Commentary (New mantra for teachers)

On the newspaper today, titled "New mantra for teachers", teachers were in the spotlight on the newspaper. With Teacher's Day just around the corner, many had begun to consider the significance of teachers in the schooling path of our lives, leading us, caring about us and inspiring us to greater heights. The "Mantra" was just as about the same as the 3 points stated above. Teachers have just made "Lead. Care. Inspire." their motivation to teach students and a form of guideline to teaching.

However, this tagline is just as delusional as it seems. Why do you think I would say that? Yes. It is true that they play a very huge part in the starting few years of our lives, leading us, caring and even doing things out of their way to inspire and help us. But there are some important things that just falls out of the creed. For example, in today's newspaper too, "Clean fun or crude act?", where NTU students were caught on camera taking part in orientation activities and one of the female student was made to eat a banana off a male holding it near his crotch. Have teachers been blind to miss out such a big loophole? Orientation was meant to invite the new students and bask in the joy of getting into such a prestigious university but apparently teachers-in-charge have apparent broke the joy and brought shame on them, together with the school.

Another example would be Mr Otto Fong, a comic artist, ex-teacher in Raffles Institution. He was a very good teacher, able to teach both Chemistry and Physics. He was also my teacher in year 2008, which I improved tremendously under his guidance. He was well-liked by the class and was deemed as a very funny teacher. However, in late 2008, in his blog post, he self-proclaimed himself as a gay and held on to that belief for awhile before law kicked in. This had greatly impacted his job as a teacher and brought about wraths of hurting comments all over the web. Even as a student of him, I would really like to say to all those "morons" to look into the stereotypes that they held in their heart. It may be true he is gay but he is still a very good teacher. But apparently his outrage brought shame to the teaching career by setting bad example (or good) and was removed from his post.

Another leading example would be Mr Daniel Cheng a.k.a. Bishan Gay or BG for short. He was always seen at Hwa Chong Institution or Raffles Institution. He was deemed as a gay as he was always caught looking at boys walking past KFC or McDonald's or even bus stops near the school. All these favourite haunts of him had brought about netizens commenting on his acts of peering at boys when they walk past. There was even a newspaper article on the newspaper on him. But little did people know the true background behind him. He was an ex-teacher in Raffles Institution and taught for many years before being ousted due to his acts. His acts also brought about the degradation of teacher's overall reputation of being a inspiration or caring person. Apparently in this case, it's over-caring and not a very good inspiration to follow.

Teachers were meant to lead and bring about good examples but apparently all teachers are still humans, and they err still. With all the examples above, it shown how bad and delusional the mantra is. Even if it exists, it will be deemed as a lousy way to inspire more teachers to work the extra mile for their students. Many teachers will still be added into the workforce due to the bad economy and the standards of teacher will clearly drop with the new inputs. Teachers with little to zero experience will be having a bit with the students as they cannot cope or cannot teach until the students understand and instead skip out weaker students just as to advance in lessons. All these are also very common within the veteran sector, where teachers with more experiences taught just as the same.

Indirectly, what is the point behind this hypocritical mantra that strives for nothing but just a way to boost the teachers' significance? This shows that many of these plans or even advertisements have just achieved nothing but a waste of resources. As Ms Ho, one of the teachers taking part in this program said caring is integral in the responsibilities of teachers. They have to care for the physical safety, social and emotional needs and mould characters of their students. Great teachers inspire their students to love a subject and other colleagues to become better teachers, she added. I totally agree with this statement, but if all teachers could be great teachers that uphold all these values, they wouldn't be deemed as teachers but robots, programmed to uphold the same values behind teaching. Great teachers would surely err big time once in a while, same as great thinker Albert Einstein, who predicted that nuclear energy can be used as a bomb and that led to Japan being bombed with atomic bombs.

(EVEN I SAID ALL THIS, I STILL RESPECT TEACHERS)

Happy Teacher's Day. (If it still holds the same meaning when it was implemented in all schools, blame principals of primary schools banning ex-students from getting into the premise to celebrate the festive mood and bridge back the old memories of students and teacher relationship.)

Cheers,
ﾊﾟﾝﾄﾞﾗ














P. S. Don't bother blogging about the comments. Public people, just shut the f*** up　if you wanna read and don't read if you don't like it. It's MY POV and MY BLOG maybe biased but i dun give a s*** It's just a assignment trying to make us read the newspapers for god's sake. DON'T LIKE IT, DON'T READ!