Little Irony
I was stoning yesterday and suddenly thought of this book called Little Ironies, Stories of Singapore, which was compulsory reading material for sec 1 or 2. and then i briefly remembered 1 story but i couldnt find the irony in it. so i thought now im sec 4, maybe i can understand it much better. i flipped through, read “The Teacher” and i really got the idea much better.
the story is about a girl called TanGeokPeng, a sec 4 student getting ready for O’s. but her english was extremely poor and her teacher was really impatient with her. the compositions she wrote. they were all in grammar, punctuation errors. but they ALL described the same thing: her dysfunctional family. the teacher gave 3 examples of the compos she wrote and criticized every one of them badly, for the poor use of language. some time later, the girl jumped to her death.
all the teacher said was: “Poor girl. Such a shy and timid girl. If only she had told me of her problems.”
like hell. yea. i that teacher sux. though it’s fiction, i believe that this kind of story has really happened before in real life, somewhere in the world. and i do not that this kind of cases happen rarely. people nowadays dun care so much anymore, abt anything. adults, when treating their child, look only at the exterior and do not go beyond that. example? wat matters: the score of a paper but not the mistakes, the achievements but not the hard work, the language but not the content(of the compo in the story). yea, people are becoming like that. the root of all troubles is development. but it’s inevitable and must take place, just like teh destruction of the earth. i truly admire the person who invented the chinese phrase 天下没有不散的宴席. it can apply to anything and everything. sighs. and that makes me sad.
back to topic. i recommended that story to my father. and i specifically told him that it’s very interesting. but all he ever noticed was the outrageous grammar mistakes made by the student. (i doubt he can do better than her btw) and after i said “do you really think i asked you to read it just for the jokes?”, another heated argument ensued. it was as usual, he did make any sense in whatever he said to rebut me, then it ended again with creative ways of reprimanding me of playing games too much. well, i admit i play too much so once he changed topic, i just Shut Up. (silence = consent right..)
anyways, i wonder wat people usually think about when they read about a student writing about her ill-fate in all her compositions, before even reaching the part about the death and wat the teacher said.
for me, it was sympathy for the student. not much of how weird the language is.
dots. i just felt this strong urge to write this. kinda different from my normal posts. bleahx
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