Short lived teaching appointments 1

When you’re a teenager, there are some bad years, and there are good years. Sec 3 and 4 were great years because it was around then that I discovered that teenage life was not the complete doom laden disaster that my mother said it would be. Those 2 years were my favourite years. Not my happiest years, but those that I would definitely want to relive over and over again.

During the first half of sec 3, I had witnessed the departure of 2 teachers. I had never really been close to my teachers. But I was starting to like my life at last. A window was opening, and those were the teachers who were standing there when I looked out of it.

One of them taught Physics. He was vaguely nerdy, but earnest. I liked that he saw that I was one of the better ones at Physics. But I think there was one incident where he made a dirty joke in class, and I could tell he wasn’t the brightest bulb around. I was sorda sad to see him go after half a year, and the teacher who came in, we knew that he was more careful, streetwise. I guess we despised him a little for that but no big deal.

This may come as a surprise to you: I took higher Chinese. I’m only willing to admit it now because a colleague of mine gleefully told everybody that he had taken higher Chinese and I had never heard him speak a word. So I thought, why not me, right?

I know, my Chinese sucks. It always had, but it didn’t suck as badly as many people in my class, and at least at Sec 1 I was able to scrape the entrance exam. Maybe the years of struggling in the deep end of the pool took its toll on me? Who ever knew? I didn’t really hate Chinese, like some people loathed it. I never was the most Chinese of all people, but I’m too egoistic not to take something that’s part of my identity seriously. It could be the most shit language in the world (it’s not) and I’d still put in a decent effort because it’s my language.

But I never did well, because there was some other stuff that was more interesting, that I could understand more easily. Like Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geography, Literature and English. Can’t expect me to be good at everything, can you?

We had a new teacher that year, he came with a fairly large reputation, and he wrote the lyrics for wu suo nan yang, did other work in the media. I think he also wrote the theme song for kopi-O. Those were the golden years for SBC dramas, and frankly, that was when they still had vaguely interesting things to write scripts about other than the shit you see on TV now exemplifying how empty our yuppie-ish aspirations are.

The Chinese teacher was a breath of fresh air. Let’s call this guy Buddha. Chinese is usually a dreary subject in class, because of the lack of interest in it, but he made it fun for us. We know that we’re better at English than the Taiwanese, the Hongkongers, the Mainland Chinese, the Malaysian Chinese, but we really really suck at Chinese. (At least in the English-y schools I went to.) So it was always a question of morale. But he made it interesting.

Buddha was a witty guy, and he was really good at the language, like he more or less challenged us to be as good as him. I remember him going through this short story about a guy watching his old father climb up and down a railway platform to buy him some oranges.

He also taught a lot of stuff about the Chinese arts that was unfortunately lost on me. I guess it’s good for one’s ego if you see that your teachers are willing to go out on a limb and teach you all sorts of funky crazy stuff that’s not in the syllabus.

As I said, I was one of the lousier students in class, but I made the effort to memorise all my vocab lists. But he surprised me one day - we had to write a personal letter for composition one day, and 2 weeks later everybody got back their composition books except for me. He read out my personal letter in class, not because it was any good - it was crap. But because he was amused that I had written a suicide note. Of course I was only ever going to do it in his class. (Not the first time my composition was read out in class though. But that was English, so it’s a different story.)

I think, even though we had the language barrier, we both recognise that we had something in common. Buddha was every bit as mischievous as I was. Cracking jokes like seeing a couple of dogs on a TV advert and calling them gou nan nu. And then he was also subversive as hell, he would open the textbook, go through the stuff in 15 minutes, and spend the rest of the hour explaining why it was crap. Well I know that my memories of those days are pretty fragmented, but I’m twice as old now as I was then, don’t expect me to remember it like it was yesterday.

There was this school skit I put up that involved advertising toilet paper. To this day I’m fairly amazed that I managed to get away with putting it up in a fairly conservative place like my school. Somebody was sitting down on a toilet bowl on stage, and I was advertising for a brand of toilet paper called “PSC”. At the end it would be revealed that “PSC” stood for “pang sai chua”. Till then people in the hall were getting kinda bored with the other plays. Mine brought the house down. I was startled to find that it was the teachers who had applauded the loudest. (Except for my form teacher, who told me she had been acutely embarrassed by it all.) Only later did I find out that PSC stood for Public Service Commission, and quite a few of the teachers had been grumpily serving out their scholarship bonds. Needless to say, the Chinese teacher loved it, and from then on I earned the moniker, “pang sai chua lao ban”.

A fun teacher, loved by his students, the one Chinese teacher who almost inspired me to like the subject. Naturally he had to go. We were told, after the mid year exams, that he was quitting. It was shocking. We have our “welcome to the fucking system” moments in our lives, and that was mine.

Why did he go? Rumour mongering is always a big activity at any school, be it a boys’ or a girls’ school. Some say he had demanded to be made the Chinese HOD. Some say he pushed the system too far and didn’t stick to teaching what was in the syllabus. Some say that the other teachers found him a little too arrogant. Probably he didn’t fit into the system? I don’t know. Could he have been more circumspect and avoided getting into trouble with the system? Yes, even though that would have meant that he had to pare down some of his plans for us. Another theory goes that he could have threatened to quit if they weren’t able to accommodate to his style. He could have said to himself, if I’m going to stay in teaching, I want my teaching experience to be (etc etc etc) or otherwise ... well a guy like him would always have fish to fry elsewhere.

It may not have been that bitterly disappointing at that time, but it was a less bright world for me after that. The first half of Sec 3 had more happy memories for me than the second. Well, the second half had job week, where I found out that if you are doing job week, you absolutely want to prowl around the Malay (ie east) part of the town, because they are more generous. Also had end of year scout camp which I blogged about before. And taking Grade 8 for a second time, and failing (kinda stupid because the first time I scraped a pass), and finally ridding myself of piano lessons for good. And a trip to New Zealand.

Buddha’s not the only colourful character who taught Chinese. My sec 4 teacher was a complete bapok who was a smooth talker, encouraged us to “love” each other, and was so feminine (he was a guy) that we concluded that he had to be gay. A nerve wrecking experience having to attend his class, but you need entertainment in life. A couple of months ago I visited a friend working for MOE, and he told me later that he had bumped into the sec 4 bapok teacher, and we traded snide remarks about him. Fond reminisces.

Chinese classes in school are just like Defence against the Dark Arts classes at Hogwarts. Always interesting for the wrong reasons, and the teachers don’t last too long.

During the June holidays, 2 things happened. First, I wasn’t selected for the school maths team. Probably did badly because of sleep deprivation. I vaguely regret not making the team, but I’m equally certain I wouldn’t have enjoyed the drilling either.

There was this other thing pulling me in another direction, and that was writing. I attended the creative arts program, where you had students attend a series of talks and immerse themselves in creative writing. Eventually I wasn’t that much of a writer. OK, I wrote school plays, won a couple of prizes here and there, but I know my limitations. I knew plot, I knew structure, I knew pacing. But I never mastered dialogue.

At the creative arts program there was this Malay guy I knew from scouts. And I didn’t really pay that much attention to him then, but I think that was probably the launching point for what would turn out to be a brilliant career. That was Alfian, and the reason why I’m blogging about this is, of course, the Alfian relief teacher incident. I’ll have my say on that, but that’s for another blog entry, another day.

(In fact that is why I wrote this entry, I wanted to think about the Alfian incident from a different point of view, like the student's perspective when a favourite, maverick teacher is removed from the system. )