Teachers (My School Experience)

I once tweeted in 2012, "Nobody fucking cares about my education down here". Honestly, that's how I felt sometimes at home. Growing up, my parents were always quarrelling over the most ridiculous things. I know that like all parents, my parents still wanted to do well in school. But I found it difficult and even near impossible to study at home since it was so noisy. Even if there wasn't a fight, my parents are the type of people who speak pretty loudly, so I often found myself studying in school or at public libraries. 

My parents didn't have specific expectations, so I found myself setting my own expectations. When I was in primary school, I just hoped that I scored better than my sister for PSLE. When I was in secondary school, I only had goals and targets for the subjects that I liked. And when I was in Junior College, I was already taking subjects that I did like (except Econs, which all arts students had to take) so I wanted good grades for everything.

In my opinion, my academic success (not that I was super successful, but you know what I mean. I did all right in the end) could mainly be attributed to two things: my willingness to pay attention in class (most of the time) and the teachers that I had. Since Teachers' Day is around the corner, I'm going to blog about my school experience with teachers in general, but I'm not going to reveal the names of the teachers. If you were my classmate, you'd know who I'm talking about.

Primary School

I think I did pretty badly for the end-of-year examinations when I was in Primary 4, which was also known as the streaming year. On the first day of school for us when we were P5s, I remember that we still had to sit with our P4 classes while they got us all sorted out. My name was called and I was put into a different class from all my friends. There were boys from my P4 class who went to the same P5 class as me but that didn't count because, as you guys know, girls only made friends with girls and boys were all seen as gross when you were ten.

The only consolation I had was the fact that my P4 form teacher was still going to be my P5 form teacher. When I met up with my friends during recess, all of them told me "Oh, you're so lucky!" even though they went to a better class than I did.

For the purposes of this blog post, let's call this teacher Mr K. It was pretty obvious even back then that Mr. K had a really tough time being the form teacher of a notorious class. My class was always being yelled at, reprimanded, and punished. My classmates were always up to their mischief and the teachers, vice-principals and even the principal had to step into the classroom to scold us for some reason or another. People were playing pranks, bullying others, clogging up toilets (I think they attempted to flush a Chinese 习字 exercise book down the toilet bowl), stealing (was it a handphone?), etc. Thankfully, Mr. K knew how to speak to us and all of us respected him for that. 

He was also a good English teacher. I recall him explaining to us (rather exasperatedly) what nouns, adjectives and verbs are even though we were supposed to have already learnt that when we were younger. He always cracked jokes and he was encouraging. I remember that we laughed at one of our classmates for calling him "Dad" by accident. To be honest, I nearly made that same mistake once as well, but I just went "Da- Mr. K" and nobody realised. Anyway, I think that many of my classmates came from fucked up families too, which was why they were acting out.

Unfortunately, I disliked my music teacher in primary school. I thought it was a good idea to join the choir and I think I went for auditions on my own accord and got in. When I was in primary school, I basically was a super quiet student who didn't talk to people or answer questions. My mother told me that there was this boy who would wait for the school bus with us last time. He went to another school but he was my neighbour. Apparently, he complained to my mother, "I got talk to her but she never talk to me!" Whatever.

I was in the choir for four years and Mdm L was the teacher-in-charge. She also taught us music, but when we were in upper primary we had a different teacher. I remember that for our recorder test, we could choose between two songs and I chose the slightly more difficult one. When I got a B in my record book, I cried and all my friends were confused since music wasn't exactly an important subject to them. They thought that my parents would scold me or something. But I just had high expectations of myself as usual.

Anyway, Mdm L seemed like a nice person because she was the one teaching us all these fun songs and hand gestures that went along with them. However, she revealed her true colours when the choir conductor had us sing individually. Like I mentioned earlier, I was the quiet and shy type of kid. I liked singing, and I thought that it was a good idea to join the choir so that I could sing with people, not alone. So this was a lot for me. To make matters worse, I also had a sore throat that day. I croaked out some lyrics, and like the crazy woman that she was, she shouted at me for being a disgrace. 

Looking back, she was probably under a lot of pressure to secure some glory for the school or whatnot. It was the first time the choir managed to get a Gold for the SYF and we were also in the top five or something, so we had to compete for the Choir of the Year award I think. But... nah. I don't think her shouting at me was justified.

