During lunch today, I was sitting next to my sisters, watching a documentary on elephants on Animal Planet
Suddenly, Laura turned to me and said "Jie, do you know that Mr. Tan Teck Joo passed away already?"
It took a while for the reality of losing a very dear teacher to sink in
I shouted "WHAAAT!!!", really loudly, both my sisters blinked the moment they saw my reaction to the news
Apparently he passed away on Monday, due to nose cancer
Mr. Tan was never one of the really far-famed teachers in St. David's
Unlike the ever popular and dearly loved Puan Susan Koh who taught us English; Mr. Sasi who will always be the boys' favourite PJ teacher for his coolness; Puan Tan Siow Pin who is probably the most lenient Moral teacher in the school
Or even the teachers who were famous for mostly the wrong reasons like Mr. Low Sin Kee who taught the afternoon session Form One students Geography way back in 2001 (I still remember how he used to sit on our desks); Miss Shik Geok Keng who taunted the girls at every chance she could get; Puan Low (née Neo) our Chemistry teacher who probably has the most nicknames given by the students of St. David's; Miss Hei who constantly picks her favourite students here and there; Miss Nellie Wee who drove the students cuckoo nuts (I remember oh so vividly when the boys in our class used to pray day and night that she would retire earlier, well believe it or not, she is retired!) or even the ever infamous Puan Ho Yin Peng who still feed the students with her daily "interesting jokes"
Mr. Tan Teck Joo was the subdued one who did his job properly without any complains from the students
He was the one with the nice wife (unlike poor Mr. Michael Chong who probably has to listen to his wife's stories all the time) and pretty little daughter
Mr. Tan and his wife were like, the Brad and Angelina?
Not the whole saving the world thing, but the perfect couple thing
One thing though, I did not do a very good job as his student
He was very lenient, and I was always seated at the front of the class (all the freakin' time!), and since he pitied me that I had to go to tuition up til 9pm without even getting home since early in the morning, he let me sleep in his class!
And yet he wondered if I could pass my PMR Math (the subject he taught me)
Months later, I told him I got an A for Math, you should have seen his reaction, he was clearly surprised
Since I did almost none of the homework that he gave, and listened close to less than 20% of what he explained in class
But still, if there's one thing I could remember him by, would be his compassion and dedication towards his students
Anyway, I just updated St. David's Wikipedia on School Captains, starting from our year (Ching Yang) onwards

With the help of Laura of course =)

Update: Guess what magik Miss Shik did again? She just forced my sister to bring back some CPU that contains stuff on the school magazine, and she was like, "I want it by today!!", which is super typical of her really. So my sister asked my dad for help and drove her everywhere til she managed to get hold of the CPU. My sister went back to school and Miss Shik gave that typical smile of hers that we all know very well and went like, "Waah... you brought it back ah!". Seriously she makes me want to get married