Just finished packing… the staff room is a mad, mad place… open boxes and huge, black trash bags all over the place and blocking the already congested narrow passageways and towers piled precariously on top of each other. The high-pitch shriek of tearing tape can be heard the entire day together with laughter and moans as we perform acrobatic acts of hopping over the open boxes and avoid stepping into trash bags… of how we managed to accumulate so much trash and how we wish we can sweep everything one-handed into the trash bags… and how we again managed to pack something we need right now into a box already taped close… and naturally, we will not, even at the risk of gunpoint, open a box we have packed full and taped close which is naturally at the bottom of our tower of boxes anyway (Yes, I'm exaggerating)…
For a last day of term, chaos is perfectly normal as usual.
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My life has been full of newspapers recently. It included the trouble-strewn sec. 1 newspaper collections in which my kids brought newspapers on the wrong day and culminating to yesterday where they went all around the school in a one-day-garang guni attempt to collect at least 200 kg of newspaper and actually managing to collect more than 300 kg, earning the school 30 dollars…. The class was a mess of recycled paper the day before the newspaper collections… and my sec. 3 classes said they were missing newspapers due to the over-eager collectors. :p My kids can really do things when they put their heart to it… like the classroom cleaning… after a lot of nagging, the class was sparkling clean… floor mopped, tables wiped and all the corners wiped free of dust.. am so proud of them. Will be bringing P to the class barbeque on the 8th, looking forward to their reaction :p
Also spent the past few days chasing after my Sec. 3 kids for way overdue newspaper cuttings… I actually really don't care but as the newspaper cuttings are compulsory to all, I have to do it. Spent the last day of school marking their newspaper comprehensions and ordering them to read newspapers at least once a week to build up their current affairs knowledge…
Actually feel quite hypocritical every time I tell my kids that they have to read newspapers… because I don't do it myself! For someone that gets her current affairs updates from reading Mr. Brown's blog every once in a blue moon (and marking my students' newspaper cuttings), I'm not a very good person for encouraging religious newspaper readings…
In fact, I remember back when I was a fresh 'A' level grad deciding which scholarship to pick up, upon hearing my decision to do the teaching scholarship, my ex-CL teacher said, "Are you sure? CL teachers have to read a lot of Chinese newspapers leh." Ha. She knows me best.
Despite her warnings, I still chose the teaching scholarship. And so here I am now. Force-feeding newspaper readings on students and not reading newspapers myself…but the newspapers reading are so necessary for the exams… without reading newspapers and going for exams is like going out shopping without money… but they so don't understand…
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