My exploration in life… (diary for baby!)

The last week flashed past quickly - must be a good sign that this "horrid" time I’m experiencing in my teaching practice is almost halfway through.  I wish time could pass even faster!  I need a pay raise (albeit it being a tiny one) sooner; ha…

I was approached by the teacher-in-charge of the table-tennis CCA, MS CHEW KAH YEE, to go with them for the students’ West zone competition that took place yesterday in PEI HWA PRIMARY.  Since I did not have any life-and-death issues at hand to settle, I went along.  It was absolutely pouring cats and dogs when we were leaving the school.  I thought of going to our little March to get umbrellas to give students some form of shelter from the rain while they board the bus, so I had the car key in my pocket.  Little did I know…

The students, the boys’ senior team and the girls’ junior team, played that day and had fortunes in terms of results.  The boys edged out a fellow school and the girls were defeated convincingly.  It was predictable, really, as the strategy the school adopted was to concentrate their strongest players in the boys’ and girls’ senior teams (since students any age could play in these teams), while the respective junior teams were considered "feeder teams" for the senior teams, allowing junior players (all ages up to age eleven) to gain competition experience.  I wouldn’t say that this was a good strategy or not, but it was an interesting one to note.

Anyway, in one of the games, there was an ugly incident involving one of the senior boys’ doubles teams.  The referee / judge / empire made a dubious call in favour of our team and awarded the point to us, amidst protests from the opposing team.  I was much surprised and disappointed by the inactions from the teacher and coach of that school when their students / players watching the match made known of their displeasure against the decision and the empire aloud, while openly taunting / booing every serve our players had in that game.  Talk about sportsmanship in sports / games!  In fact, this reminds me of the Singapore versus Thailand football match we saw earlier this year, ha!  Anyway, our boys were up 2 sets to nil and leading 8-4 in the last set at that point.  We eventually beat them 3-0 in that match.

I was also quite worried of our students’ safety and briefed the boys not to seek trouble and argue / taunt the opposing teams’ students and be worthy winners.  They told me that they were already taunted / disturbed by our opponents when they went to buy food / drinks in the canteen after the incident.  Our opponents labelled our boys as cheats and alleged that we "bribed" the empire.  It was disgraceful, I feel.  Sigh!

I returned to NAN HUA with the students and continued my marking of my P2 students’ English worksheets while waiting for YEN’s call to tell me that she was done and to fetch her home.  I waited until eight-plus last night, finished marking before I decided to just leave for SGH on my own as it got too late.  It was then that I could not find the car key - it must have dropped out of my track pants’ pocket earlier without my realising!  Thus, I had to leave the car in school that night.

I went to CLEMENTI CENTRAL to wait for YEN as she travelled to meet up with me in a cab.  I met JIANHONG while waiting at the MacDonald’s in Clementi and heard good news - that the other of my best buddies, JIANWEI, had finally proposed to her a couple of weeks ago.  This has to rank as the second best piece of news this year, along with EDDIE’s successful customary dinner and ZHENSHUN’s successful proposal to his partner, MINGFEN (the best must be the arrival of our second child to this world a little later!).  JIANHONG’s neck must have grown so long waiting for that proposal as they have been a couple for as long as I could remember (at least a good ten years)!  Must grill him when we next meet up for mahjong on more details of his proposal and their plans.  =P

I returned home late from work last night (I’ll write about it later) and found YEN in the room, watching TV.  Little RACHEL was in my mum’s room, and what made me happy was her smiling at me when she saw me.  I am so afraid that my little princess forgetting us due to the long hours we work.  I try to hold her and talk to her every night, as long as she does not resist / detest me (yet)!

I was saying that I returned home late last night.  It was due to preparations for NAN HUA PRIMARY SCHOOL’s Sports Carnival today.  It is held annually since the past few years to replace the School’s Sports Meet.  It is in attempt to get maximum participation through inter-house games for at least 4 groups of nine / ten students from P3 to P6 levels (that’s approximately 160 students), while the rest get Game Cards to participate in classroom games to qualify for exchanging of souvenirs.

The games are almost similar from the last two years’ (I was told), and as the past years, the PE committee had to stay back rather late to prepare for the event the night before.  As FAIZAL, SUMIKO and I found out, we had a mammoth of task and equipment to prepare.  Thankfully, the parent volunteers helped to prepare a lot of equipment needed already; I dread to think of what time we would stay to prepare them if we hadn’t had their help.

FAIZAL and I carried the needed equipment once we could from about three-plus in the afternoon, setting them up as soon as we think the place would be safe for us to do so and there wouldn’t be kids there to "disturb" the equipment.  SUMIKO had to leave at 6-plus, DYLAN came back from bringing the Track-and-Field team to competition at 5-plus and stayed until he left for church activities at 7.30pm, PEI HOON (a nice, untrained PE teacher) left after completing her tasks, and MRS TAY (HOD) stayed until 8 or so as she was "chased out" from the classrooms as the school attendant had to lock the shuttles leading to the rooms.  FAIZAL and I left only at 9 after completing what we could on the stations at the ground floor.

We continued our set up upon reaching school this morning while the school was gathering and having its fanfare of cheer competition and what-nots.  We made it, just in time when the competition began.  I think some children had a good time playing the games.  The others, well, just did not enjoy, I think.

After the event, we stayed to help dismantle the things we set-up the night before.  And thankfully, there was an abundant of manpower as the students were around to help.  They made the job much less painless than the night we took to set things up.  I didn’t like it when DYLAN made a remark after everything by introducing FAIZAL and I to someone, and added that one of us (FAIZAL and I) were coming back to the school after of teaching practice.

