Finally...

OK...Finally, time to take a breath. It's been a long week and it's only Thursday. Unbelievably, I've actually lost the ability to differentiate the days. For the first 3 days of the week, I went in to school while it was dark and left school when it was dark. The rest of the time was spent in one room or another as I examined examination scripts over and over, worms open, cans empty. It took me half of today to realise that it wasn't Wednesday. My personal odyssey for the week is over and I'm onto the cathartic (ironically) marking of said scripts.

(Anyone who's ever wondered why they're called examinations...well, there's a reason. Candidates are examined and most are found wanting...)

On lighter news, while the 4th or 5th hour of said meetings, we decided that we would be the kind of teachers whose students would blog about us and we'd BLOG RIGHT BACK AT THEM. (Albeit with better grammar and more cogent arguments.) That said, the issue's been blown completely out of proportion and while I have absolutely nothing against students blogging against teachers and think that the 5 students being suspended from school was harsh to the Nth degree, I also think that the arguments being made for the 5 students (about teachers not deserving respect until they earned it...) by students or other immature bandwagon hoppers are infantile at best.

Teachers today really don't earn enough for all the crap that they put up with. Apart from being educators, councilors, surrogate parents, exam setters and markers (talk about insane amounts of homework), disciplinarians, confidantes, etc, they need to put up with kids that slander their names and stomp on their hearts that they have to put out there day after day. Let's ignore the fact that it's illegal and...Nah...I'll leave it to the immortal words of the bard (poorly paraphrased...):

[they] hath disgrac'd me and [...] [slept through my lessons], mock'd at my [scoldings], scorned my [profession], [ignored my homework], cooled my [colleagues], heated mine [principal].

And what's [their] reason?

I am a [teacher].
Hath not a [teacher] eyes?
Hath not a [teacher] hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections,
passions, fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons,
subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed
and cooled by the same [bad weather] and [air-conditioning], as a [student] is?

If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die? And if you [blog] us, shall we
not [suspend]? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you
in that. If a [teacher] wrong a [student], what is his humility?
[MOE review]. If a [student] wrong a [teacher], what should his sufferance
be [...]? Why, [suspension for 5 days]. The villainy you teach me
I will execute; and it shall go hard but I will better the
instruction.

Just before anybody decides to go on a tirade how teachers really suck nowadays, remember, teachers were students before...and the brutal punishment we endured in the past was a whole lot more harsh than the simple scoldings we dish out today...The difference was that we respected our teachers for it because we knew that we were wrong...can these students say the same?

Remember: Teachers are people too.

Class dismissed.

All that said, I am not generalising in this post about all students. In fact, I would say that students nowadays are quite nice. Sadly though, there're still the idiots out there that spoil the experience completely for the lot of us...Exemplars:

1. Student who basically labelled Indians as "the stained race" in a class discussion with an Indian teacher.
   
2. Students who openly verbally abuse their teachers by calling them "bitch".