Miss Seetoh in the World (28 page)

A strategy had suggested itself which, being
so much at odds with the ideals of an institution of learning, she would have
been acutely embarrassed to use in her role as teacher. But as secret tutor to
Hong Leng over the two months just before the examinations, she would have no
qualms about taking on the role of an educational Machiavellian armed with pure
savvy and cunning to best that G.C.E. tyrant.

‘Alright, which composition topic must you
absolutely avoid? Show me,’ she demanded, having worked out what she called a
schema of salvation for Hong Leng.

The boy who came during the weekends for the
extra coaching absorbed every instruction with fervid attention, taking down
notes copiously, asking questions eagerly. By now he knew the kinds of titles
that he had to avoid, like poison, said Miss Seetoh, because they were far too
difficult for him, and would condemn him to a straight F9.

The first stage of identifying the most
deadly features of the enemy was crucial. They were the argumentative topics
that asked about the good and bad points of having national zoos, of depending
on the tourist industry, or of abandoning traditions, the descriptive topics
that required him to describe his ideal home or the ideal library; the abstract
topics with deceptively simple one-word titles like ‘Love’, ‘Happiness’,
‘Dreams’. Conceptually and linguistically demanding, the topics must have been
designed by the examiners for the elite few from very privileged
English-speaking homes, who, at fifteen or sixteen years old, were already
capable of mature thinking and expository writing. They were clearly not at all
meant for the rest of the students from the high-rise, government-subsidised
flats, who if they chose these composition topics would flounder from the
opening sentence.

Hong Leng, with five sample past examination
papers spread before him, duly ruled out, with a red pencil, all the
treacherous topics. That left a few out of the dozen or so provided. They were
the friendlier, less demanding narrative topics requiring the candidate to
provide a story for the given title. The titles were generously broad, to allow
the candidate to come up with a simple story, within the limited time given,
from personal experience or pure imagination: ‘Write about the happiest day in
your life.’ Write a story with the title ‘Too Late!’ ‘One evening, as I was
getting ready for bed, I heard a strange sound….’ Continue the story.’ ‘Was
there a time when you made a serious mistake and suffered the consequences?
Write about it.’

Maria said, ‘Hong Leng, tell me again what
you must do as soon as you look at the exam paper.’

Hong Leng said confidently, ‘I must cancel
out all the dangerous topics’.

‘Good. What must you do next?’

‘Look at the narrative topics, choose one
and circle it in red.’

‘Then?’

‘Then I must underline the key words in the
topic.’

‘Okay. Now show me which key words you
underline in this topic.’

The procedural meticulousness could save a
student’s composition from that fearful F8 or F9 grade. For one of the greatest
exam disasters was to ‘go out of point’, by which a student missed an important
word in the question or misread it, thereby submitting a composition that could
well be construed by the annoyed examiner as a pre-prepared piece of work.
Irrelevance, possibly indicating cheating, could thus carry an even greater
punishment than weak grammar.

‘Describe a recent occasion when you
suffered a disappointment.’ There was a student, some years past, who had not
been mindful of the key word ‘recent’, and had written about a real childhood
experience six years ago. She was one of the best students in her class and had
been expected to get a distinction. Her poor grade created a flurry of
activities, initiated by her shocked parents, that ended with the school
writing to the Cambridge examiners to make an inquiry, and their subsequently
conducting a proper investigation that unearthed the serious mistake that the
student had made. Singaporeans could be apathetic about public or political
issues, but be roused to extreme passion and action when their children’s
educational well-being was threatened.

For years, the story made the rounds of the
schools as a cautionary tale. Some teachers had developed a method of instilling
so much fear about ‘going out of point’ that their terrified students never
made the mistake again: their ruse was to write a huge, ferocious ‘F9’ across
each page of the offending composition with a brutal red marker, and pin it up
on the classroom news bulletin board for public humiliation of the offender.

Hong Leng, by prior acquaintance with the
monster’s deadliest feature, would be able to avoid it. There were other
dangers to be taken into account.

‘Alright, Hong Leng, how much time did you
take to do this composition?’

The boy, in working on the extra
compositions at home, had to be trained to write the required two or two and a
half pages within the allotted one and a half hours. He was slow, and at the
first attempt, had managed only a three quarter page, but was steadily
improving. What would be the use, explained Miss Seetoh, of producing a
first-class introduction to your story, going on to a first-class first
paragraph and then hearing the exam invigilators announce, ‘Five minutes more!’
or ‘Time’s up!’? Time was another foe to reckon with.

‘Alright, Hong Leng, tell me, what tense
form should you use throughout in your story?’

‘The past tense, Miss Seetoh.’

‘Good.’

‘What’s wrong with the tense form in this
sentence:

‘During the last holidays, my parents visit
Malaysia –’

‘ ‘Visited Malaysia’, Miss Seetoh.’

‘Good. Remember, after you finish your
composition, to check all your verbs, and see if they have the past tense form.
You know what verbs are, Hong Leng?

‘They are the doing or action words, Miss
Seetoh.’

‘Good. Now tell me, how long should each of
your sentences be, Hong Leng?’

‘No more than ten words, Miss Seetoh.’

The shorter the sentence, the less chance
for students like poor Hong Leng to make grammatical errors. Complex and
compound sentences were death traps. No examiner could punish a student for
short simple sentences even if these were uninspired and uninspiring, but they
would apply the ruthless red pencil to long, sophisticated sentences that were
sure to succumb to the traps of English grammar and syntax.

