可憐的小魔怪

As a private tutor, I share the obligation to teach and look after little monsters. The debate about who creates these monsters is not my concern here, I just want to show my sympathy to them. Raising a kid in Hong Kong is extremely hard, so does being a kid. I heard from my relatives that my cousin has to write a resume for her new born baby. I cannot help but wonder, what should she write? I cannot imagine what a kid needs in order to enter the so called band 1 schools. Maybe they have to master 3 languages at 6 years old or so so.

If we believe Hong Kong is one of the best model reflecting a materialistic society, then the campuses do project our society. As a result kids growing in such a hostile environment have developed a mechanism that they should compete for, basically everything. From academic achievements, to sports excellence or even who has the better pencil box. In one of my classes, there are 3 primary 3 students, 1 of them is very poor at English, she confuses am with an, how with who; the other 2 are slightly better, one of them does do very quite well in her school. So the better 2 compete with the other with anything possible while seizing every chance to show the weaker one they are far better. When I look at them, I cannot help myself from feeling sorry for them.

As human beings, psychologists tell us that we all need validations, we desire others' respect; however, if our value is purely dependent to others, then who we are is just how we are defined or labeled. Furthermore, in most cases, as Mass is fool, we tend to judge things from the obvious. By using a Hermes' bag, you are classy. By using fancy words in your essay, you are well-educated. By being confidence, you are capable. I believe competition is good for students but competition for shallow validation is not. For instance, my students always compete on who finish the exercise first, they parallel doing exercise with racing, fast-finisher means clever, slow-finisher means stupid. Well, I believe every of us knows things do not work this way, besides finishing the paper fast, how many correct answers you get is more important.

As I have said, I do not know why they have to compete on everything but it is pathetic to compete for other's validation, especially things that have no values. One become the puppet of the master when what one desires for is directed by another. It is not wrong for parents to give direction for their kids but it is also the parents' duty to guild them to the correct path. I sympathy these little monsters because they do not know what they are heading to and I sympathy the masters who create these little monsters.