Did I really enjoy going to sekolah kebangsaan?

By admin-s On Nov 21, 2014

(TMI) – The essay was about a monkey who had to climb a banana tree to get himself a banana. It had four paragraphs, each paragraph had two sentences and each sentence had around five words.

I was twelve years old and attending a public junior high school in New York City. It was a social studies class and the teacher was one Mr Nelson.

My classmates and I entered the classroom and Mr Nelson had a copy of the day’s New York Times for each and everyone of us.

It was the year when President George Bush Sr and the United States declared the first Gulf War against Iraq after Saddam Hussein invaded neighbouring Kuwait.

Mr Nelson gave us twenty minutes to read the story about the war on the front page of the newspaper. He even taught us how to handle and fold a broadsheet!

Once we were done, we were told that we could ask any question we wanted about the story we had just read and about the war. Anything at all.

We started with basic questions like why the US had declared war with Iraq and why Saddam Hussein had sent his troops into Kuwait.

Then we went on to have a lengthy discussion on whether any of us were actually in agreement or disagreement with the decision of the US to declare war with Iraq.

The year before that, I was in sixth grade at a public elementary school, also in New York City, and literary discussions were held in class with our teacher Mrs Buckley on a weekly basis.

We would read popular Jack London novels such as White Fang and then discuss assigned chapters every week.

My classmates and I would discuss how we felt about the characters, the story and how it related to our own lives, and even the author, with Mrs Buckley guiding us along.

I loved going to school.

Then my family and I came back to Malaysia. I went to a public secondary school. I was fifteen and I remember one of the classes I attended required us to write a summary of an essay.

The essay was about a monkey who had to climb a banana tree to get himself a banana. It had four paragraphs, each paragraph had two sentences and each sentence had around five words.

I knew then what the tone of the rest of my compulsory education years was going to be. Haha! But I’m being overly sarcastic here.

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