In a sense, I was looking forward to GP lessons in JC after plenty of creative writing in primary/secondary life as they were meant to be of a higher level –  no stories, no nonsense and just lots of adult topics to be debated and to be eloquent about. Unfortunately, it was not to be – for a full two years!

The assigned GP tutor for my class always sat at her chair the moment she entered and did not move until the bell rang again. She could not be heard beyond the front row as well. We gave up alerting her about audibility issues as well after a while.

Hence, slowly and steadily, GP classes went on to be a bustling marketplace. If we were not writing essays or comprehension exercises, the tutor could be seen with an open copy of Newsweek, trying to read an article for all but hardly heard. Discussions were usually one-sided and the class wags would usually say with a deadpan face, “As usual, we lose and you are right, Mrs ….”.

Our essays routinely had low marks with long commentaries on how they could be but we would be mostly unconvinced.

With very little of interest or productivity going on in class, I resorted to reading as many copies of Newsweek and TIME. It was a time of no Google, no smartphones and no infopacks. So, it was intellectual enough to be sitting around with a copy or two of these American publications. The added draw was that if you took an annual subscription of either, you could get a free ‘Swatch’ brand windbreaker. There was nothing ‘Swatch’ about the windbreaker like the colourful Swiss timepiece but for brand-conscious teenagers, it was enough just to have the label clearly printed on the chest area.

It was indeed annoying in class for us to receive weak grades GP essay after GP essay for quite a while without getting any guidance. In those days, you could say that we just lived with our grades and did not think that everyone should be scoring well in every subject.

But for my pet subject, English-onto-GP, it was not amusing for me to live with the mediocrity. I even suspected whether I was being ‘punished’ for mixing with the class ‘bad boys’ and laughing along when they ridiculed the tutor. It was difficult to keep a straight face all the time.

As the GP rep and Civics rep, I would be sent to collect the missing students who routinely asked to visit the toilets the moment lesson started and would go missing for half hour or more. The number of absconders just increased over time.

As disheartening as the JC GP experience was, I was fairly confident that in the ultimate outcome, I was definitely safe for a distinction barring great tragedy. It was a relief when the result came and helped to put the two-year pain away.

It was definitely not a fluke as I always believed my approach was good. As a GP tutor more than twenty years later, I was constantly egged on by my own classroom experiences to ensure that my students should experience as little boredom or bewilderment as possible.  

In a perfect world, every student would want to have good classroom experiences followed by matching grades.

In most cases today, students are willing to endure a negative experience if they can see a fabulous grade approaching. But with such an attitude, this mostly means that the moment the results are received, they are willing to dump the experience along with the subject.

In the case of GP, that would be tragic if you are willing to dump clear, concise writing and critical thinking for the rest of your life just because you got a painful ‘A’. So goes out the baby with the bathwater.

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