the january payslip

$1939.50 before deductions.

$1465.50 after deductions.

it really isn't that easy. everything. i would have been jealous of those who managed to get long-term relief teaching assignments, but now that i've done some short ones, i've decided i like this more: just ad hoc assignments that leave me free on some days while i continue to give tuitions in the evenings. this would give me time to do things like reading a book, cooking, baking, housework, exercise...

the only problem is, the point of ad hoc is that you can't secure the place in advance, which leaves a lot of variables as they are: variables.

t(goodness)if

it's finally friday! this week has passed super slowly, almost as if RI was long ago, when it was in fact just last week. i think time at fairfield passes very slowly because the periods are so much shorter and there're so many classes to go to.

today i shouted and shouted at my class to the point that my throat hurt. because children just don't listen; or rather, they don't hear. but i think they like me.

rematch

stepping into fairfield after so many years can be such a _____ experience. the last time we went back might be only sec 2. yes i think so; in sec 3 i went to kaixiong's school, and subsequently i never went back to fairfield anymore.

day one was monday, which was school song day. i remembered about 60% of the song. it was a hectic day, because i was practically thrown into a heap of mess, with some empty-looking lesson plans, timetables that didn't corroborate, and periods that last an odd 40 minutes long.

teaching primary school children is a completely different game from teaching secondary school children. you spend about 50% of the lesson time telling them to stop talking, stop running, sit down, do their work, stop walking to the back (or front), stop taking his pencil/paper, stop shouting.

it can be so tiring and so demoralising. but i met many of my ex-teachers, and got to talk with some new ones. mrs habeeb said not to give up on classroom management so quickly; it takes time. and another teacher suggested using a whistle (and he said i was sadistic when i suggested blowing the whistle into a microphone).

children can be so unfocused, and so blunt. they really just speak their mind, and i think that is the innocence we have all lost. i mean, they can just say anything and get away with it; no need to care about how others may feel after listening to it.

it also appears to be the case that children easily forget the previous day's unhappy events and become friendly again overnight. and saying 'please' when you ask them to do something will work sometimes.

tonight the moon shines into my room, like on the night of 27th october 2007.

没有哭, 没有说

jinquan says it's good to reflect on the past. i think the past few days have been fun, tiring, exciting, draining. today i ended up eating two lunches, one of which was the friday $1.50 laksa whch always made me sweat. (even with two lunches, i still managed to spend less than $4; eating in school can save you so much money.)

bumping into xinyang, adnaan and boyle all in one day, i ended up touring RJ with ms huang and yongsheng. the mural that i helped so much looks so very pretty still! someone was playing merry christmas, mr lawrence on the piano at the amphitheatre. after a final 'bye' to ms huang and yongsheng, on the way out of school, i was listening to 出口, and it was a sprightly ending/beginning.

i have learnt that you just shouldn't let yourself grow too attached to any place/thing/person, so that the eventual parting won't be so difficult.

a tuition assignment brought me to yew tee, where i walked past the durian stall that sam bought from on my last night in camp. then i walked through foodfare, the place where i never got to try the butter sotong. and after the lesson i was walking on the way back with the mother, engaging in very-auntie talk.

窗

today is the last day at ri. it was a rainy morning, gloomy. and weiyang is just two weeks away from ORD, which means it's almost three months since my ORD.

i have nothing much left for today. i just had the last lesson with the sec 2 class, which turned out to be not as badly-behaved as i thought they were. now i've finished bundling papers and leaving post-its for the returning teacher, and am waiting for the right time to return the laptop and access passes and whatnots.

this puts me in a pensive mood. (wow, seven working days really passed so quickly!)

decorum

being a teacher can be so easy, if all you had to do was to teach. just go into the classroom, teach what you need to teach; don't care if the class is noisy, let those who want to listen ask the class to shut up; don't care if the class wants to hand in work, just mark for those who bother to hand in; don't bother checking if they are doing well, let them come to you if they have queries.

but no, you have to do so much more than teach, which probably explains why the pimples are returning.

but today i'm ahead of time. marked scripts non-stop for three hours, and now i'm waiting for the time to go out for lunch and then go home. in the meantime, the pantry has stock of some very nice commercial biscuits. 'commercial' as in khong guan, as in fake butter, additives, preservatives... but so very delicious i think it's a sin to be eating them one packet after another.