Maria thought: for Hong Leng’s sake, I’m
going to subvert the very purpose of the examinations, to undermine its role as
a true test of merit. She would of course always have nothing but contempt for
those who tried to get hold of exam papers before their release, using any
means, including bribery, to break the traditional tight security enforced upon
these all-important, life-affecting documents. It must be the dream of every
lazy, incompetent, irresponsible student to know all the exam questions
beforehand, get expert help for the answers, learn them up, write them out with
a flourish in the exam hall and then sit back, for the remaining time, to watch
the other students slog away.

There had been a case, in Meeta’s and
Winnie’s school, of an attempted break-in; the exam papers, kept locked in a
safe in the principal’s office, were saved from theft only because the school
night-watchman doing his rounds had spotted the intruder who instantly fled.
Beyond the sheer desperation of such attempts, the annals of exams must be
filled with all manner of cheating.

Did the final stage of her strategy in
helping Hong Leng, smack of cheating too, because it involved actually
preparing answers beforehand?

‘Hong Leng, I want you to think of three or
four happy or positive experiences in your life and also of unhappy or negative
experiences.’

All the narrative questions in the exam
paper invariably asked about each or both of such experiences. Hong Leng duly
came up with two lists.

‘Now Hong Leng, I want you to write out
short paragraphs, as many as you can, describing your feelings, pleasant and
unpleasant. Describe your joy, surprise, excitement, gratitude, affection,
admiration, love, and so on, as well as anger, disappointment, fear,
frustration, distress, despair and so on.’

The suggested feelings covered virtually the
entire range relevant to the entire corpus of narrative topics, possibly for
the entire history, over generations, of the paper; there could not be a
greater offer of guarantee. Miss Seetoh, armed with this certainty, set Hong
Leng a large quantity of homework which the boy worked at most conscientiously
and enthusiastically. The next, and final, step was for her to correct all the
grammatical and other mistakes in the submitted compositions, then hand them
back for Hong Leng to study meticulously, even learn by heart, for reproducing
in the exams. The trick was to knit together some of these pre-prepared
paragraphs into a full composition, and hey presto! a reasonable credit was
assured. She had discovered the formula for passing an exam, thus undermining
its integrity and her own as a teacher.

The boy’s joy must not be diluted by guilt.
The stack of marked paragraphs now in his keeping, Miss Seetoh explained, were
all his own work, for she had merely corrected their grammatical and other
mistakes, therefore if he made use of them in the exam, he would be in no way
cheating. Maria Seetoh thought: I am the real cheat. She, teacher of English
and literature, enjoined with the purpose of inculcating a true love of the
subject in her students, of preparing them for life, had reduced that noble
purpose to the passing of exams. She was helping to turn out a conveyor belt of
exam-smart students who would find good jobs in the society and be absorbed
into the rules-governed, unquestioning, unthinking culture that the great TPK
favoured.

‘Really, I don’t care much,’ she said to
herself in the mirror, in the privacy of the bathroom. Lately she had taken to
talking to herself, to help clarify her own thinking. She had become two
selves: the public persona as she engaged with others in the world with its
many perils, and the private person as soon as she returned home and became
absorbed in her own, dear world of private thinking and feeling. Be in the
world, but not of it, was the advice of the holy book she had left behind but
never forgotten for its occasional insights into the day-to-day struggles of
decent men and women. Be pure as the dove, but at the same time, be wily as the
serpent. How much of the dove and how much of the serpent had she been as wife,
and now as a teacher?

‘I don’t care,’ she said again defiantly,
‘as long as I’m happy.’ And she had not been as happy for a long time.

 Hong Leng passed the English language paper
in his preliminaries and actually scored a strong credit in the G.C.E. O
levels. On the day he collected his results, he shyly presented a ‘Thank You’
card to Miss Seetoh overflowing with effusive gratitude (with three grammatical
errors, she sadly noted). Every year, long after he had left school, he would
send her Christmas and Chinese New Year cards. He landed an extremely
well-paying job in a computer firm, writing to tell her about it and to add,
with self-conscious pride, that he was going to get married soon to a wonderful
colleague. ‘I will appreciate very much for your kindness to attend my
marriage,’ he wrote. When the prime minister lamented the poor standard of
English in formal and business letters, he could have had, in mind, Singaporean
users of English like Hong Leng.

‘Are you happy?’ she asked him.

‘I am very happy, Miss Seetoh. And I thank
you for your unstinting help you gave me to get my G.C.E. O Level.’

One day Maria was surprised to get a call
from Hong Leng who asked her whether she could conduct courses for his staff to
improve their English. He added, rather shyly, that she would be well paid for
it. She said ‘No’ instantly, for by that time, in her solitude, she wanted
little to do with a world that reminded her of her days at St Peter’s Secondary
School.

Dr Phang is bad news, her head told her.
Beware that man, said her heart. If head and heart were investigated by those
instruments of science that told only the truth, there would be no registration
of suspicion or anxiety, only the firing sparks of pure elation. Even the
mention of his name, much less the recollection of the deep gaze of his eyes or
the touch of his hand, would elicit that reaction, properly belonging to lovers
only, which the sensitive instruments monitoring heartbeat, breathing or
pupillary enlargement could instantly pick up.

No, she would not, could not cross that
line; she would be a friend only. Crossing that line: how did the act of sex,
that very first time when the woman decided to abandon all the rules of the
game enjoined on her by her mother with the unshakeable backing of society,
give in to the man’s pleading and go to bed with him, become such a crucial,
irrevocable decision, resulting in a commitment with so much emotional, if not
legal, baggage? In the time of her mother and Por Por, that one act of sex
could be revealed to the world by physiology: how many heartbreaking stories
she had heard about the woman betrayed by the broken maidenhood and the visibly
swelling belly that caused her enraged family to cast her out. Por Por was
saved only because the family face had to be saved.