Teacher Teacher

When I was in Primary One, my secret pleasure would was craning my neck to look at the teacher's desk, watching her red pen gracefully skimming a page of handwriting and putting check marks,crosses and stars where appropriate. My seven-year-old pigtailed self thought that it indeed must be wonderful to have such a task.


Throughout my younger years, I recalled when my cikgu matematik commanded us to pull out our buku congak. She would then rattle off some arithmetic problems and making us quickly scribble the answer in our books after working it out in our head. Afterward, I waited with abated breath, seeing whether she would decide to collect our books, to mark it herself, or announce, "Tukar buku, cikgu beri jawapan, tanda sendiri!", and I would delight when she said the latter and let us mark the answers.


Fast forward to the present, and here I am, making a quick run to Walmart before closing time because my red pen is out of ink, picking up a soy latte to keep awake to finish marking these horribly wrongly answered quizzes, when I can be spending my time, doing something much more worthwhile (like my homework assignment or watching Grey's Anatomy).