May 06, 2005

Knight and Princess of the Square Table

We found out that Toast closes at 7pm on a weekday. So, no dinner there. It was either Burger King or Subway, and the latter will win because I hold 50% of the vote, and importantly, the knight was extremely easy-going.

Incomplete knowledge is a very dangerous thing. Resonant line from the principal's mouth that got into our conversation amid huge bites of Subway sandwich (do you call a half-foot long sandwich a 'sandwich'..). And then, he said knowing without thinking is very dangerous too. It's a near quote from Einstein, I think.

Somewhere in the conversation, he shared that he's afraid of death. He started to be afraid since once, he had this epiphany (wow, 1st time using this word! hee) that when we die, that's it! 'It' is nothing, no knowing, no feeling, no way, no nothing. The irony being, only death itself is not afraid of death. Hmm? Put it another way. Only the living is afraid of dying. But then, we went back to talking about what is there to be afraid of when you know that the minute you are gone, you actually don't know you are gone and it's like your computer crashed before you had a chance to do any save. And the next boot up will ask if you want to save your configurations before exiting the BIOS and what I'd do is, I'd just shake my head, breathe out a sigh and hit F10. Still, whatever you were doing would be gone, non-existent. You can almost see your CPU's smirk.

I think I'm getting too carried away. haha... Can't blame me. My com is screwed recently.

Death is so painless. And most of us are afraid of this state of painlessness. Weird?

We talked about what poetry is. Because he's teaching E.Lit at work. And he's just received some interesting pieces of poems that his students are entering a competition with. I would have liked to believe my JC life was half as interesting as his students'. I've never attempted any real poetry yet. But, it sounds like worth a try after learning what qualifies as poetry.

We share a passion, a passion for language. If not a passion, at least much respect and love. That's one of the reasons why it's typical that our conversations would usually entail something to do with langauge. This time, we basically talked about the difficulties of teaching a language and the joys of liking a language enough to want to teach it, in spite of the difficulties. If I'm not wrong, we started down this track cos we were discussing my career path in the next 5 years.

Career paths. He asked how is it possible to know when do personal goals and dreams end and societal expectations and pressure begin? Where is that line of compromise that they often talk about? Don't know.

He felt that it's so easy for a teacher to retro-evolve into a frog in the well, wrapped only in what he's been taught to teach, buried under hills of workbooks and mock test papers before the real ones come. He began to think what would mark a teacher's success. An event manager sees the fruit of his labour when the event turns out to be a great success. An architect sees the fruit of his labour when his architecture gains recognition. A researcher sees the fruit of his labour when a new drug is found to improve the well being or mortality rate of mankind. So, what is a teacher's fruit of labour? Less red ink in report cards? Or a half-hearted student rather than a disinterested one?

Teaching is not something you do for the short term perks... like school holidays (which is because we are not entitled to any leisure leave at all during school term and we do have to go back for training and preparation 1st and last week of school break), relatively high start-out pay (which is not so high when the economy picks up as a whole) and shorter working hours (far as I'm concerned, I usually work from 7am to 4pm so as to clear work, prepare for next day's lesson and occasional meeting with other team members).

For me, my success and satisfaction is in things like having the kind of rapport with my students and they coming to tell me how they feel (usually, it's 'angry', 'happy', 'sad', I work with kids with very simple, direct vocab hee), turning to me for answers or no-answers to their incessant questions (very persevering students no doubt), getting an unexpected answer to my mundane and sometimes rhetorical questions (nothing is too rhetorical in their world), getting a correct answer to a difficult question without any prompting, and well, jukebox-like singing ranging from Huang Pin Yuan to S.H.E. Oh, and of course, knowing that my students, through their own experience, know that I mean what I say, especially when it comes to making them be the last to go home when they don't behave. haha

It's always a fantastic pick-me-up to catch up with the knight. He said the same is for him. Ahh, already the ego feels better.

Posted by 杏 cy （Jancy） at 16:50