食海

i finally went back to the malay food stall at the RJ canteen. the one with the drumstick and fish and sayur lodeh. i still want to eat from the 煮炒 stall, the laksa and the chicken rice at the RI canteen, but i have only two days left after today. have two lunches in a day?

i also broke a second ruler today. i should really be paying someone. for now i'm holding on to it so that i can reuse it if needed. and then i'll pass it to the teacher i'm reliefing when he returns.

~

every new handphone is a new beginning. it's when you have to transfer your SIM card over and leave behind the messages saved on the old phone. contacts too: you have to check and siphon out which ones you want and which ones you no longer need.

beg/steal/borrow

mondays at RI are days where you have to wear a tie, and sing the institution anthem. as an anti-uniform to the boys', i wore black with the school tie, and it was almost fashionable.

i was reminded of our own weekly hair-checks during the RI years. and having to beg/steal/borrow ties if we forgot to bring. and how the ties get so stinky after a while, because no one ever washes their ties.

today i almost managed to make one class beg/steal/borrow graph paper, but in the end, they won =( you can never win students, unless you are like mrs chan or something. today was such a long day; repeating the same materials for three different classes, competing with the classes each time to see who can talk louder.

but i was very amazed by a group of vietnamese students. so very polite, and so very nice to the teachers. they were so different from the other students. and so humble. then i met weiyang for dinner; it was money well-controlled/well-spent. and i was on the train home with many sleepy people.

不是一定要你回来

this is not good, because i should really be sleeping, in preparation of facing those monkeys tomorrow. i believe what's making me hyper now is 徐佳莹's 出口.

at the same time, a chance encounter with xinyang today led to many rediscoveries of buried old secondary school classroom memories. some of them include ms huang scolding james in a rare occasion, mrs ong's are you crazay and desmin, and mrs chan's 4 deeeEEE~

i have just five more days left to sit and share an extension number with ms huang. oh well, hope more opportunities come up next time. for now, i seem to be collecting more and more tuition students, enough to hit above $1000 in one month. i suppose that's a good thing, because i dun have to work the entire day away.

and another random thought: you know how some people change their shirts everyday but wear their pants for a few days before washing them? it's because they think pants don't get dirty/smelly as fast as shirts. (i'm one of them.) i always thought shirts turn smelly faster than pants, but jinquan says that's because your nose is closer to your shirt than your pants - if your nose grew on your butt you would be washing your pants everyday.

but still, the fact is jeans are not meant to be washed every time you wear them.

on other news, i have a new phone now, but i have yet to figure out how it works, and i don't mean that in a sheldon cooper way.

chocolate-raspberry

and finally i've rid the freezer of the last disc of tart dough.
the raspberries are so sour. i don't know if that's the way they are supposed to be, but the soft/creamy dark chocolate filling helped mask the sourness. now it's time to clear out the egg whites and butter in the freezer. i don't know what to make.

photo essay (to 020407)

just what is the point of taking photos? to see whether we have grown fat/slim? (ms wong says i look a lot slimmer now.) to laugh at the incident where a classmate drew a whacky circle? to capture nice memories?

well, some things, like wine and cheese, get better with age. but, like a bottle of expired and opened bailey's, some things get more and more sour over time. so they can make you smile/glow from within, or they can make you shed a single tear.

the sadder thing, though, is sometimes you don't even have photos to help you with the memories, so you can't choose whether it makes you happy or sad. what you do is try very hard to hold on to what you can remember. yet the more you try, the more they disperse; like grasping at cotton clouds.

云在半空中, 被微风尖碎(/牵随?)
回忆也许美, 可是正在飞走, 对不对?

when you live a normal life, you'll discover that taking the train from tiong bahru to marymount costs 15 cents more than if you stopped at bishan and walked further to school. and when you step out of the supermarket a woman will ask you for your receipt so that she can accumulate $50 worth of receipts to 'go upstairs and redeem [something]'.

