Daily Love #2 - Engrisssh Veli Good

BUMMER! COWDUNG! BULLOCKS!

You know the feeling when you say you’d earn a million dollars today and find yourself just earning 1 cent today?

I kinda feel that way now. It’s already 4PM. The number of posts that I have written for SteemIt so far is 1. I spent 2 hours writing 1 post. The goal was to get in 10 posts today. I think that is a tall order. Something which is great of course! But on this trajectory, I will take 20 hours to do 10 posts! Like being a billionaire, flying in the sky with wings. Going to heaven even. I think I will have to just keep working my way up to the 10 posts. I was thinking of getting 20 posts up a day. But I AM NOT GIVING UP. This is just the start. I hope you are not panting out of exhaustion looking at the numbers I just put down. I am sorry if I did.

Today is officially 1 week after I have joined Steemit. I actually got signed up like 1 month ago. But I was so busy with school work that I managed to only explore SteemIt after finally submitting my school assignment. That very day, I didn’t sleep and decided that maybe blogging was a good idea to keep me awake. It was 10AM that I submitted my work. There was 5 hours to kill before I saw my counsellor. I had such a good time writing on SteemIt, it felt like 5 hours of just like 5 minutes. OK. 50 minutes would be a better number.

I am going to be doing lots of stuff here on Steemit. The idea is to make this place into my second home. You see, I am a writer. I have been struggling to find my footing in the writing world. I wrote blog posts. There were views. But then I never earned a dime. Just little over yesterday, my friend @orangila introduced me to SteemIt and I’m so happy that he did.

This is a very good platform for us writers to do what we do and get paid for it. No matter how much comes in, it doesn’t really matter. I will keep building up my posts and keep writing away.

I have been writing okay all my life. At the age of 9, my grammar had already been more or less formed. I had a really good teacher called Mrs. Tan. She made me into a proper well mannered person.

Every weekend on a Saturday and Sunday since the age of 7 to 12, I have been going for English tuition after leaving St. Christopher International School to move to a local government Chinese primary school, name Penang Chinese Girls Primary School. It is a girl’s school, yet I am a boy? When the school was founded, it was a girl’s school. For some reason, they chose to preserve history and when boys were accepted, they didn’t rename the school. The secondary school of my primary school is only girls. But that is another story.

Back to Mrs. Tan. Mrs. Tan was my teacher for my last year in St. Christopher’s. All my good friends left and went for tuition at her home, which we climbed 4 stories to get to her apartment. She has been my English teacher for so long, it felt like she taught me all my English. She’ll drill us since 7 with present tense, past tense and future tense. Every time we go for class, we’d write this.

Today is Saturday. Yesterday was Friday. Tomorrow will be Sunday.

Every single time we do our writing exercises, we’ll start with that.

She was the teacher that also introduced us to the Malay language. The first words we learnt were lelaki and perempuan. Boy and girl. I think I like Malay because of how she taught us. It was naturally easy to pick up as the language also uses the full English alphabet set.

Mrs. Tan would help us with comprehension and spelling. I remember spelling sometimes was more difficult than I can remember. I usually did well. But I would still have ‘diarrhoea’ or ‘spectator’ wrong. She asked us to write words 10 times for corrections. We had a vocabulary book and we had quizzes and fun English trivia to work with. We sometimes had to rearrange words. She’ll give us the meaning and we'll guess the word. It was fun.

She also gave us food every time. A cup of water and some biscuits.

“Please may I have some water, Mrs. Tan?”

“Thank you, Mrs. Tan.”

That’s the standard stuff we have to say, or else we would never get anything to drink or eat.

I think my manners started from there.

No matter how early I woke up, I would always be the last to arrive at Mrs Tan’s class.

She’d always tease saying, “Last night, you were out stealing chickens?”

I think she loved to see my blank face when I didn’t know what she was talking about. That’s because she asked that question almost every day.

She marked our essays as early as we were 8. She’d divide our score to Grammar, Vocabulary, and something else I forgot. I’d get A for all of them. I always loved seeing that A alphabet after marking.

In my government school, I was dreading my Chinese classes. They were so tough. We only started English classes when we were 9 years old. That was when we just started learning basic words. I would get 100 every single time. Then I failed to get 100 that very one time for my final exam and I’ll never forget how sad and how much I cried because of it. People came looking at me to see why I was crying…

It was the final exam and we had to arrange words according to alphabetical order. For your information, arranging words according to alphabetical order was very new. I never tried that before in my life till that very year. I arranged 2 words wrongly. Both started with the same alphabet. But when both are the same, the next alphabet needs to be taken into consideration. I put two words in the wrong place and got like a 95.

I cried my heart out not getting 100 marks.

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