Basket.

One day in a life.

We pay more and more every year so that fucking MRT trains can contrive to have mysterious and unexplained delays which make me nearly late for school? Well, a shining start to what was to develop into a magnificent day at work.

Making efforts to round up summary practices like little lost sheep, I come in to discover a couple new ones on my desk, by the stipulated deadline. The bad news: quite a number more have yet to come in. I pursue the matter after assembly, a short few minutes later. Sardonically, I ask one offender whether he requires me to beg him for his work. He answers in the affirmative with a cheeky smirk, and gets the first earful of the day from me. It sets the tone for what is to follow.

I get back to my desk and idly flip through the summary practices I have. The first book I pick has the wrong practice done. So does the next... and the one after that. A chill runs up my spine, and a familiar throbbing begins thudding behind my eyes. Fortunately, only one more is erroneous. A sigh of relief and some hope.

Shortly after, in Geography class, a student betrays the utter lack of attention he has been paying to my lesson by telling me about "surface runoff" from the "upper course" of the river. His friend whom I assign to aid him fails similarly miserably. They certainly are taking this whole "teach with patience" thing for granted. Nothing I can't live with, however.

Everything then goes as smoothly as it possibly can (ie, not very) until Social Studies. I am mid-writing-on-board-and-explaining when this Secondary One pupil strolls nonchalantly into my Secondary Three classroom, unfolds a sheet of paper and begins asking me about a misplaced hall pass, allegedly in said classroom. I had literally stopped in mid-sentence and mid-writing to look on in astonishment as this little gremlin treats my classroom as his living room. Naturally, he gets the second good earful of the day. My Secondary 3 pupils comment that I made him cry. Bullshit - I can only fucking wish our students were that remorseful about their actions.

School ends, and I go on to invigilate some Secondary Fours who need instructions repeated again and again and again and... again and... aga- GOD CAN'T THEY JUST FUCKING LISTEN UP AND FOLLOW AM I FUCKING SPEAKING ENGLISH HERE? Good heavens.

And then my day ends with yet another earful, for those who fail to give me my "lost sheep" (see above). Some of the best students in the school, it is said. Future of the nation, it is said.

You know that old joke about the little boy and his father that ends with "The Prime Minister is screwing the Working Class while the Government is asleep, the People are being ignored and the Future is in shit"? It is increasingly becoming black comedy for me.

I feel a familiar sense of detachment.

It is a starless night, and the moon is a thin pale slip behind a heavy curtain of cloud. It is one of those nights where light does not overcome darkness, but merely accentuates it. When shifting, mottled shadows cow the normally brave pools of streetside luminescence, and honest men hurry home with coats pulled tight against an unearthly wind.

It is on nights such as these when the world invariably begins to feel like something that isn't happening to me personally. As if it is all drifting past me, receding like passing scenery, unimportant and unremarkable, with me as an equally transient spectator.

And your mind is at its clearest when nothing seems to matter to you.

Thus I use such nights to think. Memories, opinions, isolated bits from everything I've ever read, experiences that were, experiences that will be, friends and characters and personalities and decisions and regrets and ultimate questions.

And I realise, don't we live in a world of strangers? Get on the bus one fine morning and you'll see so many other people sharing your commute. The odd thing is, you can take the same bus every day at almost the same time and you won't see exactly the same crowd. In fact, only one or two would have taken the bus with you the previous day. What happened to the rest? That morning may well have been the last and only time you have ever seen them. They flit into your life for that brief, relative moment and then vanish forevermore. You never knew their interests, motivations, quirks, emotions, personalities and mannerisms. You never will know all the stories they have inside them, tales of humour or pain or injustice that if told to you you might never forget. If the two of you glanced at each other once, you were acquainted for just that brief second in endless, fluxing time.

All stuck on this tiny, tiny piece of dirt, and only ever knowing each other for that short, short, short time. One second, out of the 200,000 years Homo Sapiens has been around in its present form; 200,000 years, out of the 4.5 billion our world has existed. One second, one species, out of so many that we do not know the exact number.

One island, one tiny piece of dirt, floating upon a vast blue sphere.

One tiny blue sphere in the vastness of a solar system.

One solar system in the cavernous wastes of the Milky Way Galaxy, surrounded by so many just like it.

One minuscule solar system in the enormous emptiness of the known universe, populated by literally tens of billions just like it and tens of billions, again, nothing like it.

Perhaps this will make you realise man's ultimate insignificance and sheer arrogance; to declare himself made in the image of a Divine Creator when he is but one species on one planet in one solar system in one galaxy in one known universe. It is folly; the ultimate folly of religion.

Think about it all.

There were lessons yesterday but there might as well not have been. No one was in the mood for learning and hardly anyone brought their books. Not much I can do there; students will be students. I ended up teaching them E Maths instead because of the familiar unearthly obsession with doing Maths that students tend to have, and their test is next week anyway. However, they asked me why the square root of 3 times the square root of 3 is equals to 3, and I was at a loss to answer. I mean... I also covered Chinese class with my Sec 2s and demonstrated how bilingual I am, although their teacher contrived to hand me a stack of blank paper with a deceiving worksheet on the top, much to their joy. Interesting day.

