By the time I was in Primary 4, I have decided that I have figured most things out. The teachers do not know everything, doing their homework and studying diligently does not equate better results and understanding of the very subjects that they teach. Most importantly, people will always be different and as such, our ideas, our talents all lie in very different paths.

Of course, you can imagine those were the justifications of my pathway as a nightmare through school. I am not a conformist, I find it so terribly stressful and hard to be one. I went out of my way to not do homework, embarass teachers with what I do find that they do not know or do not know much about (“the bohr model is wrong? eh…”) and I essentially called one stupid often enough that she cried.

not that it was deliberate mind you, she was an emo little one that one.

Funny enough, 20 years down the road, I am surrounded by friends who are either tutors or teachers. I myself have been a tutor to little kids at some point. In Singapore, it is THE iron rice bowl for women to be a teacher. besides that, tutoring can be immensely lucrative, especially when you are still a young student who need to make some extras. a possibly twice or thrice the usual per hour pay rate, with less physical work and not much need for anything else.

After all these years though, I have made out that I am not patient enough to be a teacher for an extended period of time. It is not my career, even though I could survive a few years worth of it. However, tutoring opened my eyes, not to mention my friends’ complaints and all. They definitely felt the rewards, of course, when everything comes a full circle and they see their knowledge passed on.

However, no job is perfect and the complaints are a constant reminder of how teachers can be quite the sacrificial lamb.

So to all my teachers whom ever taught me before, except for a certain Mrs G because you cause me to be suicidal at 12, here’s a toast to you.

This toast celebrates how you joined a job that technically puts you in the same holiday slot as your children, but how you have really a third of that holiday with your family because you need to prepare the curriculum for us.

It also celebrates your enduring patience, especially to Mdm Shanti: I don’t think you would ever forget the mostly fictional story I wrote that was meant to be my O’ levels preliminary GEOGRAPHY examination answers. Oh yes people, I think I totally terrified and mortified my teachers by making an ass of myself and wrote a story of how the clouds hated the sea, and formed sea breeze to run away from them. it ran up to about 3000 words lols!!!

This toast also remembers all the kind words various teachers have given me. Despite how much of an outcast some teachers made me out to be, there were those who never failed to give me a smile, a supporting shoulder or listened to my tears.

And finally, to the teachers who shunned me, made a mockery or example of me… you are only human. *shrugs* and while I did love a couple of you without asking for anything in return, it seems like you eventually made me a stronger person than I might have been without the “tough love”, as some saw it.

Happy Teachers’ day!!!

(yeah ok, this is like a day and a half late. I fell asleep being sick and all!)