Inspiring Imitation

A sibling of mine was just clearing out old rubbish in the room, and suddenly handed over to me a stack of yellowed foolscape paper I recognised as a few of my composition written at CHS.

The unexpected confession that came along was that studying my compositions had dramatically improved my sibling's performance in English during high school, from an average level to topping the whole cohort! That is either dramatic, or dramatised. Either way, I am truly flattered.

And this just suddenly reminded me of a funny experience I had about two years ago, when I met YL a high school classmate, now a successful investment banker: it was a prata shop at Upper Thomson, and a brief chancing upon each other gave us a few minutes to catch up.

It was then that he actually revealed to me how he had secretly used my compositions to prepare for his O levels English. I was stunned by that revelation, coming from a guy I always admired for his out of the box attitude and incredible intelligence.

It was like a joke to me, for me to have been a source of contribution, preparation or even inspiration to someone like him. It is both a strange and familiar feeling to be inspiring another person. Yet I never thought much about what I wrote. This is like a posthumorous honour, except I'm still very much alive... thank God! Would you not feel flattered by people who kept references or copies of your writings, in preparation to excel for their exams? I wonder what my English teacher would think of this.

Often being surrounded by talented and prodigious cohorts, I did not think that my composition was ever extraordinary or worth mentioning. I also did not care about handing my work in, until I felt it was ready! Haha... hence, many a time, I submitted my essay late by a few days (my headshaking monitor always had to give me his condescending trademark headshaking) and my teacher always had to penalise me by discounting my essay score.

My best friend always felt glad that, after the penalty, my essays still scored reasonably ok (and accordingly, often still beating my monitor...) But with all honesty, the score did not matter to me; neither did the approval (or disapproval) of my monitor concern me.

I just did not write for scores or nods.

If you must judge... yes, I was a very problematic student.