If my students are any indication, the humanities are stone-dead in this country. I experienced the full litany of ignorance this week: my history class has never heard of the United Nations, which is well, only a vast, indelibly controversial and newsworthy international organisation with 200 member nations; my English class told me they were taking "A Midnight Summer's Dream" and "Killing the Mockingbird" for Literature; and my Geography students set a new standard for bad with a singular pass in 85 test scripts, and 50% at that. I fully understand that many of these things are new to them, but I do not believe it is excusable not to know what the United Nations is, and not to know the titles of books you have (supposedly) been studying for nearly one term already. Before anyone comes in with "what do you expect", I do not expect a lot out of my students, and I do not believe it is excessive to expect them at least to know what the UN is. So there.

I sincerely do not believe any of them are stupid. They are simply ignorant. The latter can be fixed, while the former cannot.

Looking at yearbook photos always gives me an oddly eerie sense of detachment and wonder. You are usually looking out for people that you know: teachers, classmates, family or friends. Along the way, you gaze upon scores of countenances, features frozen in that one exact moment in time; and you think, and you realise that behind every single visage is a thousand tales not told, a hundred secrets all the individual's own, entire worlds you might never discover. If it is an old yearbook, the feeling intensifies, because you then wonder where these people are now, what they are currently doing, how much they have changed from what they were all those years ago.

What lies behind all the expressions? Pleasant photogenic smiles, blank looks, impudent grins, corner-of-mouth sneers - why? What was going through their heads at that instant when a camera flash captured them for eternity, like a fly in amber? Were they worried about an upcoming test the very next period, overjoyed that important exams were over, or simply quietly pleased that the weekend was finally approaching? There is a story, perhaps more than one, behind every single expression put on at that exact moment. We have no way of knowing what; we only have the briefest flutter of acquaintance with these people, a split-second connection of sorts when we gaze upon their images from a time past.

I thought of this, because I had the opportunity to view my present school's yearbook today, and naturally went looking for the immortalised younger images of my students. On a rather more mundane level, I realise that Secondary 3 is when people begin to really shoot up. Most unfortunately, I personally seem to have missed that phase, because I grew at most ten centimetres between Primary Six and J2 - which is ridiculous because most people grow twice or even three times that. The result is that I'm towered over by Secondary 2 girls, and that is a really shitty feeling. Every time I think I've dealt with being condemned to a lack of height, it hits me harder than ever before.

Life would be a lot easier if we could perambulate through the minds of those around us.

Just over a month at this school and I have apparently gained enough popularity for Secondary Three Express to make a collective effort to set me up at today's Total Defence Assembly programme - when they called for teacher opinions. They failed, fortunately, but it certainly was not for a lack of trying.

I still think like a student a lot of the time, and it's both my greatest asset and greatest potential failing. Why the latter? Because it means I am not thinking enough like a teacher, and thus might not be going about my job as I should be. But for now it's the former - to be able to get into their heads and assure them that I know exactly what they are going through, minus plenty of creative punishments I once experienced. But there are more fun ways to deal with disruptiveness; a sharp tongue and quick wit, I find, will put errant students back in their rightful places more effectively than the most draconian punishments in the world. The laughter of students is a powerful weapon which if you learn how to properly wield, can do most of your hard work for you.

As such, these days I rarely punish; the other reason is that I now know my students better - their names, personalities, individual quirks and most importantly, weaknesses. Some things never change: students still talk when they are not supposed to and have nothing to say when you want their opinions on a subject. As such, every disruptive, giggling joker quickly shrivels , helped along by jabbingly pointed comments, once invited to the front to share the joke, and after being laughed back to his seat by his classmates, the lesson can proceed apace.

I can surmise thus far, then, that the best way to control students is not by punishment, but by their own laughter. I'm getting the hang of it, and having one joker who can be counted upon to fuck around every lesson helps immensely. The class laughs, and after that are brightened, and willing to move on with the lesson. With punishment, the mood just turns menacing and everyone is sombre and too fearful to learn anything useful.

Of course, the risk here is run that this way I'll eventually get too close to my students and not be taken seriously, work-wise. It is definitely something I will have to watch. But for now, things are working fine this way.

The world's crankiest machine is also one of its most vital - the venerable photocopier. After the staffroom's photocopier coughed and juddered to a jamming halt for the third time in a mere twice as many weeks, teacher after teacher was left frustrated, needing something zapped yesterday and with no way now to do it.

I've never come across a photocopier that behaves exactly like it should. From my earliest encounters with these truculent yet immensely important gadgets, I have had to endure the frustrations of repeated paper jams, sudden lack of toner, rattling loose bits and, at times, a plain and simple refusal to function despite the fact that everything checks out perfectly.

Photocopiers - like women are often described, can't live with them and can't live without them.

It's the season for tests and scripts are coming in thick and fast. At the same time, I'm putting together Geography notes with help from the ones I had as a student, because some things never change, and another one of these is how easily 15-year-olds get touched off by the slightest innuendoes.

Such as "lubricant". I was not at all surprised to see the boys giggling at that one, but the girls all seemed to know as well. Hrm.

Well, they haven't caught onto River Processes the way we fastened upon it back in our day (old, old inside joke, tag me if you remember), and here's hoping they don't ever.