I had the privilege to participate in this one-and-a-half-day inaugural Education and Career Guidance Conference at Republic Polytechnic yesterday and earlier today. Among all the large-scale events I've attended before, this had to be one of the most well-organised.
We had keynote speakers who hail from various parts of the world, and also in key industries in Singapore, addressing the whole group, which comprised thousands of school personnel including principals, HODs, career guidance coordinators in schools, and full-time school counsellors. Then there were also concurrent sessions, where we had to go our respective venues during an assigned slot to listen or interact with other presenters. That was when I had a chance to be inspired today by one particular speaker, Dr. Josephine Kim.
Dr. Kim is currently a lecturer on Education in the Risk and Prevention program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She's a Korean-American and had always been interested in both teaching and counselling, so she managed to settle on a job that merged the two interests -- teaching others how to counsel. She engaged me right from the beginning of her presentation through her affable smile, lively eyes, gentle but firm and fluent speech and, more importantly, her rich sharing of personal experiences. It's her stories that touched me most, and left me feeling really inspired to do an even better job at helping students.
I learnt a lot from her in less than 2 hours, but one thing sticks most: the effect a parent or educator can have on a child. In fact, this doesn't just apply to parents or educators; any adult that comes into regular contact with a child can have such a large influence over the child's development through his/her own actions and behaviour towards the child. Such an influence is so great yet we almost always overlook it on a day-to-day basis.
Dr. Kim spoke of how when she first enrolled in a school in the States as a child, she failed everything else but Art, and thought she wasn't going to ever make it in life. It was a caring teacher who gave her a taste of success and motivated her to keep going by sitting through vocabulary exercises with her outside of class and guiding her patiently. 25 years later, she looked up the teacher in the yellow pages, managed to contact her, and the teacher, upon knowing how successful she is now, broke down in tears over the phone. According to her, she used to pray for all the students who had difficulty in school each night before she went to bed, and guess what? She prayed the hardest for a young Josephine Kim back then. It must be really gratifying to learn that a child you once helped has finally attained success in life, even if the process took a long time.
Another story that I want to remember is the story of the student who went mad and went on a shooting rampage in Virginia Tech University, resulting in a shocking campus massacre. Dr. Kim was called in to counsel the traumatised students of the university after the incident, and she revealed that the shooter was heard uttering words before he started killing people. This was surprising because no one had heard the murderer speak at all as a student before the terrifying incident took place, and no lecturer had observed anything amiss with him, or even cared enough to ask why he never spoke a word, or established any social bond with others. He looked physically healthy, and his grades were consistently good. According to Dr. Kim, in America, one of the key signs of emotional distress exhibited by students from several other racial and cultural groups would be a sudden drop in the quality of academic grades achieved. But for Asian students, because of the need to be competitive and perhaps fulfill their parents' demands, they continue working hard to maintain their grades. That's why the lecturers at Virginia Tech never thought there was anything wrong with him. What they saw were the grades, not the person. If only someone had cared enough to speak to him, even before he became an undergrad, perhaps such a tragedy could have been prevented. Like Dr. Kim, I find this very very heartwrenching.
Indeed, adults can be so cruel. How many times have we heard adults speaking harsh words to a child, simply because the child is not producing results? I have heard comments from parents before regarding their child's achievements. Even when the child attains an A2, or perhaps a 96, instead of commending the child on the wonderful effort put in, the parents say that the child should 'do even better', or that their grades are 'still not good enough'. When are the grades ever good enough, for these parents? What must it take for them to even look beyond the grades and marks to see the little hand that was trying so hard to fill in the answers? When will they see their child for what their child is, not for what they want their child to be?
I admit that, as a teacher, grades are important to me, and I monitor the students' progress through their grades too. But I know, and want to constantly remind myself, that behind each grade or number on my record list is the face of a child.
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