No kidding

It was the scariest afternoon of all my years of relief-teaching.

I was taking a class of 4- to 5-year-olds, an age group that is usually a delight to teach. They are attentive, sufficiently scared of the teacher, lively and get involved in almost anything you teach them. So I was really looking forward to the class.

However, amongst the little ones was a certain kid (let's call him Danny) who actually freaked the living daylights out of me. At first I did not notice anything strange about him - he looked like a regular bespectacled Singaporean kid - but I realised after a while that he was unusually quiet. After the kids had matched the young of animals to the parents, I asked them if they wanted to colour the animals. All of them gleefully attacked the crayons.

Except this one.

"Danny, don't you want to colour the animals?" I asked.

"No."

"Why not?"

"No."

"Danny, teacher said - colour the animals." One of his classmates said.

"No."

"You say 'No' to everything."

"No."

By then, I was in another corner of the class, trying to explain to a kid why she couldn't colour a calf blue and the corresponding mother-cow purple. I could hear the banter between Danny and the other kid, but I thought it was one of the meaningless conversations that kids have when they have finished their work and are waiting for their classmates to stop colouring.

"Is your name Danny?" The other kid was laughing away, obviously having fun asking all these questions and getting negative responses to all of them.

"No." Danny said, still with a straight face.

I've seen kids play this game, but it's always accompanied by laughter. This time, it wasn't.

"Do you wear glasses?"

"No."

When I turned to them, I realised that Danny had moved about four chairs away from the other kid, and was looking at him with what could only be described as hatred. At the same time, he seemed to be kind of enjoying answering the questions in a masochistic kind of way, and waiting for the next one. The other kid, however, was getting tired of teasing Danny, and was also running out of questions.

"Danny, get back to your seat." I said.

"No." he glared at me.

A 5-year-old glared at me, and for a second I was afraid. I was afraid of a 5-year-old.

So I realised that the best thing to do was to move on to the next topic. As I explained something on the whiteboard, he kept staring into space with a very steely look in his eyes. And he still sat four seats away from the rest of the class. He was not one of those cheeky kids trying to be funny. I've come across plenty of those kinds, but this one was different. In a weird sort of way, in a way that would make you forget his age. And I knew it wasn't my imagination.

At the end of the lesson, I asked the kids to go to the computer room to watch a video on marine animals. All of them cheerfully ran to the computer room, but Danny stayed put.

"Danny, don't you want to watch the video?" I asked.

"No."

"Look, everyone else has gone. Shall we go too?"

"No."

"It's a very interesting video, Danny. I'm sure you'll like it. Come, let's go."

"No."

"Okay, if you won't go, I won't go either." I dragged a chair and sat next to him. He did not say a word or look at me.

A few minutes later, I noticed him looking at me every now and then.

"What is the matter, Danny? Is there something you want to tell me?"

"No."

"Are you angry, Danny?"

For a second it seemed like something returned to his steely eyes, but then he looked away again. I could not believe why he was behaving in such a grown up manner.

"Danny, are you angry at someone? You want to tell me?"

"No."

Perhaps I'd been reading too much about the Virginia Tech shooter, but the truth was - even though he was at most five years old, Danny was exactly the kind of kid I could see taking up a gun and shooting his classmates. It wasn't funny.

I started to wonder - are these the kind of kids that grow up into violent killers who believe they are merely taking revenge because they have been wronged? Or was I over-reacting? Should I have raised the alarm or was it too early and way of out line? When you are a relief teacher, along with limited responsibilities comes limited power. You're merely covering for a teacher who is ill. You're not responsible for anything beyond the basic lesson itself. You cannot get involved in the character-building of the kids you're teaching. You're probably never going to see the kid again in your life, and what you do, even if your intentions are good, may leave a mess behind for the regular teacher to clean up after you. So there I was, helpless, not knowing what to do, whether to raise the issue, whether to write a note to the parent or even to the regular teacher. She would probably toss it aside with the thought - what does the relief teacher know about the kids in my class? And I'd be blacklisted forever by the school as the paranoid relief teacher with the hyperactive imagination.

For all you know, they could be right. Perhaps I was indeed over-reacting? I'd probably read too much on the Virginia Tech shooter and other school shootings in the last few days. Perhaps the kid was just having a bad day. But then, do 5-year-olds have bad days? We grown-ups have bad days. I had one myself - I spilt milo on my white top before my job interview, the interview itself didn't go as well as I'd wanted it to, I dropped my favourite black jacket somewhere on the way to the school (and hence almost froze to death in the four hours I spent in the freezing classroom), encountered the naughtiest (and most annoying) little girl I'd ever taught, and ended up with a really bad headache. That was quite a bad day. But I wasn't angry. What can happen in the day of a 5-year-old to make him so angry?

And let's say this kid stayed angry all the way. Perhaps he had a lonely childhood, perhaps his parents did not have time for him, perhaps his classmates ridiculed him. Whatever it was, he had something on his mind, and he had not told anyone. Was it possible that he would do something drastic when he grew up and then blame it on his childhood? Whether it's completely true or not, most offenders do tend to blame their parents, their classmates or their upbringing for their crimes. In a world where psychiatrists would believe anything to create a theory, I guess it's easy to blame someone else to justify your actions. But aren't parents getting too much flak? If their kid turns crazy and kills 30 of his classmates and then himself, they live with the flak that they did not bring up their kid right. As if they really wanted their kid dead. And then, random teachers jump up after the deaths to claim that they saw 'signs' of a 'disturbed childhood' and what not in 'the killer'. But the kid is dead and so are many other innocent ones. Who's the one living with the heartbreak at the end? It's the parents again. Why are they always at the receiving end?

Is it really as easy as looking out for 'signs' in your kid? Is it not possible that due to hyper-vigilance by people around him (including his parents), a normal kid is somehow unnecessarily branded as 'odd' or 'angry' and 'someone who needs help' just because someone noticed something about him that was different from his peers? Is it not possible that the so called 'help' extended to the kid by society is the reason he gets so screwed up that he ends up pointing a gun at the people around him? Doesn't this mean that watching a kid too much may be just as responsible for a school shooting as not watching him?

They say parenting is a joy. 'They' also say that bringing kids up is not easy. But why? Why is parenting so difficult anyway? If having kids is an ability most people are born with, shouldn't parenting be as easy as the rest of the abilities we are born with, such as eating and drinking? And if it's so hard, then how do you know whether you're going to do it right or not? If everything your kid does is a reflection of how you brought him/her up, isn't it too risky? How do you know what - or whether something - is 'wrong' with your kid? What if there are no 'signs'? How do you know which of your littlest actions are going to be blamed for playing a part in a bloodbath many years down the lane?

Whose fault is it really?

If a government has endangered lives by introducing guns into society, is it possible that you could end up endangering lives by introducing, without your own knowledge, a ticking time bomb - your so-called "badly brought up kid" - into the same society, to promptly pick up the gun so freely supplied to him/her?

What is more dangerous really - the gun or the kid?