The Eccentricities of Teachers

One of the first tutors I've encountered, whom we shall call Dr Andrew Lim for now, [due to his similiarity to the actor] is a pretty interesting character.

While we were doing his tutorial today on text types, he gazed into the distance, for a while, and started telling us stories about his teaching days. [Now which tutor will do the same and distract you from his own tutorial, I have no idea]

One particularly amusing one concerned the vice-principal of one of the institutions he was teaching at. For anonymity's sake, I won't mention any names, but only briefly describe her.

She was an old single woman [we all know the common 'nick' for such a woman] who had a truly, er, ancient sense of fashion, thick spectacles, and walked, or rather hobbled around school with a slight slouch, and she was pretty short at that.

This grande dame of the school looked so unintimidating, in fact, that during the first three months, one of the JC1 students, not quite acquainted with the school hierarchy yet, went up to her and said in Chinese:

"Aunty ah, the tables in our class dirty, later can come and clean can?"

The grande dame must have been in a forgiving mood that day, since she stared at the student and let him go without so much as a scathing glance. It was only later that the [probably horrified] student realised his mistake and he probably keep a very low profile in school for the rest of the 3 months.

Anyway, the point Dr Andrew Lim was trying to drive at, was that teachers develop various eccentricities in their teaching career. Apparently, it comes about from the stress of the job, and the outnumbering of juvenile minds to the adult ones.

He also named some of the possible eccentricities:

- Neurosis.
- Poor sense of dressing. Untidy, unkempt, or clothes fashionable during the times of Queen V
- Bad hygiene. [one VP was seen picking her nose in public, in the bus stop right outside her school]
- A tendency to order other adults around, like they were 7 year olds. [following this, he proceeded to warn the men never to do this to their wives, something which prompted me to think that he must have learned this lesson the hard way]

He then went on to say,

"Some of these teachers, they spend so long in the teaching force, they develop all kinds of strange, eccentric behaviour! It's so funny to see them!" Following which, he started to laugh, a little nervously at first, and then ascending to a slightly more neurotic, out-of-control pitch. This caused some of us in the class to look nervously at each other and think Is he, like, all right? and Are we going to turn out like him???

Anyway, he stressed that as teachers, the one key survival tool we needed to have was a sense of humour. At the end of the day, we had to be able to look at everything, all the crap that happened, and still be able to laugh at it all. And if you had that, somehow, you'd make it through.

Following which, he proceeded to laugh slightly more maniacally............