Secondary School

I had a rather pleasant experience in secondary school because most of the teachers were nice and encouraging, apart from the Physics teacher who told us that we were "idiots" if we had gotten one of the supposedly easy MCQ questions wrong.

One teacher who stood out was Mr. L, who was also my literature teacher during my upper sec years. My classmates and I felt enlightened whenever we left the classroom. I guess when you're 15 or 16, you're easily impressed by the way your lit teacher analyses the text, since you're immature and lack life experience to appreciate and understand it in its entirety. 

He always made lit lessons so fun and engaging. All of us looked forward to his lessons. Some random stuff I remember include how we once had class outside the classroom at the exercise corner, how much of a good actor Mr L was (and still is) when he emphatically read out lines from the play that we were studying, and how he answered his daughter's phone call in class and put her on loud speaker so that we could all hear her adorable voice.

The most memorable incident was actually the Parent-Teacher Meeting (PTM) that I had to attend with my mother when I was in sec 4. I had failed four subjects (E-Math, A-Math, Physics and Chemistry) and I knew I was in deep trouble. From what I remember, the worst results I had ever gotten was scoring 9/100 for A-Math (had never seen a single digit score in my report card in my entire life) and getting 39/42 in terms of class position. Anyway, I was doomed. My form teacher was my Math teacher and throughout those two years of secondary school, I kept wondering if she was ever going to get me to drop A-Math. Strangely, she never did.

Anyway, as luck would have it, my mother didn't get to meet my form teacher. Instead, she met my lit teacher, who was my co-form teacher. Instead of getting reprimanded, Mr. L took a look at the report card and said that I was obviously into the arts more than I was interested in the sciences. He assured us that I'd get to choose what I'd like to study in future. To top it all off, when we were about to leave, he told me that he expected to see me up on stage next year. (In other words, to get an award)

What a plot twist! I would never forget that. I was nervous all day but in the end, my mother and I left happily and we had a nice meal at a restaurant. And Mr. L was right because I did get an award after receiving my 'O' level results. Who would have thought that his prediction would come true? Not me, that's for sure.

I also had other wonderful teachers. In sec 2, Mrs T, my English teacher, was especially encouraging when I failed to make the debate team (too shy to talk but hey, like she said, I made the effort to try). My upper sec English/History teacher was awesome because her lessons were always engaging.

In general, I had good teachers who only scolded me when I was doing something wrong. For instance, I was scolded and sent out of class for talking. I was told off for folding my (extremely long) skirt or for wearing dangling earrings. Once, my ezlink card was confiscated during assembly. My shoe was confiscated and I had to hobble about if I didn't complete my Math homework. I had to surrender one of my valuables and go for detention to get whatever it was back when I was late or when I didn't have a tie on tie day. These were all part and parcel of school life and I didn't have a problem with it all since I knew that I was misbehaving. 

Junior College

My time at Junior College was the worst. I felt like the teachers were out to get me even when I wasn't doing anything wrong. I felt like there was a regression of sorts, because we were not given the same independence and respect that we had as students in secondary school. 

A simple example was not having access to the first aid kit during a sports carnival, when I used to be able to retrieve first aid equipment for my friends in secondary school. (The staff told us to bring the injured student to the general office but I guess they lack common sense because everyone knows that you go to the casualty, not the ask the casualty to come to you.)

There was Mr. N, one of our history teachers, who was the type of teacher who said that we could do whatever we wanted during his lecture as long as we weren't disturbing others. I liked his teaching style because he left us alone for most part. He didn't force us to see him after class, and I was only persuaded to go for history consultations when my friends dragged me along.

However, there were horrible teachers like Mr. H, our PE teacher, who claimed that my friends and I skipped PE lessons and we'd had to stay back to make up for it. Erm, excuse me? We didn't skip anything. Don't blame us if you're blind or if you failed to take attendance properly. To this day, I'm still pretty mad about this, especially since I didn't get to tell him off properly for being an openly biased teacher and just ended up crying. (If I recall correctly, he didn't make us stay back in the end, so that's good. But even if he did I was sure as hell not going to)

I also have this vague memory of doing my 2.4km run and right after I was done with it, I rushed to the toilet because I always felt like pooping whenever I had to run. (I didn't know that 'runner's stomach' was an actual thing) When I came back out and asked what my timing was, guess what? The idiotic teacher didn't even know. He was too busy talking to other students. Wow.