Whether it was done on purpose to spite me or not, I don’t know.  It just confirmed my suspicions that they don’t like me very much there among the staff in that school.  It is lucky that I am not carrying any hopes of going back to NAN HUA to teach anyway.  Else, that would definitely have hurt me a lot.  Still, wherever I will be going, I’m ready to learn.

Ok, back to my little stories as I grew up.  I am not very proud of this one, but I feel that it is important that we pick ourselves up when we fall and learn from it - I have to admit that there were occasions that I fell prey to greed when I was young and stole when I was a kid.  I stole a couple of packets of stickers when we were crazy over the stickers for the PANINI dinosaur books and World Cup sticker books.

Though I was never caught red-handed, I regret my actions as I understood more when I matured.  I am ashamed of my actions, but have put the past behind me for so long now, as I know it must / will never happen again.  Come to think of it, how it would have changed my life if I had ever been caught and turned-in.  Gosh, I wouldn’t want that to happen.  To err is with human, but it is important to learn lessons from it and not to repeat your mistakes again…

The school holiday this week is a much welcomed week’s break for me.  I can finally stay at home and play with our baby RACHEL again!  I fail to find words more apt than "adorable" to describe her!  =)  RACHEL has started standing up without any support, albeit for that two or three seconds.

She has this habit of sucking her right thumb (I did not wish for her to develop this habit, but since everyone else says it is normal of children to do so…) when she is hungry or sleepy.  But because she has grown this two teeth on the front bottom side of her mouth, the thumb rubs against the teeth when she sucks onto them, hurting herself in the process…  I’m trying to stop her from putting her hand in her mouth, but YEN thinks I should let RACHEL do what she wants to.  I really don’t know if I should.  =(

I write here to accord my appreciation to my pal FAIZAL for the help he has given me for our teaching practices in NAN HUA.  Having done contract teaching there, he knew the school and its staff much better than I did (most of my teachers have retired, remember?) and helped ease my joining and settling down in the school.  Thanks bro!

Back to the lessons I have learnt in life after a few weeks’ break (oh no!  Not that again!): I did not have a very close relationship with EDDIE for the early years in our lives.  It began when he started going to school.  Naturally, we joined the same school with NAN HUA being just a stone’s throw (ok, I’m exaggerating a little here; a few throws, ok?) away.

Being the elder sibling, I was sometimes tasked to bring him to and from school when he was in the lower primary.  Boy, did I dread those times then, as having him tag along then meant that I could not play games with my classmates and the added responsibility took away my freedom from doing whatever I wished to.  I was very unhappy about it but did not tell the adults (our parents, grandma) about it.  However, I do vaguely remember threatening / telling him: "You’d better not join the same secondary school I were to go to."

I think he took it quite seriously.  Not that he would want to go to the school I went to, a half-an-hour bus-ride away with an ugly uniform.  But perhaps it was our different school and its hours, that we grew apart in our secondary school years.  No more playing with our neighbours, rushing to clean the house before our parents returned home (have I written about that?), etc.  We just became a little bit like strangers - ask me anything about him in our secondary school days and I’ll be ashamed to tell you I probably not know much.  =(

It was only later, when I was in the Army, that we started talking more again.  I joined him in his Sunday kick about meetings with his ex-schoolmates.  I suddenly realised that this chubby little brother of mine was the best football player within his group of friends (maybe even his school!).  I realised at that point how far we had grown apart, perhaps caused by our not taking the effort to find out / talk to each other (I have to take a big part of responsibility here, being the elder brother), or perhaps it is a result of my remark (which I did not realise how big an effect it could have made then)…

I started doing my part slowly as an elder brother, becoming more involved in his business and life, knowing more of his friends, etc.  I guess I did pull us a little closer, but the gap has grown again, now that we live under different roofs and have our own families to take care of.  But I’ll never stop feeling sorry about not being closer to him in our teenage years, and thank our lucky stars that he has grown sensibly to become a sibling I am proud of.  =)

For those of us who have grown apart from our siblings, I guess it is never too late to build up that relationship all over again!

So I’ve began teaching this week at NAN HUA PRIMARY.  After two days of teaching, I found myself thoroughly tired already from the waking up at 3 / 4am every morning to prepare lesson plans.  Gave myself a needed break last night by sleeping through the night though I asked YEN to wake me up.  Hope their won’t be any repercussions!

I’ve always asked myself if this was the right choice of job for me since I left the SAF.  I mean - I had never had an aspiration, not that I had too much of a choice from the circumstances things turned out anyway…  Teaching was just one choice that I saw viable with my limited working experience outside of the SAF that needed little of my knowledge from my earlier qualification in information technology studies.

I thought I found I reason for teaching last Friday, when I stayed back for the school’s Co-Curricular Activities (CCA).  I was assigned to observe the conduct of table-tennis.  But the way it was conducted - with only one coach (external) playing with a queue of students at any time - left me lost as I couldn’t see how much I could have seen.  So I shifted my attention to the volleyball training conducted next door.

The way it was done for volleyball training was that the couple of coaches trained those from the school team (those who were older and more apt), while the few teachers helped train the younger ones.  I saw this little girl (P3) not being able to serve the ball over, albeit just standing in 2m in front of the net.  I went in to help her on my own accord to coach her a little.

By this time, a few other boys and girls approached me too to help them with their service.  I gave them some pointers I observed from their mistakes when serving, and was rewarded when they smiled with satisfaction after serving the ball over the net.  Perhaps that could be one reason why I joined the teaching force?  Or is it the right choice for me??