Social Responsibilities....

I always remembered what my sec 4 English teacher (Helen Soong) used to say to us,

“You guys are the top 15% caliber batch of people in Singapore, what you may understand and thus not be gullible may not apply to the rest”

She was referring to our questions about why we need to have censorship when we already understood that it has no influential effects on us.

Now zoom to the present, I know I will be getting shit for this, but I think that sometimes teachers need to have social responsibilities. Take my friend for example; he got really jumpy when he found out that someone tagged him on some funny pictures of him. I did not do the tagging… really… so anyhow I totally understood why he feels that way. Apparently he has students on his FB account, so it is definitely not a good influence on that. And I agree with him, which was why I apologized and deleted the whole picture. It was a mistake on my part to leave the photo up there for him to be tagged.

Social responsibility is often linked to being boring or loss of right be have a personal life; and I think that it is definitely a fallacy. Being socially responsible doesn’t mean that a teacher can’t have his/her private life. He/she can party, drink and do whatever that is he/she deems fit; all I am saying is that it is anyone’s right to be themselves, but don’t be a bad influence to your students when they are at an age where they generally still need time to understand what they should and shouldn’t do. There can be the better ones who understood, but what about the 85% who doesn’t ? So sometimes it’s not really about I want to be myself and stuff. I strongly feel that everyone can be themselves; but it doesn’t hurt to shield complicated stuff from the “unintended audiences”.

Celebs and public figures are the same, their actions will most definitely influence peoples’ behaviour… so they are always under our scrutiny… then why not teachers ?

If you found out that your kids’ teacher has been drinking, and your 12 year old kid knew about it, wont you be worried !? Something to ponder about…. Also recall the Joo Chiat squabbling incident where that teacher did her stunt on TV and it became a big fuss… why ? Seems like some things are more self explanatory that others… haha

And just a gentle disclaimer, both my parents are teachers and they have stood the test of time to be retiring from teaching at 60 soon… and my sis is going to be a teacher in 3 years’ time… I did relief teaching too… so it would probably be fruitless to pin me down for not knowing anything about teaching…. But maybe I am just old fashioned … hahaha

I really don’t know …

=)