回忆翻开

wilhelmina slater says that 'being an assistant is boot camp, being a editor is war.' but now i think being a student is boot camp, and being a teacher is war. this is coming fresh from the staff room at RI. after three hours of lessons, i have almost lost my voice. i did mange to cover what i was supposed to, though hopefully the students absorbed the stuff as well.

only 1 out of 3 classes were quiet. but too late, all impressions have been made, and now they know that i am a nice teacher =) or rather, =(. oh well, anything goes. i just need to teach what i need to teach, before any of them manage to film me down and put me on facebook.

and so i had lunch at the RJ canteen; my very missed fried chicken and soya bean milk. then i walked into the hullet memorial library and realised that i was there so often in the past. it felt weird to think about the secondary school days, or maybe it's just because the furniture looks all very small now.

doughnot

like a bagel factory. i actually woke up especially early to start these. the recipe comes from nigella's how to be a domestic goddess.
the dough for her bagels was only 50% hydrated, so it was quite dry, which made it easy to knead by hand without making a mess. and that was what i did. after 30 minutes of kneading, the dough was bucky and smooth.
the bagels were a little wrinkled because i didn't roll them nicely. but this was my first time doing a recipe that poached the dough before baking. this poaching water has baing soda and sugar to help create the glossy sheen in the final product, which i couldn't observe much anyway. but it was quite fun to poach the bagels; it's like clockwork - every 30 seconds there's something to do.
the bagels were indeed chewy like store-bought ones. too bad i didn't have any cream cheese spread, so i used an olive spread. on their own, they tasted quite nice too, but it's really tiring to keep chewing on them.

等不到她的谁

today i spent the entire day in the kitchen. four french recipes. three from julia child and one from dorie greenspan. that thick volume of paper is my (photo)copy of mastering the art of french cooking.

they are: french onion soup, baked cucumbers, scrambled eggs and alsatian apple tart.



i cheated a little on the onion soup because i couldn't find canned court bouillon; i used chicken broth, but the taste came out ok. i suppose it didn't taste like the real thing, but it was still nice. the addition of white wine to the soup just gave it a very special dimension to the flavour - so french! it was amazing how a whole pan of onions slowly simmered in butter could be cooked down so much, and turn so beautifully caramelised.

in the same way, the strips of cucumbers shrank so much when braised in butter. what looked sufficient for two eventually wilted down to just one serving. but they were tasty - there was a it of sourness from the vinegar bath, but also sweetness from the caramelisation in the oven.

scrambled eggs were not as easy as the recipe described. half the time i was wondering whether the eggs were supposed to be what they were looking like. and 'stirring rapidly' just sloshed part of it onto the stove, which burnt into carbon. but still, i let it stay a little creamy, beat in the final butter and cheese, and it was good.

the alsation apple tart was a good way of using up that block of tart dough that had been sitting in the freezer for almost three months now. (and i still have yet one more to go.) the tart was simple in construction: just a tart shell filled with apple slices and a custard. i'm still not a fan of apples. i think it's the bite; eating an apple is so tiring.

~

and this is how i came to spend my whole day cooking. nigella says that if the point of cooking was the end product, then the meaning must lie in the process. i'm not understanding that very much, but cooking can be such a joyful and tiring thing.

i was listening to 失落沙洲 and i think i was understanding it. i think it means that when you lose someone you love so much, you know he won't come back; you want him back, but you don't necessarily need him; you are just hurt at the fact that he's gone, that he's no longer there to protect you; but above all, you still - and you just - love him. or that's what i gathered from the MV. (did the guy die or something?)

yes it's supposed to

我不是一定要你回来
只是当独自走入人海
除了你之外的依赖
还有谁能教我勇敢

today i watched as a bird flew so very high in the sky. it must have been some big one like an eagle. i kept circling and circling and circling the sky.

checkpoint

this blog has come to a standstill. i realised that beyond food, food and food, there is nothing i can write about nowadays.

but we did go ice skating today, and it was fun, though i fell down so many times.

the missing party

time to use up egg whites in julia child's soufflé aux blancs d'oeuf.
this starts off as a roux, and is made into a thick sauce, seasoned with salt and pepper. it almost tasted cheesy already, without the cheese.
the egg whites are beaten separately, and then folded into the thick sauce base mixed with cheese.
i couldn't find any breadcrumbs to coat the sides of the ramekins, so i don't know if that was the reason the soufflés puffed oddly. but still tasty and cheesy.