Thursday, October 7, 2010

CYBER-BULLIED ON CHILDREN’S DAY 2010

1 October is Children’s Day. It was supposed to be a happy day but we were not happy. As we gave out Children Day gifts, someone threw us a stinkbomb on KiasuParents.com’s forum, a popular parenting website. The vicious comments were subsequently embargoed by the site’s administrator as it was considered a personal vendetta by a disgruntled customer.

We need to set the record straight as some members of the public have seen the bad-mouthing by the suspect.

We suspect the post by a “Goldman” in the Kiasuparents forum was made by a disgruntled and highly agitated parent whom we refused his child's admission to our programme. This is because we found the potential customer to be unduly demanding and irrational.
A parent who called us (rudely) at least 5 times just to get the address right and asked "difficult" questions that left us dumbfounded.


We were uncomfortable with his demeanor. There are concerns that we may not be able to meet up to his possible unusual requests and expectations, that may interfere with the way we run our classes. Based on experience, it is better not to accept such customers in the first place.

We feel that it is our responsibility to provide a conducive and happy environment for our existing students. We did the unthinkable. We rejected him.

Customer is king. We suppose it may be a case of inability of handling the truth and the suspected customer probably went berserk and went all out to bad mouth with the aim to destroy us.

On 30 September, we had a last conversation to reject this potential customer. And immediately on 1 Oct (Children’s Day), we discovered from Kiasuparents.com that we had been flamed under all references to us, viz Scharff and VIP learning. We suspect that "Goldman" is the same parent that we had rejected on 30 September. If so, we feel sorry for the child as the child didn’t get to attend a single lesson?!

We quote the late Mrs Lee Kuan Yew: “Sometimes without doing bad things, people will say bad things about you.”

We impressed on our students the importance of responsibility. Each and everyone of them can succeed when they hold themselves responsible for their learning.

As educators, we are responsible to ensure that they learn in a conducive, enjoyable and effective environment, on top of imparting proper techniques and approaches to problem solving in Mathematics. We partner with their parents to ensure continuity in the learning process at home. We value the strong relationships we established with the parents as they play the crucial role in tightening possible slack in the technique mastery process.

We hold ourselves responsible in providing a conducive and happy environment to our existing students and their parents. In very rare situation, we reserve the right to refuse entry to any potential customers that display irrational behaviour and present unreasonable demands that may disrupt the progress of the class.

We cannot allow our name to be wrongly tarnished by "Goldman". As such, we filed a police report on 3 October, 8 pm at Chong Pang Neighbourhood Police Post. This is to register the truth with the Authority and should the suspect continue his irrational behaviour, we will consider taking legal actions.

May the good prevail!

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