#18 Public Spaces

I don’t really recall I have a time when I felt as if I altered public space. But I do have some experience when someone alters the public space in this way. I guess this is fairly common in Pacific American School. Whenever the lunch bell rang, everyone will rush out of their class room and dash to the cafeteria to be the first one to get lunch and avoid the long queue. Lunch time is probably the most fabulous time during school day. Everyone would use that precious 30 to 45 minutes to enjoy their café food, whether they are like it or not, and have the social time to exchange gossips, people’s feeling toward a test, teacher or the overall school activities. I guess all of our conversations are all quite normal, except once in a while boys will talk about some inappropriate jokes. However, most of our conversation will be in mandarin. This comes into a problem. Whenever our headmaster Ms Pamela walks into the cafeteria, immediately, table to table, people will stop their chats. It seems like she is some kind of mute button that whenever Ms Pamela enters, people will start whispering “Ms Pamela is here, English, English.” Although people do sometimes immediately change their Mandarin conversation into an English one, most people just stop their talk and focus on their food. It is exceptionally funny that our noisy cafeteria will be immediately silence just by the appearance of one individual.

#17 Brother and Sister

In my case, I have a older sister, who is only a year older than me. When we were small, we fought a lot. Back in those days, I was always trying to fight for any toys that my sister has in her hand. I never thought of the idea of “sharing.” I will always say “This is brother’s” in Taiwanese to whatever thing I have my index finger pointed at, either a pencil, cookie or a car. My sister was always so gullible and easily teased. Often times I would trick my sister and divert her attention to the TV or other things to steal away her toys. We would get in a lot of conflict for the toy issue. From what my mom recall, we were like bunch of little monsters. We fought with our teeth that instead of punching each other, we would bite. This is kind of hilarious that often times my mom would find bite marks on my sister’s back when she help her take showers. Then I would get in trouble to being such a naughty brother. Unlike Krull, most of the time it is me who teased my sister and plays pranks on her. Now she is off to college, I rarely have time to tease with her again. She is such a fun sister to hang around with.

#16 School tardiness policy

To me, I believe the current school tardiness policy is too extreme and counterproductive. It is true that this locking door policy when you are late for school in the morning is effective that it uses fear to force people to be on time for school. However, it sacrifices students’ chance for academic education. Although the school may argue that by locking people out for a whole day just for being late for school in the morning is super effective, it takes away school time. This kind of discipline issue should be taught to the student outside of school time. Instead of the locking door policy, I propose to have a stricter detention that should serve as an enough fear factor for people to learn to be punctual. In the past years, our detention system is never strict enough that people don’t really suffer and learn from such after school community service. However, if we impose a stricter detention system, we wouldn’t need a locking door policy. For every 3 tardiness to school in the morning, the student will have to spend a week of detention. It accumulates that way that if you have 6 tardiness, you will have 2 weeks of detention. In detention, students will be forced to clean classrooms and clean the school environment. They will need to write an essay everyday in detention for 30 min on various topic that the teacher choose to pick. The initiative of the policy is well established and reasonable. There is indeed a dilatory issue for students in our school. However, to correct student’s behavior, we shouldn’t sacrifice student’s class time and education.