Where English lessons are concerned, secondary school life was also pretty full of creative writing and very little on argumentative essays for a good four years. The curriculum then was such. This was probably in deference to the JC GP curriculum ahead, and not to rush the seasons.

Today, non-fiction reading passages are making headway into the primary school English curriculum, as I notice from my child’s homework. This early balancing is a good thing now as our youngsters have the tough job of critically deciphering the topsy-turvy current affairs realities of today well before reaching physical maturity. They also need early training to concentrate on reading long articles in a bite-sized online world.

Moving from American teenage mystery adventures in primary school, I tried to fill up my head with more global English authors, notably from India and Africa. Thus, having read hundreds of English novels and short stories penned by noted names across continents, it was not difficult for me to use creative expressions to write engaging stories for any classroom or exam requirement.

We all plagiarise unconsciously from the million media fragments in our minds, including the best novelists, songwriters and film-makers. This creative trajectory served well up to the ‘O’ Level composition paper for me, where I tried to do something different by considering various questions but wasted a lot of time in the exam hall.

Luckily, story-telling came in handy and I remember desperately writing a fabulous tale with a given opening line such as “The engine of the bus was running while the driver was nowhere to be seen…”. This was my safe option in English Paper 1. I had read plenty of stories, enough to conjure a tale with bits cut-and-pasted from anywhere in my head. So it was a relief to stay in the A1 category when the results came.

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