WHEN Cikgu Yatt said in her TikTok video, "I know why you didn't finish your work... because you know the teacher won't punish, hit or scold you harshly like before", I felt a need to look deeper into her words.
The viral video was marked by the New Straits Times on June 29, 2024. I am confident that her intention was not to punish her students but to make them do their homework, that is, learn what they should learn.
Many of our colleagues in academia who were students 30 to 40 years ago would agree that during our time, we never felt traumatised or upset if we were beaten or scolded by our teachers.
"Getting punished was normal," said one of those who commented on the video. In fact, beating or scolding made us stronger to strive to improve ourselves, albeit with a few exceptions.
To Cikgu Yatt, students who didn't complete their homework lack respect and have lost their sense of shame. To many others, students now seem to be more emotionally "vulnerable".
The trend of such vulnerability seems to continue at the university level. Even postgraduate students feel traumatised if their supervisors are harsh in their criticism.
Students are terrified to have their draft thesis edited by supervisors with numerous corrections and harsh comments.
During viva voce, it is a trend that an examiner starts by commenting on the student's "good job" and "hard work". Well, they are expected to do a good job and are supposed to work hard.
Many students expect to be motivated (pampered!) before they start their viva, or else they feel vulnerable.
It is not during the viva voce that an examiner ought to acknowledge the students' performance. The viva voce is meant to examine what they have learned and what they haven't.
If the student needs to be praised, that could be reflected in the grades the examiners give or, at best, in the congratulatory notes after the session.
More importantly, the examiner might not have the same tone of acknowledgment for all students attending viva at the same session, making room for obvious bias and discrimination.
Indeed, the students need to be motivated and encouraged, and at the same time, we also need to know who is emotionally stable and resilient.
For teaching and learning, we seem to have adapted methodologies that do not make the students of the current generation perform better than us as we did during our time — a common agreement among many of us working in academia.
We fix learning times and learning objectives for all our students taking a course. It was a norm that our lecturers asked us questions beyond the topics they taught us — to test if we were interested in learning more.
This is how they could screen out the best of the best among us.
We are also forced to prepare questions with a given set of verbs from Bloom's Taxonomy that match a table of learning hierarchy — without knowing what that taxonomy was proposed for.
Meanwhile, we don't restrict students' access to screen time, rather, we encourage them to become increasingly dependent on screen learning.
Perhaps it is worth mentioning that a lifestyle with increased screen time has an irreversible impact on our health — that it makes us vulnerable to epigenetic changes — changes that are not related to inherited genetic changes.
The majority of the diseases linked to epigenetic changes have a common symptom — intellectual disability.
From the primary to the tertiary level, we are preparing a future generation that is not only emotionally weak but also lacks depth of knowledge and vision.
Perhaps that's what we want, and that would justify our venture towards a digital world, where the human workforce will be gradually replaced by more artificially intelligent machines.
The writer is the Associate Dean (Continuing Education), Faculty of Dentistry, and Associate Member, UM LEAD, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. He may be reached at tarique@um.edu.my
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times