He took care of me, in a fashion, when I was a blur Sec 1 kid and he was a relatively wise and elderly Sec 4. Of course, being a GEP, his idea of ‘taking care of a junior’ involved a fair bit of sarcasm and a lot of philosophical discussion but that’s who we are as a demographic, I guess.

He taught me bridge, hearts, how to make the AC anthem sound like something out of Castlevania. He introduced me to the Star Wars TCG, to the Wheel of Time and Weird Al Yankovic. In other words, he planted many of the seeds that sprouted to form integral parts of the present me. I’ll forever be grateful for that.

He was also one of the smartest people I knew. He was the epitome of what the GEP strove to identify and cultivate. He went on scholarship to Imperial and, upon returning, began to touch lives as a teacher. He only found out late last year that he had a congenital hereditary disease and even as he weakened throughout the year, he still made it a point to fulfill his professional role to the best of his ability. I’ve heard that when he became too weak to walk, he still held court in a wheelchair, a la Hawking but sans voice synthesizer. Mad Propz.

Goodbye Charles. Thanks for everything. I’m not grieving for the fact that you’ve left us, but because you’ve left us too early.

-Marc

(Warning: the dialogue below has been exaggerated by 20% for dramatic effect)

So, a young lass at a certain bar once inquired about my occupation. Half-jokingly and half-facetiously I replied “Oh me? I’m in trading. Slave trading”

Eyes agog, she gasped. “Really? Slaves?! FOR REAL?!?”

Smugly buffing my fingernails against my ermine coat, I flashed her a smoldering look over my shoulder and deadpanned “Yes, I trade in people; their lives and futures”.

The moment those words left my mouth, I knew that they rung more true than I had intended. Not hard, granted that the whole thing was a drunken fiction but you get my point.

Teachers really are in futures trading. We assist our charges in trading up their futures for better ones by giving them the skills to function in society. We’re really in the business of lives.  As much as prisons officers are supposed to be captains of lives, we’re supposed to be the gardeners.

How many of our teachers’ philosophies and musings have lain latent in our minds till we, years on, encounter and experience enough to gain the context and insight required to allow them to germinate into a life-changing idea or realisation? Ought we not strive to do the same for our students? To take the macro, long-term view instead of the short-term one that simply emphasises silence in class and the regular completion of asinine homework? An education goes deeper beyond knowing the mechanism for the nitration of benzene or the exact chain of enzymes that convert glucose into acetyl-CoA.

I mean, how many of us have actually used anything we learnt in mathematics save, perhaps, probability and, sometimes, statistics in our everyday life? Economics can be very useful as a decision making tool, but how many of us think purely in terms of externalities and utility? Literature teaches us to see beauty in words, but how many of us actually read the texts with love instead of dissecting them with a clinical eye just because a test or reading is coming? Being able to explain how tornadoes form and how cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons are different from each other (clue: they aren’t) can be cool, but most of Geography seems ultimately doomed to be confined to the damp, dank corners of the brain.

Unless, of course, the student ends up becoming a professional mete0rologist. A number of our students might actually become professional Chemists, Biologists, Statisticians, Mathematicians, Economists etc but even as they specialise in one field, their masteries of the others would reasonably begin to atrophy. Why should anyone with an interest to pursue a career in Applied Nanotechnology even care about History at the ‘O’ Levels?

Adolescents are plastic, idealistic, inexperienced beings. They have but a nebulous idea of what they want to achieve in their life and how they ought to go about working towards those goals. That is where teachers truly come into play. We show them possible futures and give them tiny nudges to guide their trajectories, all the while making sure that their minds remain as diversified as swiss-army knives until they find an area of expertise that they’re willing to forsake all others for.

What we’re really doing is training the minds of our students to be strong yet pliable, open and yet discerning. They need to learn how to adapt their minds to handle different subjects and to recognise that good grades aren’t necessarily corollaries of intelligence: grades are naught but signals that the individual bearing them has an active mind and a good measure of discipline.

We also instill in our students moral codes to live their lives by and plant seeds of inspiration that might take a lifetime to germinate. We teach them that genius rarely amounts to anything without hard work and perseverance (99% perspiration, anybody?) and that these two values are ultimately key to carrying any day.

It’s all to easy to take teaching as a day-to-day affair without any overarching theme, but I think we would be doing our students a major disservice if we did not keep this mission statement in mind at all times.

-Marc

Work’s taking the worst toll though. I pretty much slog from 1300h-2230h Mondays to Thursdays, and the weekends are even worse. Friday’s supposed to be my free, lepak day but I can’t even remember the last time I took that option instead of scheduling more classes.

I’m under a lot of pressure. I can’t tell how soon the housing market here will recover and so I need as much capital ASAP to buy in before the next upswing begins. I’m not a fan of taking loans, so going in with the minimum 10% down is not what I’m aiming for. It doesn’t help that I’m constantly tempted by beautiful, shiny things like this hot bod over here:

Sweet, isn’t she? $48,500. About half of what I’d need to put down for a home. If only I didn’t feel the need to be responsible all the time. Urrgh. Anyway, do check out the pictures I’ve slogged over in my gallery and drop me a tell if any of them at all perks your interest or catches  your fancy. It’d mean a lot to me.

-Marc

Lets see which burns a hole in my pocket first.

-Marc