Oxymoron In The Tropics

I love stories... whether I hear them, read them or see them.  They make me feel things, and they also teach me things. Yes, I'm going to talk about Dimash Kudaibergen again.  He is a story teller par excellence, via his music and his lyrics.  So young, you may say, to earn such a title ... Surely he hasn't lived long enough to have gathered all those stories in his heart and to be able to share those stories with others.  But watch a video of him singing... and tell me that isn't a superb example of someone telling a story that grabs you by your heartstrings and stays with you for days and days afterward.  If I were a Buddhist, I would call him an old soul. Stories are powerful because they can paint swathes of colour across your mind and they can change the way you think.  But the stories need to be presented in the right way, with the right words.  I've always been a 'word' person and I've always believed I needed to know the words to be truly ...

Someone once asked me how I learned to write so well.  She said it looked like magic the way I could lay down the words without seeming to think hard about it.  You know what?  I don't know. I just think a bit, and then I put pen to paper and the pen moves as if it is an extension of my mind. Sometimes it even moves ahead of my conscious mind. I suppose my writing has become a subconscious or unconscious part of me.  I have other theories but in actual fact, I don't really know. It could be due to the fact that I learned to read really young.  I don't remember ever learning my ABCs.  I just knew how to read.  I was told my grandpa used to seat me on his lap when he read the newspaper and then he would read aloud while moving his finger under the words.  I moved out of his house when I was two years old.  So that tells you how young I was. It could be due to the fact that I loved reading.  My father had to punish me to stop me ...

Every day I walk the corridors of my school, smiling at my young students, exchanging greetings or even jokes.  I absolutely love it if they can pick up on something I mentioned, put a twist on it and sling it back at me.  In English, of course.  That practically guarantees my undivided attention because I'd be thinking,"Could this be a potential Band 5??"  Notice that I don't say Band 6.  Band Sixers belong to a totally different category.  So let's stick to talking about Band Fivers. It takes time and effort to get Band 5 in the MUET test and 2.5 semesters in Form 6 isn't enough time for me to bring an average English student to that level.  So what do I need to find?  Someone who has maturity when it comes to arguments, someone who has a good command of English and someone who is widely-read.  If I get someone like that, all he or she needs is a nudge, a push, some General Paper materials to read and exposure to the test formats.  And...

I learned early how to excel at something.  I just needed to do it over and over and over again until others have given up and until I know it better than anybody else in the vicinity.  The only thing I had to overcome was my tendency to get bored fast.  So I also learned to short-circuit this tendency by switching focus to other things but things that are still related to that something I wanted to excel at.  For example, in university, I had to master Lewis structures.  After a few dots and dashes, it got a bit boring.  So I diverged into finding out who Gilbert Lewis was and where he lived and why he came up with these structures (and who came up with dot diagrams)... well, you get the picture.  I went to the library (no Internet in my day) and borrowed books that had nothing to do with my upcoming exams.  None of my friends wanted to study with me.  But I understood Lewis structures a shade better than my other course-mates.  Altho...

When I first became a teacher, it surprised many of my friends.  I suppose there were different reasons... I wasn't obvious teacher material when I was in school.  I was too much of  a class clown at times, too bookish to front a classroom at other times... but the one person who was most surprised was myself.  The only reason that mattered to me was how I viewed the teaching profession as a boring one.  And I was more easily bored than I should be.  I wanted to be a journalist with different assignments every time and never the same view to look at (so I supposed).  Unfortunately for me, the year I applied for a course in university was also the year major riots took place in my hometown and my mother was traumatised to see the reporters (and specifically one who was brother to my aunt) getting the best views in between the Federal Reserve Units and the rioters.  1986.. what a year.  Just a year earlier and I could have been a rep...