Early school memories…

The strength of a good General Paper candidate starts very young – with a passion for reading and questioning. Those with English language issues but are strong in their native tongue should not be disheartened as playing catch-up with language is easier than catching up with idea sophistication.

My childhood certainly was flush with plenty of reading material the whole day. I did not attend kindergarten and went straight to Primary One – partly because preschool education was not compulsory back then and we may have shifted homes one too many times to be in a stable pre-school environment in any one location.

Thanks to my older siblings, I managed to pick up reading fairly early. As both of them were already in primary and secondary schools, their textbooks and stationery were fair game for my abuse through the day at home.

Apart from hours at the playground, I read anything available, as there was plenty of time to do so and we were not swamped with too much reading material like today. I would stare at the headlines of newspapers and over weeks and months, international figures and current events would slowly set in my mind and built up quite a trivia database. I liked to observe advertisements, especially of cars. Constant questioning and pondering led to a lot of interesting realisations about how the media works.

There was no formal teaching of anything at home but Tamil and religious studies by my mum at home. English competency and geographical awareness were painlessly built up thanks to a wide range of storybooks. The ‘Hardy Boys’ and ‘Three Investigators’ mystery series stories are still a fond memory.

It was only much later that I realised that all these syndicated books were written by dozens of ghost writers under pen names. The books had a lot of ethnic stereotypes and absurd storylines but were great language learning tools for primary school. I spent a lot of my savings collecting ‘Hardy Boys’ titles, with more than fifty in the end. By Secondary One, I realised I was unlikely to read them again and donated the whole collection to my primary school library at my brother’s advice. I would also spend hours flipping through my brother’s school textbooks, his collection of the Rafflesian Times annuals and espionage novels.

The siblings played plenty of word games such as Scrabble and Snatch (also known as Grabble). Even though I was clearly younger, I usually tried to do a one-upmanship by pretending to be in tune with the siblings’ language competencies and caught up soon too. This applied to engaging in both English and Tamil, our native tongue.

English lessons in my primary school focused heavily on grammar and vocabulary competencies. Ironically, without explicitly being taught rules of grammar and appropriate vocabulary, it was a case of ‘whoever read widely had the best advantage’. I enjoyed learning idioms and alliterations too, stuffing them into picture compositions wherever possible.

With all the good grades and teacher praise, it was a lot of motivation for me but unfortunately not for the weaker students who were not helped much in getting to a certain level of competency. The teachers could not be blamed much either because there were some forty students in a class and the ability range was quite wide.

As I went on to secondary and junior college systems, I realised the advantage I had over peers in English/Literature/GP simply because I had a habit of reading widely (without expecting any dues), and for the longest time too.

Till today, this advice holds for parents with school-going children and also serves as caution to JC students who try to ‘study’ for GP like other subjects as exams near. Most current students may be familiar with peers sitting at the canteen half an hour before the GP paper staring at a recent copy of RI’s KS Bull, hoping to catch some gem!

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Gryphon Point