Daily Lesson from Life 15 April 2009

"Wed, Apr 15, 2009 The New Paper - Student throws chair, file at VP

IT was like any other routine visit by a vice-principal to a class during the Pastoral Care period.
But one student suddenly went berserk.

It happened when the vice-principal, a woman,visited a Secondary 4 Express class at a school in the east on 2 Apr.


While she was addressing the class, the student suddenly stood up and threw a file and then a chair in her direction. He also rushed forward as though he wanted to hit her, but was quickly restrained by his classmates. No one was hurt in the incident.

A student from the class, who did not want to be named, told The New Paper that the vice-principal was 'scolding' the class about their poor common test results.


She asked those who were confident of scoring at least five O levels or of making it to polytechnic to stand up. All except two boys in the class stood up. The student said: 'She then told the form teacher to take down their names and call their parents.'

She told the class to sit down and write down their plans for achieving their goals. The form teacher walked over to one of the two boys who did not stand up. She told him to take out a piece of paper and start writing.

It was then that the boy suddenly stood up and threw a file and subsequently a chair in the direction of the vice-principal.


The boy was under counselling with managing his emotional issues prior to this outburst."

The old school folks will say that the boy need to be severely punished for his outburst and 'violent' behaviours. Inability to manage one's emotion is not a good reason to not punish him.

While the new school folks will say that since the boy was under counselling on managing his emotional issues at the time and that the outburst though unacceptable need to take into account why the boy snapped. In addition, since there was no injuries to anyone, should we punish the boy or try to understand what went wrong and help him, as he obviously needed help?

I lean more towards the new school folks' approach given the fact that the boy was also remorseful and at a loss of why he did what he did!

Lessons for me are:

1. when people care about their study, they experienced stress when they are not doing well. Some handle it better than others while some don't. As leaders and people developers, we must expand more efforts and energy to help those who cannot handle the stress;

2. the approach upon which we adopt to 'identify issues' and 'encourage those who did not do well' must be sensitive. 'Scolding' in my mind does not really help the students in raising their performance for the next tests! Proper feedback skills need to be taught and practiced;

3. while we choose to help instead of punish the boy will invite questions, we must be clear in our fundamental objective in education: to help someone who knows they need help! With this key belief as anchor, I don't think we will question ourselves if we are 'weak leaders' who cannot punish our people! We have the strength to do the 'helping' instead of the 'easier way out of punishing'!

May the boy get the proper help and that he succeeds in managing his emotion better. May the VP and the form teacher and the school learn to 'motivate' better despite experiencing a very stressful session of the students not performing well at their tests! ;-)