December is the most sentimental month for me. This is probably because my cadence of activity lowers, and I get actual time to introspect and plan for future projects. There is nothing much like inactivity to give you the time and space to think about all the traumas the past year has wrought. But also, the small victories and growing steps I have tried to take.
Some of the superlatives that happened in my education and teaching context this year:
Biggest Teaching Fail: Having a challenging student who complained about my teaching without first discussing it with me. I admit I have hot-takes on certain issues, and my methods might not be kosher with everyone, but they are effective if students keep an open mind—which is the entire enterprise of General Paper. I’m just thankful they did not post it on some social media site because I think that’s the most cowardly thing to do and something I actively advocate my students not to do. Instead, they should be advocating for themselves through engagement rather than retreating to the safety of an online mob where it’s as easy to get criticism as it is to get validation.
Biggest Teaching Success: Guiding students and getting them to at least try their hand at GP (even if they hate my subject) - I knew they were trying it for my sake, but I’ll take it. Sometimes, success is not about finishing the race but starting it. Society often celebrates visible spectacles, and rarely the hidden, small victories we accumulate over time—to the point that we ourselves often discount them.
Most Interesting Experience: Staying overnight in school for a Leadership Camp. I got to know my students from a different horizon, and it was a humbling experience as a teacher and as a human being. I believe many teachers who are long in the profession often get cynical about knowing their students too personally. Increasingly, this cannot be the case. I do think that all content today has to be paired with personal context, both on the teacher and students’ end (this is definitely worth a separate post). In any case, the experience made me reminisce about hostel life as a student again albeit with the freedom and power of an adult—in this case a teacher having to catch students who might be Up To No Good at 3 in the morning.
Most Mundane Experience: It will always be marking terrible essays. I mark comparatively fast but often it’s the sheer volume that ends me.
Best Form Class Moment: Gathering together as a class to eat WingStop and enjoy Movie Night. This is the part where I genuinely felt like a nosferatu draining the youth off these kids—my age is certainly showing.
Worst Form Class Moment: Not being able to connect with as many of them as I would have liked to because the class was too big and I only had so much face time with them in the span of a year. Especially in JC2, with the many programmes, tight schedules, and senior activities (think, National School Games, Performing Arts Competitions, etc.), at count I would say I’d only have a full 6 to 7 months with them.
Best CCA Memory: Most, if not all of Council work is memorable. Scouring through the tenth version of their proposals—while onerous—was something that I definitely valued because I could see the growth and development of their ideation and thinking. That to me, is the journey that is worth taking alongside my students.
Worst CCA Memory: Scouring through the tenth version of their proposals and finding grammatical and formatting errors.
And this brings me to the next rule.
Rule #5: Dials, not Switches
There is a spectrum to everything. Our values, our feelings, our actions—plenty of what people see us for are but glaciers when our true selves are hidden beneath the surface. One of the best shows of 2024—Shogun on Disney+ (not sponsored)—had this genuinely brilliant line:
“It’s a saying they have, that a man has a false heart in his mouth for the world to see, another in his breast to show to his special friends and his family, and the real one, the true one, the secret one, which is never known to anyone except to himself alone, hidden only God knows where.” ― James Clavell, Shōgun
Does this mean that we should lie and deceive? Certainly not. But I believe there is value in understanding and negotiating the relationship between our three hearts. What a tiring activity! The Doctor has two, and we mere mortals have to weigh all three. It is little wonder why many people often prefer the one. I did not use to think that way: plenty of things used to be clearly black and white for me. In that sense I often acted, felt, and believed reality existed purely on the surface—how niave I was! It was only when I got older that I realised how untenable that paradigm was.
Most of what people are lies beneath. Credits: Mutomorro.com
2024 was a more positive year than 2023 for me—and hopefully, that remains an upward trend. At the start of the year, I decided to do an annual tarot reading for fun (for what it’s worth, I’m religiously agnostic though leaning Christian). In that hour, I took many notes and asked many questions: and I’m genuinely surprised that many of the tarot’s predictions are largely contextually accurate. One thing the tarot master said: ‘This is a good year for sowing good seeds' made me emotional, and that line stuck with me throughout the year. The old me would have discounted it, but here I am trusting the process into 2025.
Posts will resume in 2025 when the school term starts and all the hullabaloo of Orientation kicks in. Until then, I wish all (18!) of my subscribers and your families a Merry Christmas/Happy Hanukkah and a peaceful New Year. Thank you for reading this far, and keep being the brightest star for others.