my first batch of students

this was my form class in my first year of teaching. i am not in the picture. i inherited the class from mr lee ah leng (seated 5th from left , next to the principal, the late mr wong kai ping) when i joined the school as a trainee teacher in may 1968. actually, when i first joined the school, the principal was the late mr cheong pak low.

this class was the top secondary three class in the school and the students in the picture should be between 55 and 57 years old. yes, i was about two years older than the oldest student in my class. i remember an incident during a casual outing with some of these boys. we were on a public bus; the conductor issued me a concession ticket but demanded full fare from one my bigger students.

in those days, you were thrown into the deep end right away. i reported for work even before i had received any form of formal teacher training. most of us attended training on a part-time basis. we worked (taught) in the morning and attended training in the afternoon or vice versa. it was really tough trying to follow the lectures; many a times some of us ended up dozing off in our training class.

of my former students, i have lost contact with most of them. i met doreen yip briefly when she was the vice-principal of raffles institution. the other student i have met is kwek leong and his wife (who was also my student). they bought a condominium unit at anchor point. i met him when i visited my brother-in-law who also had a unit there.