I teach the history of the place we live.我教的，是我们脚下这片土地的历史。

I grew up twenty minutes from the river mouth where, the story goes, a prince from Palembang sat under a tree and watched a mousedeer kick his hunting dog into the water. My grandfather told me that story before I could read. I became a History teacher because of it.

My first posting, in 2011, was a small school in rural Pahang. I taught History from the textbook, the way I had been taught: read the page, underline the dates, copy the notes. My students were polite and patient. They were also bored, and I knew it.

The boy in the third row

In 2016 I moved to Selangor. One afternoon I was explaining the fall of Melaka and noticed that the boy in the third row, who talked all through every lesson, had stopped talking. He was not listening. He had simply given up. I went home and made a slide deck until eleven at night. It did not help much. Neither did the next forty.

I always knew this history was extraordinary. The problem was that my students could not see it. The port with eighty-four languages, the Chinese treasure fleet, the Portuguese cannon: I could see all of it. They saw a page.

What changed

In 2026 I spent six Saturdays learning to make teaching materials with AI tools. On the last one I made a whole unit in an afternoon: a 90-second film, a memory song, a class page, character cards, two games and a poster. The first time I played the film, the class was silent for ninety seconds. The first time we sang the chorus, they shouted it.

I still decide what my students learn. I choose every fact, write every lyric and check every date against the textbook. The tools make the pictures, the music and the pages. That is the whole arrangement, and it gave me my evenings back.

This site is where I keep that work, and where I share it with other teachers.