A developer's blog

This week, it’s just thoughts accidentally got caught by my mind when they were having a walk by :P

Naughty kids and (a cup of) tea

In my time, juvenile stories about school boy and girl’s trouble often involve a phrase “Vào phòng giám thị uống trà” – loosely translated to English as “Have tea in the principal’s office”. That phrase mean if you did something naughty, you’ll have to go to the principal’s office, sit there, and endure the long talk with a cup of bitter tea. How many kid in the world like tea? They are for old men. :P That is, the experience is unpleasant because of how the tea taste.

Recently, there is a wave of tea-based products stormed the market here. At first, there was only a bottle of green tea.

A tea bottle, cut from a poster

The above product’s unexpected popularity spawned a myriad of copycats. They even tried to add other flavor to the tea. Now tea tastes like orange (!), grapes, and stuff.

A herbal tea bottle

Having to have tea isn’t such an unpleasant experience as it was anymore. Kids nowadays should have found something else to describe the same situation. I wonder what that is?

‘Tiên học lễ – hậu học văn”

It’s another saying, rooted back from Chinese culture that’s quite popular among 1990s education bigshots in Vietnam. It means one should first learn how to be polite (“lễ phép”), other study should only come after (“văn” means literature, the only subject taught in Chinese school the last 2 millenia). However, the textbook (and the curriculum) emphasizes the “politeness” toward teachers, your relatives and older people.

Nobody told you to treat your friend well.

And now they are crying out loud on the media about how bad there students are at soft skills (and that’s another fancy word they started to use recently).

I think they got the Chinese’s idea totally wrong in the first place. Politeness isn’t for those whom they thought you should respect! It’s for everyone, you should have respected life in general! It’s from this respect that you learn how to please others, how to make friends (party over at each other’s home), form gangs, fight and grow. Instead, they tried to make you socialist children who sit 16 hours a day doing homework until you have to wear glasses :P

If they continue to stay as dumb as they are now not realizing the relation between a 2000 years old saying and a noun they recently learned how to translate (which, like parrots repeating humans’ words without understanding a bit of it), they will make another generation soft on the soft spot.

It’s interesting to think about it though: polite – softskill, literature – hardskill.