It has been 10 months since I started this job and I shall soon be released from contract and going into *** for training. This post is mainly to serve as a reminder to myself in the future when I have children.
Today marks the end of Semester 1 and it is time for the Meet The Parents session again. As expected I wasnt required to be there ( reminder, next time just go home when the school is relocated back to tampines ) but nonetheless I was there from 8 am to 3 pm due to school policy. Did absolutely nothing except connect my laptop and microphone in the music room and sang songs.
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I have 2 ideas to remind myself in the future.
1) To find out the true personality of my child, I should consult the teachers who teaches the non-core subjects to get a clearer picture of my child's true colors.
Reasons being:
For core subjects like EMS, they are conducted in a classroom setting where it has been drilled since Pri 1 and there is more or less a certain amount of classroom discipline instilled into them.
Form teachers are with them for close to 3-4 hours a day and are generally very strict and fierce to enforce discipline and respect. Hence students are definitely more afraid of their form teachers.
Parents put alot of focus into their child's results, teachers put alot of focus into their child's results, no one actually cares too much about the moral upbringing and personality of the child as well as the positive/negative impact he brings to his peers and vice versa.
For non-core subjects like Music/PE/Art, this is where I feel that would allow the child to freely express himself. I can find out personality traits like whether my child has a competitive nature and whether he would resort to underhanded methods like cheating or violence to win during PE, or does he give up extremely easily in class when subjected to physical activities. For Art or Music, most boys would tend to dislike it as it seems feminine and pointless, this is where I will be able to see what my child's attitude is like towards things that he dislikes. Will he uphold his moral upbringing of respect over personal feelings and continue participating and listening to teacher's instructions or will he become a huge nuisance and pest in the class?
Case study/example 1:
An art assignment required students to decorate their names. A P4 student handed in a piece of artwork consisting of the words F.U.C.K. When confronted by the art teacher, the student was proud that he knew the word and proud that he knew what was the meaning of the word. The art teacher took this case to the form teacher, letting the form teacher settle.
Did the form teacher show the student's artwork during MTP session?
Nope.
Was the incident even mentioned?
Nope.
If it was my child, would I have wanted to know?
Fuck yes. Lol.
Case study/example 2:
This one happened in my class. A P3 student stood up in the middle of the class under no provocation randomly shouted: "CHAO CHEE BAI" and grinned cheekily at me. The rest of the class stared with a confused look since none of them even knew what was being said. I brought it up to the form teacher and when he confronted the student regarding what was said, the student cheekily replied "I dunno" to every single accusation.
The form teacher then gave me one of the stupidest suggestions ever. He told me to record it down next time. Like wtf? I have a fking lesson to conduct and I am expected to waste 50% of my handphone battery to record every single sound that this P3 kid makes for an hour just for an off chance that he decides to do that again? Hey buddy, in that case, its fine by me. Your form class, not mine lol.
Did the form teacher bring up this incident during MTP?
Nope.
If it was my child, would I have wanted to know?
Ccb yes.
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2) The second point is not really an idea, but a reminder not to be cynical. I feel that one of the key factors that determine whether a child is morally upright is how innocent/cynical he/she is.
Children are NATURALLY innocent. I belong to the 人之初性本善 faction and as long as children do not lose their innocence and naivety, they are on the right track regardless of results.
How to destroy a child's innocence?
By being a cynical adult, be it teacher or parent.
Imagine your child comes home one day and tells you "Daddy/mommy my form teacher say this school event is compulsory, so that day cannot have tuition/family gathering/violin/piano lessons etc."
A cynical parent that has a proud mentality would say " fk that shit. no such thing as compulsory in this world. your teacher talk cock only. go for ur tuition/violin/piano lesson and tell your teacher that day not free." ( of course the conversation would not be delivered in this manner. )
A part of the child's innocence just died inside, not because he cannot go to the school event, but rather the weight of the teacher's words, just became null and void that easily. The instructions from teachers that were once absolute, are now easily refutable not by himself, but by his parents. An internal struggle between obeying his parents and his teacher starts to occur and in the years to come, the teacher's words no longer have any impact to the child.
Imagine a student coming to you in the middle of the lesson complaining that his/her classmate called him/her stupid or told him/her to shut up.
A cynical teacher would be one that disregards the student's complaints due to its childish nature. ( "Teacher he use the S word", initially I thought it was the word shit. Actually it was the word stupid. Cute right? Lol)
I have to admit I was guilty of waving them away asking them to think whether they would become stupid just because others said so. It may seem logical and justifiable at that point of time to get on with the lesson and ignore such childish complaints, but I have since seen the error of my ways and it is exactly the same reason as before.
A part of the child's innocence just died inside, not because he was called stupid or told to shut up, but rather he resisted the urge to scold back his classmates and approached the teacher instead as it is the "right" thing to do. ( Of course we can say that the right thing to do was to ignore but they are P3s for fks sake, if you called me stupid at P3 I would have cursed your whole family to oblivion ) My disregard for such incidents would imply to the students that I am a teacher who tolerates and accepts such language to be used with no serious repercussions, the good students would get their innocence slowly chipped away by their classmates while the bad students would 变本加厉 and push their limits further.
Furthermore, I would have single handedly destroyed the framework that my colleagues in P1 and P2 so painstakingly built. So instead of approaching the teacher, the students would lose their innocence and they themselves will slowly become cynical as they realized that approaching teachers are useless since most of us "do not care" for such small matters. Small matters become big, and soon we will have more and more students submitting FUCK on their artwork.
Imagine a cynical parent meeting a cynical teacher during MTP session. What would happen?
The parents would think that the teachers are useless and the teachers will think that the parents are useless. Both parties are judging each other's uselessness and it becomes an extremely pointless meeting where both parties end up talking about how useless the other party is at their role. While all this is happening, the children are the ones that pick up the wrong things, mainly from cynical parents. This is how students lose their respect for their teachers, when their parents are at home discussing loudly about how useless teachers are.
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Write too much sian already. Mind starting to block, words starting to get choked, sentences starting to not make sense.
TLDR: Dont be cynical. Approach non-core teachers for a true assessment of my child's personality.
