Chasin' Paper

I have now been living in Singapore for almost a month, and I’ve learned a few things.  First and foremost, air conditioning is the greatest invention since the printing press.  Second, since geckos eat mosquitos and spiders, they are your best friends and you should always welcome them, even if they insist on lurking in your bathroom at night, then leap into violent motion just as you lift your tired eyes to look in the mirror.

Yes, I’ve been picking up life lessons left and right.  I’ve also spent the last week at my school, Catholic Junior College, learning the ins and outs of teaching in Singapore.  Although I’m not teaching classes yet (the students are in their exam period leading up to the end of the year in December), my Head of Department was kind enough to entrust me with a task of vital importance to the direction of the College as a whole: paperwork.

Last Friday, I received a stack of five hundred detailed reports on students’ extra-curricular activities.  Since these reports go out to parents, the school needs teachers with a good handle on English grammar to correct them.  Determined to make a good first impression, I approached the reports with the dedication of a sheepdog and the fastidiousness of a hairdresser, ready to herd errant clauses and snip any modifiers dangling where they weren’t wanted.

My zeal lasted about five minutes.  The exhaustive inventory of my future students’ contributions to society was riddled with complicated sentence structures that were invariably wrong, yet stubbornly defied my efforts to fix them.  Furthermore, it was clear that most of the reports had been adapted from a single template, because I corrected virtually identical sentences literally hundreds of times.

I even began labeling the recurring grammar mistakes in my mind.  In fact, some of them I came to despise in a deeply personal and possibly unprofessional way.

My inner monologue went something like this:  “I hate you, Subject-Verb Disagreement in Stock Sentence #3 About Community Service in Bangladesh!  I want to take you out behind the garbage dump in a burlap sack and beat you with a stick!”

Mike crosses out two words with his red pen, then snorts angrily and crosses them out again.  He takes up the next paper on the stack in front of him.  Two seconds later…

“Go die in a hole, Incorrect Preposition in Stock Sentence #5 About the Mathematical Society!  Your mother was a superfluous semicolon and your father reeked of split infinitives!”

Grading these reports did more than threaten my sanity and raise my blood pressure, however; it taught me that what I hate, what I despise more than almost anything in the world, is an overachiever.  Not for me the Student Council Vice-President who plays three instruments and dedicates his every weekend to rebuilding orphanages in Cambodia.  The extra-curricular report for a child like that (let’s call him Mervin) is likely to be a full page, single-spaced, with more sentences in need of editing than there are grains of sand in the desert.

But the rare slacker, now… there was a true blessing.  Every now and again, though not often enough, I would take up a new report, only to find one short, sweet sentence: “This page is intentionally left blank as the student did not meet the participation requirements.”

“Yes!” I exclaim, overcome by a rush of morally questionable joy.  “Bless you, child!  The record of your utter lack of contribution to your school or your community is both beautifully concise and grammatically flawless.  Oh, well done!”

...I realize that my post thus far has basically been one long complaint.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m still extremely excited for this job.  As an example, I sat in on a class today led by a veteran Lit teacher from Ireland, and afterward I was raring to go.  David is everything I want to be as a teacher: he recited critical passages from Othello in a booming voice, brandished a broom handle to portray Iago trying to kill his wife, and translated the Shakespearean word “fie” into its closest Singaporean equivalent: “Wha’ la?!”  I swear, I wouldn’t have been surprised if David’s hair – which is white and wispy – puffed out like Einstein’s, struck not by lightning, but by the sheer static force of his academic fervor.

Alas, I am not yet able to impress upon Singapore’s youth the brilliance of Shakespeare or Dickinson.  What I can do, for the moment, is complain about paperwork.  But I’m in good company, for my fellow teachers assure me that complaining is the national sport of Singapore, and Singapore’s teachers are its Olympic athletes.

In the end, although I would like to get up in front of a class, the paperwork really isn’t that bad.  At least it makes me feel like I’m doing something to earn my salary.  As the American rapper and venerable wordsmith Plies says in his song, “I Chase Paper”:

All I do is paper chase

Ion’t got time, I can’t wait,

‘Cause I need millions on my plate!

My paper may be lined and perforated instead of green and covered with dead presidents, but at least I’ve got a lot of it on my plate!