Seasons in the Sun

Happy belated National day... I'm not a big fan of the government but the ideal of a nation deserves at least some mention no? :D Of course it could be argued that the government is the one that fosters the ideal of a nation (as per phil) but I doubt the government had much to do with the actual land itself (except for certain parts of the island). Anyway, I digress. Happy National Day! (NDP is stupid though. Waste of taxpayers money. Just have a holiday and give the money spent for National Day back to us as tax cuts.) I wouldn't even go into the ERF and other monetary incentives that usually almost happen co-incidentally before elections. To the main subject of this blog post then. I was just pressing forward on my I-Tunes mp3 player on my computer when it played the original Terry Jacks - Seasons in the Sun, and boy did it brought back memories of secondary school. Some of you may not know but I hated my secondary school for it being extremely retarded and the lies about swimming pools which never materialised. But there was one teacher (well 2) but today is just about Miss Tan, who was my English teacher in sec 2? Or 3. She was also in-charge of the library and brought me and other librarians (I wasn't one though; she just wanted me to pick out books for her cos she knew how much books I read the library, I think) Anyway, she had a really cool way of teaching English that was really different from any other lessons I had in school. (let me tell you how I did chemistry practical another time :D) She would bring us to the audio room and used music to teach us English and sentence structure. I think she got abit fustrated with me cos I used to answer her questions by saying it sounds right. I dunno, maybe I have an instinct for using grammar and stuff. I never really learnt past perfect, past tense, past continuous and whatnots. Which I am paying for it now cos my lecturer is pretty particular about sentence structure for radio broadcasts. Argh. Her lessons were really fun. We had the lyrics to the songs like Seasons in the Sun, Tell Laura I Love Her, Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree, 25 Minutes. I can't remember more though. :D I'm sure there was one or two more I missed. We sang along and learnt the stories of the songs and she would then explain the sentence structure and stuff. It really gave me the inspiration to use songs for my compositions (which scored pretty well (like the top in class) wahahaha). Every composition for my classes would see me sitting in my chair for 15 minutes digging through my head for a song that would fit the topic, then using the essence of the song into the story, which tended to be sappy love stories (Due to the fact the 90s had tons of sappy love ballads ok...). Miss Tan Lye Hwa, thanks for everything. I still recall the pen you gave us (cos we were like the worst class, which is another story for another time) that told us, "Even eagles need a push". I hope u're still teaching and inspiring a new lot of students that people have condemned. I'll try to visit when I'm back in Singapore to thank you personally (if u still remember me that is :D I hope you do, but that's just my vanity/ego speaking). Cheers~