I've gone and done it. I've moved on and officially become a public servant in the employ of our glorious government. Yes, I am a TEACHER. Been posted to a certain Secondary School in the North East side of Singapore (public servant = official secrets acts = careful to watch what I say) and started since Wed last week. I must say it has been quite a bit of a ride. What can go wrong on the first day rite? Murphy's Law of course. =0)

First off, being the second time I took the bus to school and being unfamiliar with the route, I woke up far too early for my liking and arrived 1 hour ahead of time (0620hrs instead of 0720hrs). Had to sit and wait for my mentor teacher to arrive only to find that there were 10 Teachers on MC that day and one of them was, surprise, surprise, my mentor teacher. Now, it is a rule that no class must be without a teacher and my mentor teacher took 3 classes on that day. Talk about immediate promotion to co-form teacher. Ha! There was seriously no one else to assist then as the English dept people are really stretched (i.e. I am going to be SUPER busy when I get into full swing of things) so had to go into all her classes to take over.

Now, I did not teach the Almighty English Syllabus to the boys then as I wasn't prepared at all for it so what I did was to go into all classes and hopefully instilled the 'fear of God and Mr Ang' into their lives. Trust me, if you don't show them you mean business, these boys are likely to walk all over you. So as I would put it, I gave them hell. I sound like such a meanie teacher but hey, trust me, if you were me in that class, you would have done EXACTLY the same thing. Figured I was pretty nice to because I gave them all FREE TIME after our little intro to each other so they all got to play chess and cards and other silly things like flooding their desk with water (think Suez Canal, remember how your desk had this 'long kang' thingy at the top edge of the table?) and whatever secondary 2 boys do.

I did get my feet wet only today though as trial by fire to teach 2 classes on a new topic that we're covering currently call Factual Recount. Now, for the uninitiated, factual recount can be found in newspapers, police reports, biographies, history and annual reports etc. Mentor teacher told me after my class that I might be a little draggy that makes the students go into 'lala land' a little so still learning to balance what is fast and what is slow currently. There were some 'smart aleck's' in class that asked me certain questions that I really got stuck at today but thank God for my mentor teacher who stepped in to save the day. Besides that, the other technique is to pretend and act like you know and ask them BACK to answer the question, ha! 40 brains versus 1 bigger brain, certainly there's only so much I can do and the boys, I've discovered, are really quite intelligent if they want to be. But of course I will teach the right things and will get back to them on stuff that I really have no clue about. (eg. "What is an Adverbial 'cher?" Eugene's Brain: OMG! OMG! What the heck is that?!?!?? I've NEVER seen that word in my life and even if I did, what does it mean???? Adverb + Verb with a tail or something on the behind??? HELP!!!") =0p

The one pretty cool thing about the school is that they are all using MAC's and I really love using the Apple platform. Did you know that iChat is always switched on on all Mac's in all classes so that you can actually communicate with anyone on the network asking for help if you're really desperate so that it is really AWESOME. Talking about being connected when teaching. Am trying to log on messenger or to download it currently but IT admin has locked down the site and limited installation premissions so might not be able to communicate with the outside world as much as I want to though so that's perhaps the only drawback.

I've got till December to make up my mind about this career choice of mine. I was quite dismayed that some of the older generation teachers had quite a pessimistic mindset about the teaching profession (one teacher said to me: "Brave thing you're doing. Good luck to you!") but then again I don't really blame them. Times have really changed and getting attention from the boys to learn about stuff is really of challenging to the max I tell you. Not easy getting abused from them boys day in and out I will say. I trust that I won't turn into a heck of a sourpuss after 4 years of this, ha! One must keep his focus regardless of it all I say.

I still can't believe that I've gone and done it and am giving my childhood dream a shot but hey, you don't really want to be old and haggard and telling yourself why you didn't give yourself a chance, no matter how long or short, in living your dream rites? ;0)