First Month..

Today marks the one month anniversary of my career. It has really been an eye-opener, getting to see all kinds of adults and students. As time goes by, I slowly get to witness the negative traits of my fellow colleagues. On the other hand, I'm beginning to see the positive traits that my students possess. I hope I'm not speaking too soon.

I've seen a fair share of a certain male colleague behaving like a wimp, pushing the blame on me, as a result making me the scapegoat and being reprimanded for no reason. Although he did apologise after that, I've learnt to stay clear of him unless there is an absolute need to communicate with him.

Irresponsibilty is the most common sight, surprisingly, not only for students. Some of them are too lazy to clean up after making a mess of the staff common table. Nobody bothers to go downstairs to get printing paper when the paper has run out in the photocopying machine. The most common solution is to get paper from the printer or use one sided paper. And that certain male colleague mentioned above just could not be bothered to print the correct number of copies of worksheets for his students. His excuse: they can always share. He apparently jammed up the photocopying machine but had no guts to inform the photocopying lady, who fumed in anger when she found out what happened. I could have had my revenge and let the photocopying lady know who the culprit was but I didn't want to be in the same 'league' as him.

I hate to say this but I realise that the older generation in my job tends to be more dedicated, responsible and most importantly, possess more civic consciousness. Perhaps the former comes with years of experience. But I feel that the latter two comes from one's upbringing, which sadly mirrors the type of people that Singapore is going to have for the next decades.

An incident happened while I was in class today. It touched me a great deal when I saw my students helping a particular classmate of theirs to cool down and get a grip of herself. While assisting her, they didn't mind getting their uniforms stained by the marker she was holding or getting scratched by her. Frankly speaking, if it weren't for them, I would be at a loss. It then struck me that although their actions were rather childish, their minds were not. And through this incident, I got to differentiate between the caring ones and those who were only concerned with going home early.

I think there's a lot of learning to be done for me if I were to treat this as a career, rather than just a job.