I attended the CGL Alumnae, International Cultural Night year 2018 last year. I am proudly a student of Convent Green Lane (CGL) where I graduated many years ago.
A special mention of my teacher, Mrs. Tan Get Joo, who was my Chemistry teacher during my highschool days for she told me about this event and gave me ticket to access the event. Thank you so much. Seeing her again, so many years after leaving school, I had some kind of fondness towards her. Instead of feeling like her student, I felt like she was my friend regardless of our age gap. Back then when you were in highschool, there’s some kind of feeling like you need to respect your teacher because of their authority and some teachers like to instill fear, making the gap between teacher and student even bigger. Somehow after leaving school for so many years and having experienced the many pleasant and unpleasant things in the world, I don’t feel that gap between my teacher and I anymore. I still have respect for her, but not because I need to but because I want to. Being in a room with all the guests older than me, I don’t feel small at all and instead I feel we are all mutually equal.
Mrs. Tan was also my Rangers teacher. I was in an all girls school and being in a society like this is one of the ways we were exposed to the outside world and have access to the boys school. She was fair enough where she lectured us if some girls were out of line and misbehaving with the presence of the other gender, yet she was lenient to let us interact and have fun with them. Rangers activities also involved a lot of types events, event preparations, life skills training and contributing to charitable causes. It also involved a lot of performances especially dancing which we prepare to perform at our own troop hosted gatherings, to represent our school and perform at other troops’ events or very rarely to compete in a dance competition. This is the part I like a lot because I’ll always join to dance and as time went by, I was choreographing for the dances. Perhaps this is why I have a certain fondness for Mrs. Tan because she gave us the platform through Girl Guides and then becoming a Ranger, to have the chance to enhance our artistic side. She probably saw my progress in dancing more than my parents would know about me being able to dance.
I probably paid more attention to her when she was talking during Rangers than when she was speaking in class during Chemistry. Recently I heard the saying “everyone who studied Chemistry would have heard of the saying likes dissolves like”. I’ve never heard of it before in class. Apologies to you, Mrs. Tan if you did say it but I really didn’t hear it in class before. Can’t help it that we were forced to study in Bahasa Melayu in school, which would then directly translate to “suka menghapuskan suka” or something like that, which would not make sense at all. 😄 If in English, then it means an example like water dissolves the like which is water or oil dissolves oil, which makes sense but the saying of “like dissolves like” during Chemistry class, I didn’t hear that before. It’s only now that I started making my own balm, salve and products for my skin that I am hearing these terms. Maybe I found that I didn’t have a need for Chemistry back then and was just one of those forced subjects that we needed to take, which at times I find our school studies were a waste of time, really. We weren’t allowed to choose our own subjects in school. Not cool.
Apart from that, the extra-curriculur activities and sports were my favourite in school. That’s the beauty of our school, CGL. It allowed us to not only gain knowledge academically but also to let us have the chance to discover our artistic talents like dancing, singing, acting, emceeing, performing and in sports.
Anyway, I made a video about the Alumnae event I attended. Here it is and enjoy watching :