Tofu

i think our children these days are soft as tofu. and their egos are as huge as they are soft.

a friend of mine did this camp for a group of student volunteers working on a programme. he has been working with them for some time already and the camp was meant to be a team-building cum planning event. as part of the teambuilding, he arranged a dragonboating session.

as they rowed, they met some adverse weather conditions. there was a huge wave. that means that if the rowers were not careful, they might be sucked into the water. the water has jelly fishes, which pose another problem. so my friend asked them to raise their paddles. twice. but they didn't. they were still fooling around, joking, laughing, etc. so he lost his temper and shouted, using some very strong language. because of that, the students got pissed off with him. and despite him explaining his actions and even apologising, they continued to sulk and are refusing to talk to him.

how stupid are these students?! unfortunately, a good portion of our students today are like that. they think that they are always right, that no one has the right to criticise and scold them. and if anyone scolds them, that person is a bad person who ought be punished. our students expect us to talk nicely to them, to speak softly to them, to mollycoodle them. throw a vulgarity at them and they get offended, crumble and break down. they take the comforts and privileges that they have as their God-given right, that things would be done magically for them without them lifting a single finger.

but life is not going to mollycoodle them. life is not going to speak softly to them. life is going to show them their idiocy in the most direct way possible. true, life is not going to hurl vulgarities but life is going to throw tragedies in their faces and sneer when they are felled by the burden of failure, writhing in pain and humiliation.

and we are not helping our students prepare for that moment when they have to bear the burden of responsibility for their own lives by themselves. our being soft on them just condemns them to a weakness of character which would damn them to be failures.

this tofu generation needs toughening up. they need us to break them, to push them into ditches and learn for themselves how to claw back up rather than wait for someone to pull them out.