A couple of weeks back when Kwang Guan and I met for dinner with a bunch of friends, we started chatting about studying in university, the issue of studying overseas and scholarship. Me being one of the poor kid who have got a place in an overseas university and yet to get a scholarship, Kwang Guan exclaimed that there is one scholarship that will fund me overseas that I’d definitely be able to get. Being naive (which is probably why I haven’t got a scholarship), I asked what before the answer dawned on me – MOE Scholarship.
News has it that MOE is desperate for teachers and Marcus, my MOE Scholar friend tells me there’s probably 70-80 overseas scholars from MOE in this year. It is an amazing figure, almost equals to the total number of PSC scholars this year. And perhaps what Kwang Guan say is very right, I’ll be able to get their scholarship. I’ve been a rather patient person and I’ve been helping classmates with school work since I started discovering the joy of learning. I’ve been looking to inspire people around me to love learning, especially academic knowledge. I’m ever-ready to share things I know about the world and to pick up new things I’ve never been exposed to.
I just got to know this new friend in camp and he told me I’m very academic. I guess I do seem very much so in camp, always reading something, and ‘flaunting’ my knowledge in my conversations with people. It is not always a good thing to know a lot because people have a hard time tracking if you’re still at the topic or moved on to something else. Desmond told me I’ve the habit of using jargons people struggle with. Of course there are times when it is fun because you can talk to almost anyone even when they are interested in disciplines so far-fetched from the normal ones and with lots of information about different things, you might be able to develop a conversation on something you don’t quite know to something you know a bit about and then expand your knowledge from there.
If that is the case, then why not teach? My case for not entering teaching career is sometimes forgotten because I don’t use it frequently and normally I just employ my instinctive distaste for working in a school as an excuse for not getting into teaching. I’m well aware that the Ministry probably need people like me, interested to inspire, willing to work long hours, don’t mind sacrificing for students and rather bold with creative stuff. Unfortunately, I am not interested in them enough, primarily because I understand that at the end of the day, the scores of the students is almost everything to the student and the parents and as a teacher, no matter how I’d like students to be imbued with the love of learning, if this love doesn’t translate into practical examination results, I am not a good teacher and I’ve failed, both administratively and ideologically. Touting an ideology of hoping to inspire rather than instruct, I am essentially more of teaching about life than about things in the world – an inherent misfit in the world of education.
Lead. Care. Inspire. probably idealizes what I think should be plain necessity in education and in a field like this, my life work to-be is going to take forever to accomplish.
