3resilience

Every morning, getting out of bed at 5.15am to make it to school on time is pretty dificult. It's even worse than in the Army, where I used to wake up at 6.30, wash up, change, and then go downstairs to my office and to a new day of work. But one thing never fails, not then and not now. Seeing the sky brighten always perks me up. When I was on missions in the field, there's nothing quite as heartening as watching the darkness slowly turn to indigo, and seeing the leaves of the canopy overhead being silhouetted against the dawn. After a cold night, you wake up wrapped up in your jacket and cocooned in your hammock staring up at the brightening sky; and, though you are in the middle of the jungle, though you have just passed a day of hard trekking and only have another day of hard trekking to look forward to, you almost feel - almost - that you are exactly where you need to be.

And so it is every morning, on the terraces on the hillside of the school, facing East, with the brass band playing the anthem and the flags being hoisted high. Every morning, waking up early is justified by the dawn sky. I realise that I'm very much partial to the times of transition; that is, sunrise and sunset. Watching the colours change is exhilarating; the patterns of light and dark change with the second, and everywhere around you new things to see appear endlessly. A sunrise is enthralment; and a sunset is enchantment.

*

Had a crisis of faith today during class. I planned to show my Sec 2s George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck, but the first screening was undone by poor audio quality in the classrooms, forcing me to rush the booking of an LT to transplant my class to. And anyway, the general sense is that these kids can't appreciate the movie fully. They didn't have the contextual knowledge, so at one point I was pausing the film after every scene to explain to them the significance of McCarthy and his antics in the context of 50s America. Also, they were put off by the black and white, I think.

So overall I'm not sure of the usefulness of the session at all. Was using the film as a starting point for a discussion on ethics in journalism for tomorrow, but a more fundamental purpose was to introduce them to a medium. I realise that, beyond teaching the technicalities of English, I am actually rather imperialistic in the way that I choose the materials for my lessons. I impose on them works that I think they should like, works that I feel will make them appreciate the fruits of the language in a way that is moulded after the way I appreciate them. So the pattern that started with Arthur C. Clarke, went through Roald Dahl, Jeanette Winterson, Paul Theroux, Pico Iyer, Sarah Turnbull and Jean-Paul Jeunet, and finally came to George Clooney - the pattern is meant to nudge them to become more sensitive and responsive consumers of the language.

But of course, at the end of the day these are still my tastes, and only one of an unimaginable range of paths to approach that particular end-state. And definitely some people will not like it - may not even understand enough of it to form an opinion on it. I realise that by introducing them to works that I myself only discovered in JC, I may be putting some of them off the genre by intimidating them too much. Intense beauty is still intense, and it is that immediacy that can be frightening, no matter how wonderful it may make me feel. But my hope is that I will at least be able to prod a few of them in the right direction - or rather, in the direction that I think is right because I took it. If one or two come away from all this with a widened appetite for English works, I tell myself, then it is enough. It is ideologically satisfying.

But what, then, of everyone else? How much can a teacher do when faced with a class of 30 different lives? How do you make a difference to each and every one? And to what extent should you try to do this? In between the divergent goals of making the biggest impact, and making the biggest impact on each person, where should your priorities as a teacher lie?

*

When I see sights like this, it strikes me how my kids in the high school seem more grown up than the people in the junior college. The Chinese High (for me, HCI is a pale substitute for the original name) is much more focused, much more directed. The junior college seems to me to be infused with a general sense of distraction; the energy is diffuse and insubstantial, and though they have lots of energy, the JC students splash it indiscriminately all over the place, for such innane tasks as painting banners for council elections. And from accounts from the JC side, my kids seem to have a much clearer idea of where they want to be in the future, and how they intend to get there. I guess it partly has to do with the narrow clarity of youth, how you think you can see the future because you have seen so little of the world in the time that you have been conscious so far.

*

And the future comes one step closer. My friends have been receiving replies from the universities that they applied to last year. It's a mixed bag; Joel, of course, has performed well, with a place in the Ivy League and a fighting chance to come to Columbia, even (heh, for better or worse!). Others' paths are not yet so clear-cut, and the waiting has effectively been extended another two months as they await the results of being put on a waiting list. And still others are suddenly facing the prospect of local study - an option that in itself is really not bad, but must seem as appetising as a blank brick wall when compared to the opportunities that some among our number are getting.

It's hard to reason this out. It's a fallacy that my place in Columbia should add an unintended edge of gloating to my postmodernist reasonings that Singapore is as good as many places for tertiary education, but the fact remains that it looks bad if I am saying it. How then, to approach the issue? We may choose to hide it away now, but come August, there will be a very definite deadline. And what then? The trick is to avoid feeling entitled to overseas opportunities - and thus to avoid feeling cheated if those same opportunities are unavailable.

And Kats should be in Tokyo by now, lugging his 120kg worth of baggage through the teeming streets (at least, that's the impression I get of the place) to his new digs in a suburban university. He is the third of our class to leave. Each departure is like a milestone, part of a countdown to August, magical August. That idea, I think, has some bearing on why this new wave of departures is so easy to accept. You see him walking through those glass doors of the Departures gate, and you visualise the opportunities spreading out before him, and him walking straight into them - but the bite of envy is taken off by the knowledge that it's only a matter of time before you take your own turn. And anyway, the friendships that are being displaced this time round are so solid. This is not to claim that the friends who left two years ago were any less close or loyal; but it's just that in the course of these last two years, what we've gone through, the changes that have been wrought in us, have served to solidify what we have managed to keep constant even more. It's a different type of dependability, elementally different, just like diamond and steel are hard for different reasons.