Then, there was this old and ugly random Math teacher who didn't even teach us. I was playing around and poking my then boyfriend (now an ex) in the bus and also while walking to school or something. Then, out of the blue, he scolded us, marched us to the front of the general office, and yelled at us for who knows what. He claimed that we should behave appropriately in public, which sounded like we were showing Public Displays of Affection (PDA) when we weren't. 

When I was a JC student the only thing I knew how to do was to cry when I was angry, so I did that and walked all the way home, and my then bf followed me and tried to calm me down. Back home, both of us received calls from our JC2 form teacher, who was our other history teacher, Mrs N. Her lessons were boring and most of us didn't like her, though I didn't have a problem with her until the incident that I'm describing right now. She told us to return to school so we had no choice and did so during recess.

Mrs N and our co-form teacher (who was a Math teacher but he didn't teach me at all because my class was split into two Math classes) met us when we arrived back in school and scolded us for our "inappropriate behaviour". We tried to explain that we weren't doing anything inappropriate, but they said that in the first place, we shouldn't be dating. (Ugh okay that's not even relevant to the argument that we were trying to make but sure, go ahead. Say that it's a "distracting relationship" all you want, but at the end of the day, I did get my As and my ex bf didn't do so badly either. In fact, I actually helped him with his studies. Jeez)

My mother didn't know I had a boyfriend, so Mrs N proceeded to use this as leverage over me during the PTM session with my mother. Basically, while my mother was next to me having a discussion with Ms Z, my lit and GP teacher, Mrs N spoke to me about how I needed to study harder and not be so distracted in school. She said something like, "You wouldn't want your mother to know about your relationship, right?' I was furious. Which teacher actually blackmails her students like that? When I actually behaved inappropriately during assembly with my ex bf in secondary school, the Discipline Mistress took our ezlink cards, spoke to us after school and threatened to call our parents. That was all. I wasn't blackmailed!

To make matters worse, I was done fine at that time in JC. I remember my report card reflecting that I was among the top 80-90th percentile for most of my subjects or something. But in the end, when we left school, my mother reprimanded me until I cried. A big difference from what happened back in secondary school.

Anyway, the JC teacher that I guess made the deepest impression on me was Ms Z. She was our GP and lit teacher, which meant that we saw a lot of her. I liked her at first because she gave off the "don't try telling me what to do" vibe, and her lessons were always conducted really well. However, I grew to dislike her because she would compared my results with my then bf and also the other couples in our class. At that time, there were 3 couples in total, and our class was already divided into 3 cliques, so what she did only caused more tension. 

Another thing she did was how she always tried to get me to speak up in class. She pointed out that I'd have to speak up during tutorials in university to get participation marks, and this is true. But I didn't like being put on the spot and feeling forced to give an opinion about something. And since I was getting good grades, Ms Z ended up portraying me as a selfish person who keeps all her good ideas to herself (not true) and doesn't contribute in class. As I started disliking her more and more, I also started arguing with my then bf over Ms Z, because he was one of those students who loved her and he was also the lit rep, so he always had to do her bidding. It was a disaster. 

Anyway, I don't agree with what she did but I'll admit that I did get my As partly because she was an effective teacher. I became the "Top Arts Student" of my school and I'm grateful to most of my teachers, but it doesn't mean that I have to like all of them as people.

--

I know that it's not easy to be a school teacher. In fact, when I hear stories from people who are actually teachers, I feel glad that I'm not. Not only do they have more students than I do, but they also have to juggle with other admin work, CCAs, field trips, camps, meetings, courses, etc.

I have always treated my teachers with respect and even before I became a teacher, I could already tell, by observing my own teachers, that it was a tough job. However, I can't deny that there are strange teachers who can be unreasonable, or teachers who may not always know what they are doing. Despite meeting some of these teachers, I've not felt deterred to become a teacher. Even if they were mean, I would say that at least they made my school life interesting in some way.

To all the teachers I admire, Happy Teachers' Day! You've inspired me and made an impact in my life, whether or not you realise it. And to all the teachers I have lost respect for, well... you've made this post become half of a rant, and somehow some people find rants enjoyable so thanks?