Selamat pagi Cikgu (Good Morning teacher)

I HAVE the utmost respect for teachers. In fact I think when the end is nigh and the time comes for great divide – who languishes in hell, who revels in heaven – it is the teaching profession who will have the greatest representation in the land of perpetual running rivers of milk, geysers of honey and where its denizens play in perpetuity.

Why, do you ask, should I think so highly of the teaching profession. Simply because theirs is such a noble vocation and each of us owe them a great debt of gratitude. In no other job can anyone have putty in their hands to shape generations of students who go on to nurture whole families .

This appears to fly in the face of that most recent development down in Sekolah Menengah Peristina in Sungai Buluh. This was where a parent mistook a changing room for a toilet and set off such a stink that, with positions so entrenched, will fester on if cool heads do not prevail.

Before we jump in headlong into the on-going polemic, let us set the scene by searching for the origins of the location’s names – Peristana.

One would be hardpressed to find any explanation as to how the now-notorious school got its name. Bereft of any enlightenment, one can only surmise that it must have come from some colonial era plantation. Perhaps the name Peristana could have been a re-working of the English word pristine, which through abuse, ignorance and mistranslation assumed its present guise.

This is not without precedent. Ask anyone living anywhere near Nilai if they know what the letters L-B-J in Felda LBJ stands for. Those loquacious enough will in all likelihood volunteer – London by Johnson; when in actual fact it stands for Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th President of the United States.

No thanks to the parlous state of our state education system, even kids in the eponymously-named Felda settlement cannot get their address right. They know no history, can’t care to expand their horizons much less pronounce English names with any degree of facility.

Just for general enlightenment, the Felda settlement was named after the US President who visited Malaysia in the early 70s and was honoured with this generous legacy – in the day when Uncle Sam was very much seen as a benevolent, caring and much respected super power serving as a bulwark against encroaching communism in this region.

SEEING THE WOODS FOR THE TREES

Lets then leave such semantics aside, and get back to the real issue at hand.

Just as Muslims were about to get through the two-third mark of fasting in the month of Ramadan, their patience was tested by accusations of discrimination against an ethnic community.

The head teacher of the overwhelming Malay-muslim school was accused of forcing its non-Muslim pupils to take their meals in a toilet. Based on that incendiary social media posting alone, I too got all fired up at the insensitivity of it all.

But being the journalists that I am, I told myself to; “Hang on a sec..; let’s not jump to conclusions and get all worked up until the facts are laid out.”

Keeping one’s powder dry has its merits. I sat next to the senior editor of a vernacular newspaper at an Iftar evening with the Deputy Prime Minister on Thursday who merrily mocked a rival publication for jumping the gun. “They splashed the word toilet in their front page! The newspaper quickly replaced it with changing room for its online portal when they realised their mistake. Alas, by then the wildfire had raged uncontrollably and the race genie had been released.

In contrast, my new-found editor friend said his reporter came back with the same story. Being the seasoned editor he was, the reporter was made to double check his facts and given a lesson in interior architecture that distinguished the difference between a toilet as opposed to a changing room.

For the architectural ignoramus, a changing room is where athletes pile in prior to a game to put on their sporting attire. Crudely put, you preen in one; you p** in the other. One chalk, the other cheese.

A changing room – this school’s changing room; is really just that. Its got shower stalls; but even then the thoughtful headmaster saw to it that the water line was disconnected to ensure no one had any personal plumbing ideas.

And one other thing, this makeshift dining arrangement was agreed to and endorsed by the Parent-Teachers Association wa...aay (sic) back in March! So the question arises; why has it only now become an issue? Non-muslims may have trouble comprehending the headmasters’ decision. So let me help.

THE BOG IN THE DOCK

The changing room – minus the toilet facilities (toilet ya..where there are fixtures that allow for the big job to be done – in this case is clean enough and therefore suitable, in the eyes of the Islamic religion for prayers to be performed.

There is no act more rigourous in the demands for sanitary consideration and the strictest conformity to cleanliness as performing the prayers. If it is considered suitable for prayers, it follows that it is also okay for the purposes of dining.

In Muslim architecture, toilets should ideally be separated by a door from the shower area, in observance of, and to make permissible, the act of ablution.

Come to think of it, so cramped are most of our public housing nowadays that most kitchen and/or dining spaces are located cheek by jowl with the squatting toilet. We don’t go around hounding the providers of such hovels, do we? Hmm....perhaps we should!

Interestingly, some of our favoured eating outlets are guilty of offering its patrons fresh rolls of toilet tissues in place of proper serviettes or napkins to go with our prawn mee. Hungry diners do not appear to care as they continue to throng these favoured eating joints.

If anything, this case has revealed the ineptitude of the Public Works Department which I understand has a special unit that handles the design, construction and maintenance of public schools.

Why? Because the reason we find ourselves in this pickle right now is down to the undersized canteen space at the school. Surely, someone who underestimated the demand for canteen space should hold his head in shame and offer it for the chop...ouch! (But in the interest of fairness, I will stand corrected if the plan was never to take into consideration unfettered – nay unplanned – growth of Sungai Buluh and its surrounding conurbations.

Be that as it may, it is universally acknowledged that the changing room is not the most appropriate of settings for the makeshift eating area. So perhaps our head teacher – and all who follow his footsteps, need a bit more polish in their consideration of what’s yea and what’s nay in an ultra-sensitive situation.

So there you have it. Listen, listen, listen – and listen even more before jumping to conclusions. Failure to make full use of one’s auditory appendage might just lead us all over the edge and into the abyss!

Yes, teachers play a big part in all the unfolding drama. The headbiggest teacher however, is we ourselves – as parents, elders, brothers and sisters. How we behave in front of our charges makes us the biggest teacher there is!