Friday, June 29, 2007

Scratches

Part of the "perks" of being in the teaching line is that you may get your property vandalized by students from time to time. It surely doesn’t help if you’re teaching in a school where visits by the local police is a regular affair.

To date, my dear Estee ( a nickname I’ve reserved for my car), has been vandalized 5 times in a span of 3 months. Most of the times it would be scratches…sorry..long scratches at the sides of the car, extending from the back door all the way to the front. At other times it may be chalk markings on the windows. Yeay! Lucky me..it wasn’t liquid paper like my friend’s Altis. Perhaps Estee is a tad too pale for the students’ liking, so much so they felt they needed to give her an instant make-over by splashing Milo onto the windscreen.

When I see the “art work” left by the students, I often wonder what goes on in their minds when they do these “touch ups”. What drives them to cause such destruction? What have I done to deserve this? The physical scars can be repaired…all one needs is money. But the emotional scars that one bears inside take time to heal. Often, a very long time indeed. For many of us whose husbands take interest in our cars, having to explain to them about the scratches and sorts is something that we can do without. Really, we don’t need to be reminded that we work in a zoo (as mine had aptly put it). And yes…we have been extra nice to the students today…no punishments meted out to those who turned our classes into a circus.

So when I discovered a 2 meter scratch on Estee yesterday, I quickly went into control damage mode.With the help of my kids the car was “cleaned”. After an hour of laborious polishing (and a backache to boot), we managed to get most of the scratches to magically disappear. Thank God! Coz hubby returned about 10 minutes later, and I really didn’t feel like going through the rigmarole of explaining the why and the wherefores.

To end this post I leave you with a poem that I penned on the eve of Teacher’s Day.



A Teacher’s Wish

On Teacher’s Day I have one wish,
For students to try their best and resist,
Temptations to scratch a teacher’s car,
The one that’s near, or one that’s far.
Be it with stones or twigs or pens,
Your actions are hard to comprehend,
Splashes of Milo across the screen,
It stains our hearts, makes us wanna scream.
Oh Why! Oh Why! Do you do this?
Why is it you’re hard to please?
What would it take to leave our cars alone?
Perhaps a parking bay in some safe “Green Zone”.
Till that day comes, we just have to pray,
That you’ll turn your backs and walk away,
Heed this advice, and be at your best,
End this vandalism, give it a rest!

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tell my brother that life is full of trade offs, you enjoy the benefits of having a wife as a teacher, you have to live with some scratches on the car. If you get a wife who works in KL, drives 100km a day, gets a boss who expects them to stay back until 1am sometimes and 7pm most of the time, and may be stuck in flash floods sometimes(which may render her car useless)or massive jams in Ampang, most days, and you have to deal with kids homework and tuition yourself... you will realise that a scracth on the car, however long or deep, is a small price to pay. As a matter of fact, a RM200 touch up paint job will do the trick, and the car will look like it came out of the show room.

So blue wonder, save your back, just tell him to deal with it!

Anonymous said...

By the way, that comment was from Mak Lang... lupa pulak nak tulis, not that you can't guess!

Sue said...

cute poem. I like the 'Milo' part. :)

bluewonder said...

mak lang,

he cheekily asked me to polish his car! I said NOOOOO WaYYYYYY

bluewonder said...

minah celoteh,

Tq for visiting n nice to meet u. My hubby loves going to Spore. Latest visit, he came bck with plasma TV. good bargain he said.

D said...

Hey, Horay-Mouse teachers are tought ones, lorr! He only chooses the best to be educators.

On a different note, you have been tagged and apparently, by doing this meme you are contributing rm127 to the Darul Izzah Orphanage. Got time to do this, eh?

luvs, D

Anonymous said...

So Mak Lang,

How much is Mr Merican gonna giv u bonus this year....more BBQ comming up ah?

Mr Tompang

(",)azlan::~~~ said...

Dear bluewonder, Did you know that you can insure your car against Special Perils?

Unfortunately, the insurance industry defines Special Perils as flooding and damage from falling objects (usually branches and trees during a windstorm, but also bits and pieces that fall out of the sky. The chances of your car being hit by a meteorite are astronomically small, but bits of aircraft can cause quite a bit of damage, you know ~ just as any New Yorker about 9/11).

Although the insurance industry doesn't consider the little perils you find at school as Special Perils, you can, however, insure your car against RSMD, which is insurance-speak for Riot, Strike and Malicious Damage.

Azlan Adnan
Authorised Insurance Agent
019-282 9526

madame blossom said...

masyaallah.. what good timing to sell that insurance!

but blue, read the small prints, if u decide to buy. :)

i can't imagine how difficult it is to connect with the kids nowadays for teachers.. maybe u can make lots of doa, and get inspirations from they ways of our prophet.. and maybe even from movies like dead poet society, ada satu french one ni.. les chroxxxx.. i forgot la.. but i hear it's good.

you have a noble job. keep up ur fight, to make better people out of these students.

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