The First Day...

Come in, and sit down.

Get your notes ready.

Done? Good.

Welcome, then, to your first class.

Welcome to NIE.

This is where all future teachers are taught to be teachers, by those who were teachers, and those who were teachers for a while, became aghast at the thought of teaching Spore's precocious young things for the rest of their earthly lives, studied frantically to gain their Master's in Education, and then took up a career preparing other people for the career they so frantically jumped ship from.

Well, ok, maybe not all.

I'm glad you survived the bus ride into campus. Enjoy it while it lasts, because when term time starts and the rest of NTU start classes, you will no longer be able to find breathing space on either 179 or 199. In fact, you will be lucky if you weren't squeezed up against the glass pane of the bus as it trundled dangerously through army training grounds, or if you didn't suffocate and die unnoticed in the crowd in the bus.

Did you find your way here? Despite the rudimentary map with the lack of labels and names? You did? Without help? Man, you were smarter than we thought.

How did you find the briefings? Were they helpful? Did they give you a good idea of the courses you'd be taking in NIE, the level of difficulty of the courses, and the amount of the coursework you might have to do? Did they emphasize the seriousness of the course, that you weren't students anymore, you were paid employees of the government, and that your ass may now be severely kicked if you skipped classes with the same regularity that you did in your previous institution of learning?

Well, if you didn't run screaming with despair out of the lecture theatre, then I don't think they did a good job in the above.

How about the food in the canteen? What food have you tried? The undersized cups of drinks in the canteen? The suspiciously rubber-like western food? The unappetizing... well, pretty much everything? Did you manage to find a table, with a fan blowing comfortably at you?

You did? Man you have to tell me how you did that.

How about the tutorials and lectures? Yes, the ones we surprised you with on the very first day of school. Man you should have seen your faces!

All right? Well, of course. It's only the first ones. Trust us, it will get more interesting...

And we hope you understood that lecture on the development of the English Language from the Celts to Present Day Singlish. We hope you diligently wrote down piles of essays, like that girl who was sitting three rows down in front of you. Amazing isn't she? I think she actually wrote down more information than was given by us.

And we hope your first tutorial on the different forms of text was interesting too.

It was?

Really?

And the lecturer? Yes, the Andrew Lim dead lookalike.

He was interesting too?

Hm. We'd have to have a little talk with him over that...

Anyway, it's been nice talking to you.

We're hoping you will stay around a while.

Oh wait, you HAVE to anyway. What am I talking about? There's still that matter of the 3 years of servitude you owe to our government.

Oh well then. See you again soon.

Don't despair... yet.