confidently and carefully with his signature spiky hair, is Ken Ming Loh, Talent Acquisition Manager.

Ken knows the qualities that make a good Fellow.

Why? Because five years ago, he was twiddling thumbs and shuffling flashcards among the applicants for TFM’s first-ever cohort.

Before becoming a Teach For Malaysia Fellow, Ken remembers wanting to change the world, the only problem was, he didn’t know how.

“For me, it was a stab of faith,” he said. “I was working in a firm as a Human Resource manager, and learning a lot, but helping someone earn more money wasn’t really my definition of impact.

“I really wanted to go into the community and do something – but I didn’t know what it was.”

Coming from an upper-middle class family in Kuala Lumpur, Ken says he has had many privileges in life.

He was the top of his class, spoke English at home, and even got the chance to complete the final year of his Psychology degree in Australia.

His was a good, comfortable upbringing, rounded off with a cosy corporate job upon graduation.

Then, in 2010, young Ken was invited by a friend to attend the TFM launch – both the company and the future Fellow simultaneously making their starts in life.

“When Teach For Malaysia came along it was very interesting because it’s not just a work opportunity but also about personal development and creating an impact,” he said. “For me that was really exciting.”

“After university you just get into a job and that’s it, so it was a very conscious decision to say I’m going to do something and I’m not going to wait until I get more money or I get older.”

Ken was soon accepted as part of the Fellowship’s pioneering batch, that is, the first ever cohort to carry out Teach For Malaysia’s mission to combat education inequity.

“For the first time in my entire life I was with a group of people who shared a voice and vision,” he said. “Everyone in that room was thinking about how they could make Malaysia a better place, and everyone’s invested in the classroom because they feel that’s where they want to start.”

Despite not having the support now established by Teach For Malaysia’s Alumni network, Ken embarked on his two-year Fellowship journey, full of energy and determination.

Really tough

Soon, he found himself placed as an English teacher at a high-need school in Pulau Ketam, Selangor.

“Before I was placed there I had no idea it even existed, so I had to Google it,” he said. “It was a fisherman’s village, on a remote island.

“The community only spoke Mandarin and Hokkien, not English or Malay. I didn’t have a Chinese-speaking background, so it was really tough. Besides, the school looked and felt nothing like the school I went to as a kid.”

With an SPM pass rate of only 50 per cent, and literacy levels that were staggeringly low, Ken found himself faced with huge challenges at the start of his Fellowship.

“I remember two students got into a fight in one of my classes,” he said, his back straight and speaking with crystal clear conviction. “They were crying and shouting at each other and trying to tell me who did what, but I had no idea what they were saying.

“After that, I had to learn Mandarin just to understand their context.”

Within six months Ken learned to speak Mandarin fluently, an achievement he attributes to his willingness to become a better teacher.

“Language was one of the biggest barriers,” he said. “In my English classes, some kids couldn’t understand a word I said, so I thought the key was immersion into their context (environment).

“Once context solidifies in your mind, you can start thinking about how to actually address these issues, whether it’s behavioural or academic.”

As part of this immersion process, Ken slowly started getting to know the community, spending his free time cycling around the island, playing basketball and speaking with locals.

The norm, according to Ken, was for students to drop out of school after Form Four, get a job and earn enough money to survive.

He says they had a “defeatist mindset”, with no expectations of going to university.

“One time, this student came up to me and said ‘teacher, why do you even bother teaching us? This is our last year, we’re not going to pass English, so why are you working so hard?'”

His voice shaking a little, Ken expressed that challenging this mindset was his biggest obstacle.

Love and patience

He described walking into a classroom and seeing this 15-year-old girl, in a ponytail and pinafore, with her feet on the table.

“She was really, really tough,” he said. “She just looked at me and went ‘What?’. I knew I had to approach her with a lot of love and patience.

“Constantly I would gently remind her to open a textbook, do an exercise. Then, one day I took her to the side and told her she was a really smart kid. Sometimes, I would write questions on the board and I could see she knew the answer but she wouldn’t say it.”

Three months later, to Ken’s surprise, the girl brought in her textbook to class for the very first time.

“She started writing and I thought ‘what is she doing? Is this a good day?’, and she just looked up and said ‘what, shut up lah,” he laughed. “A very hard kind of love.”

Eventually, the same girl would go on to organise class events and even became a class leader. It was a transformation that Ken is proud of to this day.

“Having someone consistently believe in you can actually change your view about yourself,” he said, adding that it is regardless of age.

“It’s about empowering them to believe that they have a say, they can achieve and that they can do something.”

For the rest of his Fellowship, Ken was on a mission to challenge the defeatist mindset. He set up extra classes, took students to visit vocational colleges, and even secured ten of them scholarships with a university.

Now as Talent Acquisition Manager for Teach For Malaysia, he hopes Fellows old and new can continue this legacy.

“Looking at all we’ve achieved in the past five years, I’m excited to see what we can achieve in the future,” he said, getting ready to screen a group of buzzing candidates in the next room. “I don’t think our current size cuts it. I feel there’s just so much more potential we can grow towards.

“I hope within the next five years our cohort will grow at least five times bigger, because then it’s that many more kids, that many more stories that many more possibilities of transformation that we’re seeing right now.”