I realised that we can adopt so many kinds of teaching styles. But we can fail in teaching for various reasons. Sometimes, our teaching is criteria based. Students feel a sense of intimidation because there are too many criteria or ‘to dos’. They feel a sense of failure even before they start trying. They know that the criteria is far too perfect for them. Some teachers are informative based. They wanted to get every facts and details across. They are afraid of missing out certain facts that make the lessons incomplete. They fail to realise that the lesson objective is more important than remembering the details of the story. This is especially true for child education. Children can get the details of the story, but they may not get the teaching point. Others are cognitive based. They go by reasoning and logic. They emphasised on the flow of the lessons. Some are problem based. They teach for correction. They zoom into the problems and explained what is wrong and what need to be done about it. Those who are more successful are those who are transformative based. They exposed worldview thus letting the students know more about themselves. The students are about to analyse the situation and proposed a solution themselves. But it requires most work and thinking too.

What is religion in our world today? Is it still a belief? Is it still a philosophy? Is it a worldview? Is it about peace or about war? In the name of religion, we proclaim peace. In the name of religion, we declare war. Religion has always been a tool people used to fight for rights and to justify our rights. It is anything but religious actually. Religion has been an identity for people groups. It is a weapon to fight for survival. It is a means to achieve our ends. So sad…..

Have we been too fixated with our faculty of thoughts and emotions? Is it possible to think with our hearts? Can we feel with our heads? There is cognition in our emotions, and there is affection in our thoughts. If we only think with our heads and feel with our hearts, we will fail to understand ourselves, we may also misunderstood others.

Some spend too much time making their heads big. They are full of knowledge but they are petty (small heart) and take little or no action. Others have big hands. They boast their ability and skills, but lack of planning and generosity. What we lack is often a big heart. It requires the most time and effort to develop in most cases. Heart is what we are made of. It is our character. It is our motivation. How nice if these three aspects are in balance in our life. We will have the knowledge to think, analyse and plan. We will have the skills and ability to carry them out. We would also have a right motivation and a pure heart in all the things we think and do.

Our life is a blank piece of paper. It depends on who writes on it, what is written on it, why it is written, how it is written and when it is written. If nothing is done to it, it is only fit for the trash bin.

We look into the mirror everyday, but how much we know ourselves? How much do we really see ourselves? Perhaps is because we tend to look at others most of the time. Anyway, once we leave the mirror, we can only see others. People who know themselves and see themselves are people who really make deliberate effort to do so. We need to use the things around us to be a mirror for us. We need to use the people around us as mirror for us. We cannot depend just on the mirror we see ourselves. That’s superficial anyway. People who are wise are people who can use anything around us to be our mirrors. All the things around us can be reflectors for us to know our true self. I hope we can understand ourselves more than others. We can see ourselves more than we see others. In this way, we will able to see more good in others than seeing their flaws. We will see our weakness and not just our strength.

Once I was so stressed with my school work. But my friend still invited me to her concert. I was thinking of rejecting her invitation but I was too ‘pai seh’. So with a lot of grumbling, I went to the concert. I told myself I must make full use of the concert. During the concert, I learnt something about life. The concert was a Chinese orchestra and I saw one of them was playing the ‘guzhen’. As I watched her played, I learnt something about life. I realised that only a taut string can make a beautiful note. A loose string cannot make any nice music. I realised that in each of our lives, pressure is needed to make our life beautiful. If there is no pressure, we will slack and slog. We need the pressure to provide the necessary tension and motivation to move ahead in life. Of course, it cannot be too taut at the same time. If the string is too taut, it would break as well. There need to be necessary pressure, but not excessive pressure to keep us going in life. So enjoy.

The Jenga game is played by removing the lower blocks so that the blocks can be stacked higher. One lesson learnt from this: in order to get the excitement and thrill in life, we gradually eroding the foundations of our life. Though we may enjoy all the fun and cheap thrill, we may also fall hard. Build strong foundations in our lives. We need them. Look far enough. Don’t look at the thrill without the pain, that is not ‘xiao sa’, that is stupidity.

One day I was watching 2 boys playing badminton. They were not good players. They keep missing the shuttle. Before the shuttle can land low enough, the boys would hit it. The shuttle ended up high up in the sky, but it could not go far. Sometimes, the boys would try to hit the shuttle before it landed low enough. As a result, they missed the shuttle. I learn two lessons through the boys. Sometimes, we try to grab those things that are not ready for us to have, we may get it sometimes, but it would not last long. Or we may try our means to get it even faster, but we get nothing in the end. There are things that we need to wait. The perfect timing would come. Good things come to those who wait.

The water sprinkling system at my office has not been working for a long time. The company was supposed to send his man here but had not done so for a long time. One afternoon, I was checking if the system was repaired. It was not, of course. But something caught my attention. Even though there was no water supply, the weeds were still growing. Many times we starved our lives from ‘healthy food’ that builds up our lives. We hinder the growth of our lives, but that is not all, weeds began to grow and it further speeds up the rate of death. We may look healthy on the outside, but who knows for our long we have been death inside of us. Wake up, before it is too late.