The prodigal daughter returns
Thursday, Jun. 10, 2004 1:22 a.m.
I am seriously considering applying for a transfer to my alma mater. I have already written my cover letter, done up my resume and made photocopies of my academic certs. It remains for me to print the documents, get postage and push the whole package through the mailbox.
I want to reflect on my secondary school experience in order to imagine what being the other side of the coin will be like.
My secondary school is a prestigious girls' school that takes in the top 10% in the country. It was established in 1879. The school motto is in Latin and means "Daughters of a Better Age". The first line of the school song is, "From High Olympus flows to us the glory". In other words, the school has all the pompous trappings of a top school.
So you can imagine the kind of girls you will find there. Boys who don't know us imagine us to be ugly lesbians. Boys who know us, through inter-school collaborations, competitions, after-school classes or mere propinquity, will say we are geeks and nothing more, meaning we are way down in the looks department. They concede that we are intelligent, only to pity us because in their eyes that's all we've got going for us, all brains and no brawn. This may be the reputation that all girls' schools and women's colleges all over the world have, but here in patriarchal Singapore, the chauvinistic disdain for females who are at least as intelligent as the males is more acute. The very idea of it seems inconceivable to some, and when a bloke does meet one of us and realise that it's not a myth, it's easier for him to put our sister down by picking on her shortcomings than to admit that they're in the presence of an equal.
What do the girls of this school grow up to be? At our best we are intelligent, independent, confident, adept at everything we do,and adventurous, always pushing new frontiers. At our worst, we are snobbish, opinionated and supercilious, on top of all the above, of course. An example of an old girl who exemplifies the above traits is, surprise surprise (to non-Singaporeans, anyway), Annabel Chong. Sure, pretend you've never heard of her, men. This lady, however, is my favourite old girl (scroll down to read article. It's titled "Who says I'm a man-eater?"). She's one cool sister.
If the boys made fun of us back when we were schoolgirls, it's harder to do so now that we're all grown up, because most of us have lost the geeky birth-control glasses and switched to contacts or got our eyes Lasiked (depending on how successful we are in our careers). Some of us turned out to be late bloomers and are drop-dead gorgeous now, if not our considerable purchasing power would have given us a good wardrobe of clothes and accessories that do the trick. Thus we are all the more intimidating, and apparently 1/3 of us will never find husbands. (This is a mythical statistic passed on to me by one of my Lit professors in uni who is also an alumnus. She in turn got the figure from someone else. Perhaps the figure is supposed to scare us into stupidity and submissiveness, so that we will be more attractive/acceptable to our local men. Humbug. :-P) It seems we're not supposed to have happy lives.
I don't know whether the fact that I can empathise with the girls will make me a better teacher. It is likely that they will drive me up the wall with their stuck-up attitude, although to be very honest I don't remember any of my schoolmates giving attitude to any teacher. We were quick to pick on our teachers' idiosyncrasies, for instance bad pronunciation and bad dress sense, and make jokes about them, but we were never defiant. So perhaps the worse I will have to put up with are behind-my-back giggles and sniggers brought on by in-jokes about some amusing aspect of me. It's impossible to predict these things.
One thing I want to do, if I get accepted into my old school, is be a more caring teacher than my teachers ever were. I never had one whom I felt I could confide in. They were all proper and polite and very knowledgeable about the subjects that they taught, but they seemed detached and disinterested in us as human beings. I remember the trite response I got from my form teacher in Secondary 2 (sophomore year) when I told her about my parents' impending divorce. It was like talking to a coin-operated mechanical shrink. And she treated me no differently after that. Not that I was expecting her to let me off homework; Daughters of a Better Age do not shirk homework, not even Annabel Chong, who when asked in an interview once if she ever slept with any of her college professors in USC to get an A, retorted that she never had to resort to that because she could get A's on her own merit, and would flip if she got B+. But I suppose I was hoping for a kind look or an encouraging word every now and then. She remained polite and aloof. I gave up on all teachers after her. Even in junior college, when bigger shit hit the fan and suicide first came to my mind, I didn't try to talk to any teacher about it and was cold and reticent to the teachers who did show concern and wanted to help.
I've never done that to my own students, be indifferent to their personal problems. It's not possible for me to find out about a kid's troubled heart and not see them in a different light. That's the kind of teacher I am. The girls of my alma mater may be indifferent to me; after all the school drums it into their heads that they are the finest young women in the nation and they can do anything they've set their minds to do, and so they will try to handle everything on their own. But somewhere among these faces I will surely find a girl who is lost, scared and lonely, a girl much like myself when I was 14. If I am a teacher there that girl will have a pair of listening ears.
Sisters help one each other. It's what they do.
Older entries
Ramadan - 08 October 2006
Where I Have Been - 03 October 2006
Baby Talk - 10 August 2006
6 Weeks of Separation - 16 July 2006
Unacceptable Rudeness - 21 June 2006