DIRTY HOE

Well, if you are teachers, then you are well-aware of the tactics in major examination. And yes, I’m referring to the arranged seating in the exam hall. If you are students, you’ll probably meet teachers who ask you to be ‘kind’ and share your answers with the friends next to you.

And all the students who are deemed the hope of the school, those who are straight A’s students, those who are in Malay ‘ditatang bagai minyak yang penuh’ (I cannot think of an idiom that matches the famous Malay saying) since they are viewed as the ones most likely to succeed will be seated next to those from the last classes, those who are deemed as the trash of society and will most likely to be drug dealers or good for nothing type of brothers or sisters.

And then in the school meeting, the problem would be these delinquents would disturb the good students. Badgering the good students even before they started answering their own papers. And when the powers that be asked how can we curb this problem, my sarcastic remark (which I keep in my mind) was “Stop arranging the kids according to your evil plot a.k.a putting the good students among the bad students so the bad students can take the advantage to copy from the good students”.

I know we are so cooped up with percentage and the good name for the school but come on, are you kidding me? Teaching kids at an early age that they should depend on dirty tactics to survive? So that they could be successful at the expense of others? So that they can take other people’s place that others deserved just because they get extra help to cheat in the exam?

I don’t know how the schools have downgraded from the past decade that I was out of it. I thought the school was supposed to be a place for kids to know the right from wrong, to discern good from evil and to maintain their veils of innocence for as long as we can.

But I guess others have the wrong means to get to their designated destination. No matter what the means are. Even when the means put other kids at a disadvantage just because we want to save a few students who are meant to doom anyway by their own admission?

Maybe I am still green and naive at the real truth behind the success of a school. But if I am right about the wrong means to get the percentage that we wanted, that I’d rather be naive than condoning the dirty tricks that teach the students to lie and cheat.

But again, I’m just a subservient servant serving selflessly for the sake of a higher power above me.