The teachers

I am a very quiet and contemplative person today, compared to the past, when I was very talkative. In looking at my past, I traced the transformation of me turning from a talkative person to a quiet person, to more than 20 years ago. I wasn't the same person back then as I am today. I was rambunctious, energetic and playful.

The year was 1986 and I had begun attending secondary school. In my first day, I had chosen to sit at the second row and second column from the front of the class beside the door. I remembered many of the teachers then.

Mrs Singh was my form teacher at Tampines Secondary. She was a svelte, and pretty woman with sharp features to her face. There was Mr John, who taught history. He had a thick, dark, luscious and distinctive moustache above his lips. Mr John (Arockiaraj?), an Indian, spoke with a thick and low voice. Mrs Chan was the physics teacher. She had curly hair that was slightly red in colour. Then, there was Miss Siew who stood in for Miss Low for a month or so. Miss Siew was a petite person with slightly curly hair slightly below her ears. She was a pretty interesting and animated teacher who made geography lessons interesting, in a different manner than Miss Low, who was the full-time geography teacher. Miss Low taught geography in an enthusiastic manner, and for some strange reason, she had lots of white hair within her dark hair. Till today, occasionally, we still talked about Miss Siew in a reverent manner. There was Mr Low Peng You, our math teacher. He was tall and lanky. The only reason I remembered his full name was because it meant old friend in dialect. He was almost bald in the head and only had hair slightly above his ears on both sides. There were also Mr Pang and Mr Ng, who both taught us Mandarin and Chinese. Mr Pang had a moustache like Mr John, however, it wasn't as thick or luscious. Mr Pang was stout, and had a big stomache, as if he had a tire around his waist. He seemed like he had overeaten, or had beer for many years. There was a year in which Mr Pang shaved off his moustache and he looked pretty funny and ridiculous. Mr Ng was tall, perhaps the same height or slightly taller than Mr Low.

There was Miss Constance Chay. She was also my form teacher. She was short, and she had short hair. She looked pretty sporty. Despite being a Chinese, Miss Chay didn't know how to speak Mandarin properly (I believe she still doesn't know how to speak Mandarin today). In one of the years, we were invited to her house to celebrate Chinese New Year. In my 4th year, she bequeathed a very thick dictionary to me. In the first year of my polytechnic studies, she invited a bunch of us to send her off on a Saturday when she went overseas to study. Even though I took note of the date, I eventually forgot to send her off. It was one of my regrets. Miss Simone Khoo was one of our teachers as well. She taught us literature. Whenever one of her students misbehaved, her favourite reaction was to launch a chalk missile at him, and the unfortunate student either had to duck or suffer the injuries resulting from the chalk missile. Chalk missiles were pretty new then and not yet in vogue (it would change within a year or two), and I believed Miss Khoo was the one who started it first.

And then, there was Mr Chan Soh Har, my favourite science teacher. Mr Chan was taller than Miss Chay, but shorter than Mr Ng. Mr Chan wore spectacles, and was slightly cock-eyed. He was more than tanned, indicating perhaps having spent much of his younger years in the sun, or he was extremely sporty. It was due to his influence that I started drinking coffee. I loved to sit beside or in front of him during break. And as he drank coffee during breaks, I also started drinking coffee, he always sipped his coffee slowly, while I finished my coffee rather fast. And so I slowed down. It was also during those years that I began reading Scientific American, a magazine that Mr Chan subscribed to. I had always borrowed it from him. After a year or two, I stopped reading it though. Mr Chan once threatened to me that if I did not keep quiet in the class, I would not be accepted into the computer club. Mr Chan taught us how to think. In fact, in one of the tests given, there was a question on plotting the graph of the specific density of water against temperature or something like that. This wasn't taught to us in class. However, he had taught us something similar. Out of the entire class of 40 students, only 3 of us got it right. I was one of them.