Nostalgia is also emotion. I know how it feels when we want to go home.
A student reluctantly requests to go home. She was holding her tears. The nostalgic urge to meet parents, to take flight home was apparent.
That longing to go home can be read in her face painted in sadness more than the sincerity of going to hospital. Having been a teacher for so many years, having looked at their faces in times of laughter and teacher and fear and doubts, I have learnt to feel their emotion. But I have also learnt not to be overwhelmed by their emotion lest empathy makes me gullible at decision making.
As students end their midterm examination, even parents seem to seek permission to take children for varied reasons. Yes, there are few with genuine health conditions who need to visit doctor, or some other purposes. Parent and children seem to provide as convincing a reason as possible to get away from our noses, and we are put to task of reassuring, explaining, verifying and negotiating the authenticity.
Our Dzongkhag had decided to plan entertaining and productive engagement programme for two weeks, and Dechentsemo sketched the plan to the last detail. We have sporting activities, movies, music, reading festivity, guest speaker talks shows, painting class, dancing and singing to storytelling, to engage students differently. These are learning opportunities I haven’t received in my decades of schooling. When this happens for our students, some parents and students have neither enthusiasm to be part of it nor a thought that it’s a pandemic situation that must be respected.
The Ministry of Education directed to hold all boarder students in campus to ensure safety of students. Ministry is right to have placed this referendum, taking into account teachers and students need for a vacation. In fact, teachers have had no vacation since pandemic began, having to make homes as workplaces even during lockdowns. But this are་trying times we must all understand with some bitterness to taste.
If boarder students are to go home, many are from faraway places. They may not be go, we cannot say, to high risk places but when they are in other places, they have more danger to be exposed to other people. Day scholar students are staying in the locality already and are cared for already.
When emotions comes in between people fail to understand greates causes that need to be adhered to. Some parents even fail to understand that principals have to be guided by higher directive, ensure safety of all students, and engagement and entertainment of hundreds of others. We think of everyone, and every child is insured upon us.
When emotions arises we often become selfish, thinking about our own happiness only, about happiness for our own children. If nothing can make us feel guilty, we have our beloved King as a beacon of selflessness, of compassion and leadership. His majesty is a family man, and his majesty must love to be with the future king, the prince and the baby prince. Her majesty the queen would love have her knight is armour beside her, but her majesty is bracing the absence of our beloved king with queenly courage. His majesty sketches the plains and the mountains, settlements and the forests, relentlessly day after day for wellbeing of everyone of us. And we think we deserve rest and reward, that our easy desire must be fulfilled, that my daughter must go home for vacation, that we must have party and pleasures. Our service to the nation need not be known by any but by our conscience, by looking at the intent that often drives us wrong in our actions.
If we need to be fair, we must understand each other. Parents must know that I have children of my own deprived of my time in reaching out for welfare and safety of other students. We fail as principal of a school if parents fail to make home of our minds for your students.
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