I don’t know why there were tears in my eyes when I was watching this short videoclip. It was shared by one of my friends, Soon Seng in an online group discussion.
This somehow remains me of that particular class where students are so bothered by their classmates’ skin color and ended up into fights – almost everyday.
I was being scheduled to make replacement (relief class) to the class today and I found myself repeating the same yelling, “Stop fighting! STOP!”
They were fights between the Indian and Chinese students. A Chinese student who were trying to make fun of me questioned in Mandarin, “Teacher, why are there so many Indian students in our class?”
It just struck me. I don’t know what to answer and I only managed to reply, “All of you are special and you guys can learn a lot from each other”. Well, my words were falls on deaf ears. He just laughed and ran away with his buddies.
Probably the idea was too abstract for a 13 year old kids to understand. I don’t blame them. I don’t blame the parents nor teacher neither. I understood the history of our country, as well as the diversity and political issues. There are unique, complex and tricky.
I don’t know how much I can do for these children especially in term of cognitive and moral developments before I leave the school in 2 years. At the moment, I can only plant as much seeds as possible to these vast ground and water them as often as I can with a big hope that one day, they will understand and grow as a wise, humane person.
I want to see more of this in our younger generation.
Would that be possible?