Economies of Scale

I went for course on Wednesday to find a shred of memory being recalled. Mind you, there was nothing that I could have thought would stir me up in this particular course as it was on suicide intervention. However, I just had to meet my JC economics tutor there...

I remember resolving to be the most piah student in JC because:
a) The JC that i wanted to go to refused to let me in though I think i satisfied their criteria,
b) I wanted to study Psychology in NUS so i better work hard,
c) I dunno... maybe i wanted to re-create the joy i felt when i got my "O" Level results...

So anyway, to cut the long story short, I was the super piah student in my class and so in my "piahness", I went to do up my own notes for Economics because:
a) I wanted to be piah,
b) I realised from "O" Levels that I remembered better when i wrote my own notes,
c) It was a subject I knew close to nothing about.

This Econs tutor was known for his high standards of teachings as many in his class during the first 3 months would know. So in one of the first few classes while he was asking us some questions, I surreptiously took out my home-made notes to try to find the answer... I was caught of course and while he perused my notes, I was thinking of all the worst case scenarios (e.g. pointing out the wrong theories that I've copied down and then lecturing me about it, etc). However, he smiled and told me to just keep it up.

From that day on, I was treated as the owl in class: the teacher's pet who supposedly knows it all. Any questions my classmates had no answer to, I had to answer them. And if on any occasion I were to say i have no idea, he would shake his head sadly and say, "Even *** dunno..." and proceed to give us a lecture of how to answer that question. You have no idea how many times I had to smoke out some answers and luckily, they were also correct, though not necessarily the one he wanted...

He even made me go to another tutor's class to teach them how to do MCQ when I only passed that test with a few marks only... So humiliating! It didn't help that I knew people in that class... I just felt like digging a hole and jumping in!

Yups, my class had to be on our toes whenever econs tutorial came round coz there were so many impossibly difficult questions to answer. It was a miracle that none of us suffered from a nervous breakdown then...

So, anyway, the chance encounter on Wednesday brought me down memory lane and it also kind of made everything go full circle... Coz he said this to me when I asked him what he was doing at such a course: "I'm no longer so strict with my class nowadays, have to be more gentle with them." Heh... I guess he recognised that he was really a slave driver then... The reply I gave him was: "Well, you were just trying to do your best to teach us ma..."

And it was true.

I was appreciative of the hard work he made us do as that brought me to understand that I reap what I sow. My friendships with people suffered when in JC. I was so focused on getting good results that I almost let my friendships just fade away.

Yups, I understood that results were not everything. So I spent more time with people in University and that really made me feel so much more alive. It also helped me to see that commerce subjects were just not my cup of tea. So... yeah...