Fortissimo

Three posts in one day... Originally I wanted to put it in my previous post, but when I remembered I had already published it, and on second thought I think this deserves a post of its own.

As Kaiyan so poignantly put it, this is Singapore. Nothing is free. No free food, no freeloading off the government, no free housing, no fre education, no freedom of speech. I suppose that is a small (or is it that small?) price to pay for economic, social and political stability. Personally I'd rather have the Singapore government than some government who has strikes and protests for lunch.

The article on the boy who got public caning for flaming a school teacher angered me and the others at first, but on closer inspection, it was plain stupid of him to hack into a teacher's account and then flame him. On the school's forum.

How dumb can top-school students get?

However, the three JC students, among many many others, who were sought out by the discipline department to be suspended and told to remove the offensive comments?

Firstly, what the hell are you doing reading your students' blogs? I have seen teachers spend every second of their available time frantically marking towering stacks of exercise books. And these teachers have time to look up students' blogs and be sad about the terrible comments made by their favourite student?

Secondly, the blog, while also used as a medium of entertainment towards a selected audience, it is primarily an online journal to, as I have said about four times now, create a worded snapshot of a particular point in your life, before it melts away to join forgotten memories. Punishing a student for something said on their blog is equivalent to discovering a student's private diary she left under the table, where she wrote that her maths teacher was a fugly biatch, and punishing her for that comment. It's her bloody diary, dammit, what business have you to read it without her permission?

The blog is freely accessible to anyone. But apart from your friends who know your blog address anyone else who stumbles upon your page is most likely a stranger from halfway across the world. Unless someone decides to be a bastard and sabotages the author (in which case you shouldn't be persecuting the author either), if the flamed person happens upon that blog, he or she should know that the nasty comment was not meant to be read by him or her. And of course as Kaiyan said the idiot should be reflecting on why the nasty comment was made. If it was made because the author is an immature asshole then why do you bother yourself with it? If it was made by a normal student then for goodness' sake reflect on what you did, whether your were unfair or unreasonable. It's bad enough that the teacher runs to the discipline department to handle this, and worse that the discipline department actually follows up on this case and punishes the student.

Please. If it's face you're worried about, go stick a mask on so it won't fall off.