24/3/04 - Sunita did not come to school today.. so I had to cover her Year 10 double Malay period.. one period is 35 mins in school here.. first 15 mins they did their Malay homework.. and then they whipped out their History books to do their essay assignment... so I peered over Seth's work and saw that they were doing Hitler's Germany, their treatment of Jews and WWII in Europe... and Danial asked: "do you think you can be of help for our hist homework? Our hist period is after lunch.." And I was like "sure! why not?".. and so the rest of the Malay lesson turned into a history lesson by me.. and wow, it felt great! Especially when you see them scribbling furiously as I did the essay outline and the salient points for them on the whiteboard.. haha... If only I did better for A level history, i'd have oozed more confidence in front of them... but that's over now. can only look forward.. but hey, at least I didn't have to refer to any textbook while scrawling all over the board.. so i'm not a spent force yet hopefully.. =)
I kind of quite dislike the new system in school where students with behavioural problems have to carry a yellow book... and let the subject teacher sign on it EVERY period of the day.. and you can only be taken off the yellow book if you have a clean record after 5 straight days.. as I was signing Danial's book just now (he's on the yellow book thingy), i flipped thru' and it's quite evident that it's the HOD that is making life difficult for him cos' she's always the one that denies him the "right" to be taken off the list.. so i told him, "danial, if you look thru' your book, you'll see that most of us are nice people and that if we can see that you've been generally all right during class.. we'll sure sign that "you're okay..." so all you should be doing now is to be really on your best especially during the lessons of teachers who always don't pass u... and you'll be off the list in no time..."
And he said "it's english i'm always booked down".. and that's the HOD class btw... n i said "well i have no comments on that.. but since u figured it out, u're gonna work on that right?" Sigh, i really detest this system... pretty draconian.. i'll just scream if i have to give a book to every teacher to sign every period.. if he has a problem, he shd be counselled n talked to in a very civilised manner... and just to throw him some arbitrary punishment and not solve the root of his problem.
Lastly, we've just bought 54 new library books.. all from the New Windmill Series of books.. most are actually Literature texts.. revolve around human issues. cool stuff. I just catalogued them... will probably be reading them before everyone else too... books include Friedrich by Hans Peter Richter (my Sec 1 Literature text), Rice Without Rain (by Minfong Ho)... hmm what else? can't remember... lots of stuff about discrimination against blacks in America, and the Aborgines in Australia... but I'm still reading the book which I just bought from Kino 4 days ago... "Berlin The Downfall 1945" by Antony Beever..