Strict Discipline

I have always been a strong advocate of discipline. And I am essentially a very strict person. Whenever I set my mind to do something, I very rarely won't achieve it. But of course I am also realistic when setting my target. I won't be silly to set, for example, a target of beating Usain Bolt in the 100-metre sprint.

When I was a young boy, I was a lazy bum. I hardly ever finished my homeworks from school; and I hardly ever studied for my exams. I think I only started getting serious with my life around mid-teens. I can't really remember what made me change, but somehow I did change my attitude. And then suddenly I found that with discipline, I could achieve so many things which I could only dream of in the past.

Not surprisingly, therefore, when I left school and took up a job as a teacher for maths and science, I was determined to instill discipline in my students. Now in most cases known to me, there's only good that can come from discipline. And I set out to be very, very strict in my approach. I quickly became an overzealous discipline monster. For a long time, my students, though hated this terrible teacher at first, improved significantly in their studies.

Those of you who knew me well would know that I have a flair in creating tricks. And I just come up with tricks upon tricks. When necessary, I come up with riddles. The poor students had to put up with my tricky nature. But I am convinced that in the end many of them gained a lot from my classes.

I remember a time when I set the questions for the maths exam. In those days, the questions were set as a multiple-choice format. If I'm not mistaken, 40 questions, and each was followed by 5 choices, options A to E. No one scored the full marks because all the answers were C. It's a strange psychological experiment that I conducted to satisfy my own curiosity. Never before in any exam have I seen all the answers were C. I wanted to test the kids—whether they trusted themselves with their knowledge. But they didn't. To them, it was impossible for all the answers to be C. Since it's a multiple-choice exam, they took it for granted that there must be a mixture of choices for the answers. But it turned out that all the 40 answers were C!

I have more or less forgotten my teaching days. Then a chance remark by "Peter" when he commented in my post below brought back some memories of my teaching days. Peter said:

"I still remember quite clearly during school days that if we provide an answer for +3 OR -3 to square root of 9, we get zero (0) point. Corny was lucky to get half the point from his teacher. Mathematically the answer is 'Plus and minus three'. Note that I wrote answer, and not answers."

I myself was a teacher, and a very strict one at that. But I think it was harsh not to give any marks at all for a partially-correct answer. And this gives me an excuse to tell another one of my grandfather stories!

Most of the time, strictness is good for the students; and I still believe that up to now. But sometimes it can be damaging, because unfortunately teachers are unable to know everything about the students beyond what they see on the surface.

It must have been in the year 1988 when a boy joined my class. I was given to understand that he has failed his form five exams 2 years before that. He then took a 2-year break from school. And then his parents persuaded him to try again. He was therefore older than his classmates. But although he was older, I treated all of them the same. Discipline is discipline; strictness is strictness. No one shall be immune from my approach!

Anyway, John (not his real name) was very weak in maths. And actually, many kids have problems in maths. Apparently, before joining my class, John has always failed his maths papers in school. It was just not his thing, if you know what I mean. But when he came to my class, his interest in maths was aroused. Suddenly he found learning maths was fun! It's no longer a subject to be scared of. He was therefore determined to pass his maths exam for the first time in a while. And I was equally determined to help him achieve his goal.

Then came the first term exams, and the teachers' room became off-limits area. Question papers all nicely prepared on the respective desks. Those were a few weeks' worth of work by the teachers. If any of the question papers leaked out, the teacher would have had to prepare a new set of question paper!

Anyway, it so happened that the maths exam for John's class was among the first few subjects that week. Immediately after the exams, John appeared pleased with himself. He kept bugging me how soon I could come up with the results. I told him to be patient—it would take me at least a week to mark all the papers and compile all the results. The next day, John kept bugging me. He was really excited to know how he did in his maths. I said quite truthfully that I haven't even looked at any of the answers yet.

Then that evening, I started marking all the papers. And then I understood John's excitement. For the first time in years, he passed his maths exams marginally. Now to most students, passing marginally is no big deal. But to John who's always been haunted by this forsaken subject, it's a huge achievement!

The following day in school, when I went back to the teachers' room, to my horror, I caught John just about done rummaging through the stuff on my desk. All the other question papers on my desk already seen by John while he was in search of his own maths result. I was totally devastated; I was mad! And of all the punishments I could think of then was to deduct 2 points from his maths paper. On hindsight, I think that was not a very smart way to punish him, but y'know, sometimes you can't make the best decision at the spur of the moment.

Unfortunately for John, the deduction of just 2 points made him fail his maths! He became upset. He pleaded with me to reverse my decision on the punishment. But I have made up my mind. This kid must learn! Then he started cursing me—calling me all sorts of names. I became even more upset; and he bacame upset too.

The next day, he did not come to school. Instead both his parents came to see me. Very decent people. They pleaded on his behalf. They said he was under a lot of pressure; that it's important for him to do well etc. I said everyone's under pressure. But anyway, to make the long story short, I did not give in. The punishment remained!

Well, John never did come to school again after that. It was not until months later when I heard from someone else that John had some sort of mental condition and had been in and out of the mental institution in Bukit Padang for a while. He suffered from serious depressions and had to be under perpetual medication. His parents did not reveal that information to the school because they wanted to protect their son. They did not want his classmates to treat him differently because of his condition.

And for a while, I was overwhelmed by guilt. It's one of those rare times in my life when being very strict has failed me. I never claimed myself to be perfect. I make mistakes all the time too—lots of them. Sometimes, I just wished that I could turn back the clock and decide differently in John's case. But obviously I can't do that. I just keep all these small events in my life and hopefully if ever I come to the same situation again, I will be able to approach the matter differently.