By Zubaidah Nazeer and Megha Gupta

GOING through what he wrote, you would think he has a dirty mind.

It is littered with explicit words and crude phrases that refer to body parts.

Russel (not his real name) is just 13. As he is a minor, we are not revealing his identity.

The Secondary One student was asked to write the piece, called a 'reflection' in his school, on 7 Nov last year.

He and a schoolmate had been hauled up for taunting and shoving the previous month.

A few of his schoolmates were also made to write reflections, and they put down allegations about him, some of which turned out to be false.

Russel later claimed he had been forced to write his own reflection, owning up to uttering Hokkien vulgarities and making crude gestures.

His mother, Mrs Chan (not her real name), is upset at the way the school has handled the matter and demands a letter of apology.

But the school, in the north, says it will not apologise. It insists that Russel had written the reflection on his own.

Mrs Chan was also puzzled that no disciplinary problems were mentioned in Russel's report card, given two days after he wrote his reflection.

The report card described him as a boy who 'demonstrates positive assertiveness and has a keen interest in aesthetics'.

She claims the school handled the situation in a 'humiliating' manner and it was 'hypocrisy' not to mention these issues in the report card.

She also claims that her son doesn't know Hokkien and the meaning of many words in the reflection.

'The school shows him to be an angel (in the report card), but it has made him out to be a devil in the reflection,' she said.

The school says it intentionally left out the disciplinary issues from the report card.

Russel told The New Paper that on 12 Oct, he and a schoolmate were having a friendly tussle when the other boy shouted a vulgar word. Russel got angry and responded with a crude gesture.

His mother was summoned to the school the same day.

She was shown reflections three students had written that day about Russel and his use of vulgar language, among other things.

She was shocked and returned home to question her son.

Then, further investigations showed that many of the allegations made by the three students against Russel were false.

So the school met Mrs Chan again on 7Nov to discuss the matter.

And it was on that day, before this discussion, that Russel was told to write his reflection.

The vice-principal handed Russel's reflection to his mother during the meeting.

The nature of the reflection stunned Mrs Chan.

'I could not believe that my son had done all those things and knew so many bad words,' she said. 'My husband and I were so angry with him.'

She screamed at Russel and beat him after they got home. But when her son broke down and repeatedly said that the reflection was forced on him, she began to believe him.

'He told me he was threatened with canes, in the presence of four classmates, the vice-principal, the discipline master and the head of department.'

Russel claimed he was scared and wrote whatever he was asked to write.

He said: 'There were four or five canes on the table. I pleaded with them... but there was no choice. I was scared that they would cane me.'

The reflection was done in a question-answer manner in which he was asked leading questions and then told to write his answers accordingly, he claimed.

This episode so affected the Chans that they cancelled their annual family holiday as 'nobody was in the mood'.

Mrs Chan said the allegations by the students about her son were 'ludicrous remarks that were totally untrue'.

HUMILIATED

She also felt humiliated and alarmed about the lewd things in Russel's own reflection.

She questioned why no checks were done before she was summoned the first time and argued that the school accused Russel without a thorough investigation.

'If my son has done something wrong, cane him. Why must the school get other students to write reflections about him?

'I think it's a reflection only if a child is writing about his own actions,' she said.

The school maintains that its intention was not to humiliate Mrs Chan or Russel.

On 16 Nov, the last day of the school term, Mrs Chan handed in a letter to withdraw Russel from the school. She said: 'My son had a traumatic experience in the school and I could not send him back there.'

Russel studied at home till he was transferred to a new school on 29 Jan this year. Mrs Chan is grateful to the Ministry of Education for approving a transfer for her son to another school.

Asked how he is coping, Russel said he is happier and trying to forget the incident in his previous school.

This article was first published in The New Paper on Jun 11, 2008.

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