Oxymoron In The Tropics

When I first started teaching Form Six students many eons ago, the only things on my mind were finishing the syllabus (I was teaching Literature, besides English Language) and polishing their abilities to retain information, organise information into the form required by the question and present the info in an academic fashion.  However now, things have changed.  Not only do I have to scrabble my way along the minefield of today's schools (mines that begin with e- or online-), I also find myself having to deal with social pitfalls.  Not MY social pitfalls,  THEIRS. And one of the most interesting is their chosen email addresses.  Yeah well, let's deal with one social pitfall at one time.   One of the ways I make sure my MUET students at the very least know how to attach a document to their email is by asking them to send me their homework via email.  I do this because I want to ensure that they arrive at university campuses with rudimentary knowle...

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots  Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind. Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . . Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging f...

When people talk about 'the walking wounded', they normally think of soldiers returning from a battlefield.  I usually think of a war poem I studied in university... Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce Et Decorum Est'.  Oh man, that was such a gory poem.  I could actually hear the sounds of the wounds... viscera spilling out into the open where it was never meant to be... But today I am thinking of different 'walking wounded'.  In my many years of navigating the morass of relationships, I have been continually astonished by the level of woundedness I have encountered in people I meet.  They walk upright and smile when they would and sleep when they should... but they carry such deep injuries within.  I almost wish they had physical injuries instead... at least these injuries would be exposed to the air and dried sooner or later.  But emotional and mental injuries can live forever within psyches.  Like an abscess, they sit inert but causing pain.  And these wounds continue...

Twice a year, the pre university exam results come out and excite ecstasy, happiness, horror and even nonchalant unconcern among the students.  The lecturers are usually just tied up in knots.  The ecstasy or despair comes later, after the analyses are done.  But I don't want to talk about that.  Today is the second last day before the deadline of repeat exam registrations and already the kids have made my colleagues and I feel like strangling them.  First, some of them buy the PIN at Bank Simpanan Nasional at the very last minute (which would be tomorrow).  Then they happily whatsapp the PIN to the poor teacher in charge of Exams, thinking everything will be fine.  They will have had two weeks to ponder their options... two weeks to decide which paper to repeat and therefore two weeks to buy this PIN.  But most will wait till the last minute.  Poor teacher will be struggling to access the website together with countless other Ex...

It seems to me that I am meeting more and more young people from broken lives or families.  I'm wondering if all this while, there have always been broken families and lives everywhere or has the world gotten worse? Yet these young people still fight on to find meaning and stability in their lives.  They still laugh and smile with their friends and classmates, never showing how much they are bleeding inside. I suppose there is no point in railing against a cruel or unjust world... because they cannot change the outside elements or factors. They can only change how they respond to their experiences. So far, the majority I meet have shown admirable resilience... although a few have the tendency to snarl and snap when people accidentally touch on sensitive topics. What I do notice is how all of them find their anchor in God.

I was on FB checking on some stuff (yes, my FB account is still dead but I have a shell account for school groups) when I came across my ex-student's fb.  Let's call him Max. Way back when, Max was a brooding young man with too much pain for someone so young.  There was so much loss, rejection and anger filling up his heart and mind.  When my eyes rested upon him, my heart hurt for I saw wounds I couldn't put a bandage over.  Sometimes I wished I could just take him home and get him to smile.  But of course, I couldn't do that.  My house would be overflowing if I gave in to every urge to take a kid home.  But that was a long time ago.  Max was fortunate because an angel smiled on him and he was given an opportunity to join a training program which took him away from painful home and prepared him for a well-paying job with an MNC.  There was a time when his FB account showed statuses that spoke of wanting to give up and go home.  I prayed that he wouldn't. Fast forwa...

An old friend commented that I 'know my stuff' and that puzzled me for a bit. By the time anyone reaches my age, he ir she better know their stuff. Or risk winning the 'Slow Learner' award. But then I do tend to know things intensively and exhaustively. That is because I develop a near-obsession about new things. I like new things because well... they are new. So I always want to figure out what they are, where they come from, why they are like that and all things related. If I were to create a mind map about what I want to learn about new stuff, the resulting paper required would be knee deep. Metaphorically speaking. Perhaps I have a psychological condition but I need to know enough about something until I am able to reach a sort of critical mass and I am able to say,"Yes, X is _______ !" And that adjective or noun should be able to describe X to a T. It took me 15 years to reach critical mass about debate. And what a great 15 years they were.... And...