Ep. 17: New Term, Higher Goals| Best Conduct

Allah (SWT) has given us one more term for this year. And with every new term comes a new opportunity to keep on doing what we were doing well, and try to improve on it. And, also work on those areas that really need work on from ourselves. And everyone has those, everyone has those strengths and those things that they are able to do consistently and really well. And everyone has those areas where improvement is needed. MashaAllah many of you were attending Jumu’ah and other prayers, and it was wonderful to see that. And I’m sure those of you who live further away were participating in your local mosques and your local musallahs. Now with this last term of the year, we have to collectively give it one push towards making it better for ourselves, for our fellow students, for our teachers, and the environment in general. And there has been a lot going on at the school. Many modifications and changes and improvements. And Alhumdulillah it is all a part of our efforts to give the students the best that we possibly can. And we have a ways to go, there is no doubt about that, but it’s a collective effort. It’s not just that the people at the administration and management will make certain policies and then everything will change. It actually requires every single one of you to contribute towards that in some way or another. Could be just by complying and making it easy to those that are implementing the rules. It could be by encouraging others, creating an environment. There’s no doubt that students have on one another often is more than the impact that even teachers have on students. So how can every single one of us be someone who has good impact, positive impacts on other people. How can we somehow make other people’s lives better. Increase the quality of their learning, increase the quality of the behavior. Every one of us can do that, in fact every one of us is responsible for that. One of the things that we have been working on is a department to support behaviour. And you will be hearing this in a couple of weeks, but the behaviour support department is actually geared to allow students who need work, who may be slipping, who may be in some circumstance that they can’t get out of. Whether it’s to do with their learning, or language or behaviour, whatever it is. And we want to give everyone a chance to be able to be worked on one on one. So that A we don’t have this environment of students being admonished in front of everyone, we don’t want that. And we don’t want to have a system where there’s just punishments. There’s just do this or else, do this or else, do this or else, we don’t agree with that approach. We would rather give someone a chance and find out hey what’s happening, are you ready to work with us. We’re happy to help you through this, we’re happy to coach you, we have belief in you, and we feel that you can do better. We feel that you can be a better version of yourself. We feel that whatever behavioural issue you might currently be going through, there is a way out of it and we want to work with you. As long as we have that cooperation and willingness from your side, there is a great deal we can do together. It’s about giving students a chance, it’s about having faith in people, it’s about working with them. But also, it’s about setting a bar and raising a bar for what is acceptable behaviour and what is unacceptable behaviour. Because it’s important for this environment to be a place that everyone goes to for the sake of improving. We have hundreds and hundreds of students here, hundreds of thousands of families sending their children here so that they can be a better person. And, it would be really sad that somebody comes here and they learn things that are inappropriate for example. Whether it’s language or habits, behaviours, the way they deal with parents or elders or siblings. It would be really unfortunate that a person comes to a place like this and picks up bad habits. We never want that to happen. So, you will be hearing a lot about this, and we will be consulting with the older students as well, as to “what do you think would be the right approach for dealing with someone who has behavioural problems? What do you think is a good way out of that, and we will be consulting with you in the coming days. So, there’s a lot happening, there’s obviously a lot hat comes from the teaching and learning side, there are final exams, VCE exams. There is a whole bunch of stuff going on. May Allah (SWT) make this term very fruitful for all of you, and may he make it easy for you, and may Allah (SWT) enable everyone to overcome any obstacles, any challenges, any adversities, and enable us to come out of this year much better than where we started.