Furious teacher flung a sandal at a student

You need a lot of patience to be a teacher nowadays. As long as you are dealing with the so called Generation-Y or Millennial Generation or the Facebook Generation then, you need exceptional patience, self-motivation and superb anger-management to be a teacher. Some youngsters are spoiled brats, unlike those growing up in the sixties or seventies which are more humble, polite and respectful to their teacher. Our society has been changing over the past two decades and thus the teaching professionals such as teacher, lecturer and so forth must also change their mentality and also the ways to handle the student.

A primary school teacher was reportedly flung her sandal at a 7-year old disobedient boy for chatting in the class despite being reprimanded earlier. Fortunately the boy only suffered minor injuries but the parents had lodged a police report on the incident and demanded that the teacher be suspended from her duties. When a police report is made, naturally such incident will be reported in the newspaper.

Use your imagination; if you are the teacher, while you are busy teaching in the class full of enthusiasm and there’re disobedient students keep-on talking and making noise in the class despite your warning many times, what would you do? This kind of things happened very often when I was young in the primary and secondary school, the teacher would just fling a duster to the student and no one dare say anything. Sometimes the duster hit the student, so you can imagine the student’s uniform will be full of the chalk dust.

Those days, the disobedient students would never inform their parents on such incident unless very serious thing involved injuries or whatnot. The students even though naughty, are scared of the teacher. The parents no matter how still respect the teacher and if they know that their kids are being punished for some wrongdoings, very likely, the parent will punish their kids for another time at home.

A few months ago, the parent of a college student who committed suicide went to the college that so happened my wife is teaching, blaming the college authority for not alerting them on any abnormal behaviors of their son who committed suicide. They opined that if the college authority were more attentive and observing, could have help to prevent the student who suffered from depression from committing suicide.

The fact is; if we do not straighten the discipline of our own children, then don’t expect the teacher to do it for you. If as a parent you can’t even discipline your own kids, then you can just imagine how possible could the teacher doing it in a class of 40 to 50 pupils? Those days were different as the pupils were scared of the teacher more than their own parents but nowadays, the spoiled brat don’t even bother about their parents let alone the teacher.

What do we get from LYNAS?

The government is now fighting hard to ensure the Lynas project can be operational as it was initially planned. By the way, the factory is almost completed and there is no way back for the government despite the protest by the people all over the country, not confined to those living nearby Gebeng where the factory is located.

The Mentri Besar of Pahang even took a swipe on those who claimed that property prices dropped at Kuantan, arguing that the property prices had risen instead due to the setting up of Lynas factory. The fact is what do we actually get from Lynas? We import the rare earth from its country of origin far away by ship, then transport them via Kuantan port by trucks to Gebeng, creating a few hundreds jobs, making millions of dollars for the Australian company LYNAS but leaving behind millions of tonnes of waste which are potentially harmful even for our future generations.

There are possibilities that the waste materials could seep into the nearby Balok River and then the whole ecosystem will be affected, the fish, animal, human, plants and everything else you name it. Rare earths are  by itself harmless as what pointed out by the government but they are mostly mixed with radioactive substances that's why an extraction and separation process is required.

Many of us who are not staying nearby the factory area couldn’t be bothered by the protests against the setting up of Lynas. But come to think of it, what do we really get from Lynas? It is worthwhile for just being a country absorbing all the radioactive waste materials from Australia by merely creating a few hundred jobs?   

Our thoughts are with you, Fabrice

We don’t know exactly what’s inside our body; only god knows whether all our organs are functioning well inside. The EPL fans are saddened with the collapse of Fabrice Muamba on the pitch when his team played against Spurs on last Saturday. He was suffering from cardiac arrest and collapsed out of the sudden. Even the team doctor was saying that it was miraculous to have Fabrice staying alive after being in-effect dead for 78 minutes. 

I can’t imagine it sometimes, how could a seemingly healthy, young and physically fit footballer fall ill due to heart problems but things like this happen though not very often. We can only pray for his speedy recovery. Fabrice is a fighter on and off the pitch and hopefully one day he will be running on the football field again. Although things like this happened far away from our country but I guess thousands and thousands of football fans in this country will be saddened by such incident. We are entertained by all this brilliant guys through the one of the most watchable football league in the world. 

Probably Fabrice is a bit lucky to be in England, or to be playing with such a caring team like Bolton. The team doctor had said that 15 defibrillator shocks had failed to get the 23-year-old’s heart beating in the hour after he collapsed on the pitch, and it was altogether 78 minutes of heart stop-beating before Fabrice reached the hospital. Probably he was lucky that a consultant cardiologist at the London hospital who was at White Hart Lane as a spectator at that time ran on to the pitch to help. Fabrice can survive because the team and doctors never give up on him; they tried their level best to bring him back. Such spirits and determinations are truly commendable. These are the finest example of footballer, coach, doctors and good Samaritans. 

Get well soon, Fabrice, our thoughts are with you.

Don't take thing lightly

Visited my sister-in-law who underwent a knee operation yesterday at the Penang Aventis Hospital then I realized that very often, we do not really know how to take care of our self and tend to overlook on symptoms or signs given by our own body until it becomes something serious.

Perhaps some of us know how to take care of our car better than our own body. We send the car for servicing when it is due and spent a few hundred dollars sending it to the experts to deal with it. Nevertheless, when fall sick, most of the people tend to take the over-the-counter medicines and hope that everything will be ok by the next day.

As we get older, it is important to adjust our lifestyle to suit the decline in our physical wellbeing. You job a bit faster and the next day you will have stiff legs and you sleep a bit less the next day you will be drowsy and loss concentrations. That’s how it is. Take thing lightly, don’t get too emotional when you argue with someone or else your BP will be skyrocketing and that is really detrimental to our health.

Life is short and nothing is more important than a healthy body, mind and soul included.  

Don't take thing for granted

Travelling along Jalan Kelanang to my office I sometimes see underage kids riding motorcycles without wearing proper safety helmets. These kids shouldn’t be allowed to ride in the first place as they are too young to even own a license. I have seen for far too many times that very young children riding motorbike fetching 2 or 3 of their brothers or sisters at the back cruising along the road and I was thinking how on earth their parents could allow them to do such dangerous things. 

Sometimes, adults tend to take things for granted. Just like the mother of the poor little girls Dirang thought that it was safe for her daughter to go the shop nearby as most of the parents were also doing the same thing. But unfortunate things did happen from time to time and we never take it as a lesson. It happened before that a pity little girl by the name of Nurin was adducted and murdered and after so many years the police could have conveniently forgotten about the case and such pitiful things happened again and this time around Dirang was the unlucky one. 

There are monsters around us that hiding under the sheep’s skin that we might not know who they are or for what evil purposes they adducted innocent boys and girls. If there’s really a God, then God should punish them before more victims are harmed. If there is such a thing by the name of justice then it should be served quickly to prevent more innocent kids from falling prey to such inhumane acts. 

Coming back to my story of underage kids riding a bike speeding on a kampong road, sometimes, it is the parents to be blamed for allowing their kids to do such dangerous things. Just like a mother allowing her little girl to go to the shop nearby unrealized that her girl could end up being adducted and murdered, the parents should stop their kids without a driving license to ride a bike.