In Continuum.

Apparently, there was a wake for that Chinese Indonesian student yesterday or something like that, and all his friends from school were there to, quoting the newspaper this morning, pay their respects. Wait, what respect? Here is a student who went crazy and attempted murder on a project supervisor. I'm not sure if someone like that is worth our respect at all, much less attending a wake that he pretty much accomplish all on his own, on his own accord. He made it happen for the most part, and it is for all the dumbest reasons in the world - grades. He lost his scholarship here in Singapore, didn't do exactly very well for his project (Got a B instead of an A), and that was probably how he went over the edge and stuck a blade into the lecturer's back. He probably thought that he didn't have much of a choice when he did it, probably thought that it was the end of all things. If he didn't break his neck on the way down, he'd probably be telling people right now that he didn't have a choice, that he had to take his life and someone else's at the same time. The truth is, there is always a choice in everything you do, there is always a choice. Losing a scholarship and getting a B is nothing compared to what a billion other people in this world are experiencing right now. Even if the only choice you make is going to be a stupid one, don't pull someone else down into your hole of stupid. Keep your stupidity to yourself. 

With that said though, that project supervisor probably had it coming as well. There are some lecturers out there who doesn't seem to understand the fact that the students are under pressure most of the time, and that grades are everything to a lot of students out there. Here we have a foreign student from Indonesia, a representative the Mathematics Olympiad when he was back in Indonesia, and was in Singapore on a scholarship. Reading these achievements, you know that this guy is probably the kind of person who puts a lot of emphasis on his grades - why wouldn't he? I mean, he has been doing well all his life, everything seems to revolve around his achievements academically, so it is natural to assume that grades are pretty damn important to him. In fact, to us college students, our grades determines a large part about where we are going to go after we graduate. Even if we don't want it to dictate our lives, it will. There is no two ways about it, our grades determine a whole lot of things for us. So, there is some kind of responsibility on the part of the supervisor to be reasonable with their grading, you know, and don't just mark a person down to the lowest grade possible. You have responsibilities to your students, and putting them down with a horrid letter or numerical grade is not one of them. 

Just this afternoon, the lot of us got into a rather heated debate (not argument) with one of our lecturers. We all know how much effort our friend put into his assignments, and he definitely did not try to take the easy way out for the research proposal this time. It was returned to us this afternoon, and the grade that he got wasn't to his satisfaction. Let's just say that, to be honest, I don't think he deserved that grade at all. So we went up to the lecturer after class to see what went wrong, and we tried to put our point across (not argue) to the lecturer. She then became all defensive about her decision and started pointing out all the nitty-gritty mistakes that supposedly warranted him the grade he obtained. Jody and I tried to debate (not argue) our point to her, but it didn't seem to get through her thick skull at all. After my words were completely deflected by her wall of stupidity, a couple of other students went up to her to consult her in regards to their grades. She described my friend's paper as "like a written diary" when it really should be an academic paper. Then Ken went up to her to consult her, and she told him that he wrote like "a primary school student". Jeremy was being told off because he "sounded like a baby". Notice the downward trend of education level, the way she moved from a diary to a primary school student, to an infant altogether. 

Seriously, sometimes you have to wonder if it is all about the student's inability to cope with stress, or is it just because some lecturers are just complete imbeciles. I think the student who stabbed the lecturer was being incredibly stupid for doing what he did. But at the same token, I think the lecturer probably wasn't exactly the best lecturer around when it comes to dealing with the students. It's interesting how the victim of the assault and my current lecturer were once colleagues at the same local university. The same department probably gave birth to the same breed of numb-headed idiots we have in the teaching community today. I mean, you don't put a student down by calling his word "amateurish" or that he is acting "like a baby" when he clearly isn't. I was there, I heard their conversation, and Jeremy was never, at any one time, trying to be aggressive or anything. She was the defensive one, saying things like "I don't want to waste my time and argue with you". Some students can take such comments and move on, you know, some students just take it and then brush them off their shoulders. But then if you are going to be irresponsible with your comments like that, one in every thousand student that you take is going to crack sooner or later. Your comments are the reason why the society breeds these psychopathic killers at times that run amok in our schools. It is you, your irresponsible words and grading, that deals the death sentence to these students. 

This isn't the first time a student has cracked beneath the local education system. There has been numerous cases in the past whereby students have killed themselves because of stress from school in Singapore. What people don't know is how the school deals with these cases, and it isn't to provide aid to the students or to ease up on the workload. They tell the school not to tell the press anything, to keep everything in the down low and never report it. That is how they attempt to cover everything up, that is also why you don't read about it in the news so much. Everything has been silence, edited, omitted, or deleted altogether before it reaches the front pages. Nobody ever heard about the girl from my sister's cohort in Cedar who attempted suicide in the school toilet with a pair of scissors to the wrists. She didn't succeed at killing herself, but at least it was attempted for the same reasons why so many others did - academic stress. She, like the Indonesian boy who stabbed his project supervisor, is just one of the many students in our schools right now, on the verge of burning out from their school work and experiencing an emotional breakdown. They are the population that cannot take failure, when failure to them isn't a stepping stone, but a rock that pulls down into a deep dark abyss. 

And the reason is because they haven't experienced enough failure in their lives. If you have been succeeding all your life, failing once is going to hit you hard across the face. Of course, not everybody reacts the same way as that student, some students probably are capable of shrugging things off and moving on. But then you cannot assume that all of them are like that, because there is always one or two students who cannot take the idea of failure. I think I like failure at times, I think it is a great reminder that I need to improve myself, to rethink my priorities, to work a little bit harder, to get better next time, you know? I think it is OK if I fail a couple of times at life academically, and it is OK not to be number one. After all, at number one, the only way to go is to stay at number one, or to move down to number two and beyond. Of course, you could always try to remain at the top, but then someone is going to overtake you someday, someone always does. I am glad that I have been an average student all my life, you know, never being the particularly bright student in class who demanded too much of themselves. I expected my best and I did my best, even if my best weren't good enough. Like the A levels, that one I messed up in a royal fashion. But messing that up also caused me to end up in this current school, which I love dearly. I never would have met the people that I've met, and I am thankful for that. 

Failure is kinda like another route, you know, it's just another direction that life takes you. It always works out in the end, no matter what happens. Dropping from an A to a B is not the end of the world, neither is losing a damn scholarship. There are people who are worse off than you, doing much worse than you, working even harder than you, losing much more than a letter grade and a scholarship. They are not killing themselves over something so trivial, they are not running into offices and stabbing their lecturers - though they do sometimes deserve it. Like an epiphany a friend of mine once had, it is all about perspectives in life. You could choose to see losing your scholarship as the end of the world, or you could see it as an opportunity for you to work harder, to do better, to challenge yourself. It is all about perspectives, and there is always a choice to everything. Failing is merely the other direction on a Y-junction, the road on the left instead of the road on the right. It may not be what you expected initially, and it may not be nearly as smooth. But even that is a road that leads to somewhere eventually, because everywhere leads to somewhere. Nobody is ever really lost in life, they are just going around in circles all the time.