Teaching Among the Giants

by Bob Lynn,
a Peace Corps teacher

In early 1963, I was thinking that I needed to reconsider my career choice. I was at that time a graduate student in English at Yale University, preparing to teach literature for the rest of my life, and I began to think, “Is my whole career going to be just like graduate school? If so, I need to jump ship”. As an undergraduate, I’d had a wonderful time studying literature. You read masses and masses of the best works of the best writers, you and your classmates talk about all the things you’re reading, and then you write papers that say (you hope) deep things about life, literature, and wisdom in general. Ah, but that was undergraduate work. In graduate school, I’d found, you kept on reading, but now you filled in your knowledge by spending your time on the very minor works of major writers, or sometimes on the major works of very minor writers. And instead of tackling The Big Issues of Life, you wrote papers on tiny bite-size issues to show your professors that you were ready to be a “scholar”.Part of the trouble was that I was adjusting to being mole-like scholar, and I could really imagine myself becoming perfectly happy to be a dusty, safe professor wrapped in tweeds and tenure. So I figured it was time for a break. The biggest break I could see at the time was joining the Peace Corps, the volunteer service based in part on the British V.S.O. (Voluntary Service Overseas) that also had a New Zealand counterpart called Voluntary Service Abroad.

I applied to the Peace Corps in March 1963 and was sent a letter in April asking me to report for training for service in Gabon, I think – or perhaps it was Togo. My training was to start in the middle of May.Very, very fortunately, I had a job teaching summer school for that summer, and I couldn’t get out of it. I asked the Peace Corps to take me off that assignment, explained why, and more or less begged them not to strike my name off their list, but to give me another chance.And that’s how I ended up being invited to report for training that October, and of course how I ended up in Sarawak, a place that I certainly knew even less about than Gabon or Togo.

My next lucky break came in Kuching, where the Education Office or whatever it was called then told me I was being sent to Tanjong Lobang School. I heard good things about Tanjong Lobang in Kuching, but of course I had no idea, when the Malaysia Airways Dakota hopped up the coast in late January, 1964 and dropped me off in the midst of Shell-land in Lutong, that this was going to be the most pleasant teaching experience of my life. I’ve had a couple of jobs that stretched me more, especially a job in the Singapore Civil Service that was far out of my usual range and kept me learning new things every day, but I’ve never had a more enjoyable time in a job.Many of the ex-Tanjong students who have written recently have said very kind things about the teachers there, so now it’s time for a teacher to say kind – but quite true – things about the students. 

In my view, and this is the view of all the teachers from that era that I know, the outstanding thing about teaching at TLS was the students, from the cheery little Form 1 kids whom Robert Nicholl used to refer to as “the tiny tots” to the generally noisy strong personalities of Form 6. The most obvious thing one can say about those Sixth Formers is that they were very bright. Think a bit about the winnowing process that occurred in Sarawak in the 50s and 60s, the process through which students worked their way up to the top forms. Many Sarawakians of school age in the 40s and 50s, of course, never had a chance to attend school. Of those who did have a chance and who completed Primary 6, roughly two thirds were dropped at that point. Of the one-third who entered Form 1, two-thirds were dropped after the Sarawak Junior. I don’t know for sure how many moved from School Certificate classes into Form Six, but I’ve always understood it to be closer to one-quarter than one-third.Do the calculations and you’ll find that if you were a Form Six student anywhere in Sarawak in those days, you were one of the top three or four percent of those who had started school so

many years before. Now of course it’s true that some of those who never even entered school may have been much more intelligent than any Tanjong students, and it’s also true that the ability to pass examinations and get promoted to a higher form isn’t the only ability one needs in life.Still, for teachers it was just heaven to be surrounded by so many very bright kids, all of whom had already learned the skills and attitudes that students need to have if they’re to succeed. Sometimes these splendid students were too good, at least for me. My most challenging class in my first year at TLS was General Paper, the make-or-break paper that tested for good writing skills, but also for clear and sophisticated thinking. Students in a writing course need above all things to write, so I started off having my students write an essay of about 500 words each week. There were lots of things we needed to do in class, so I had them write those essays as homework. Their 

essays were remarkably good, so good in fact that I was quite confident no examiner would ever fail anyone in the class. But then came the mid-year school exams, and I was shocked. Their writing was terrible! They would all pass their individual papers in other subjects, but they would fail GP and thus fail to get their precious HSC --and it would be all my fault!

Fortunately, they still had a year and a half before they faced the dread exam, so I had time to investigate a bit and wake up to the actual problem. As it turned out, the problem was simply that these students worked too hard. Quite unlike American students I had known, these kids really pushed themselves.

I’d given them something to write, so by golly they tried to come into class with something worth reading. I have no idea how many hours those students spent writing the homework essays I’d assigned, but it must have been about five times the time I thought they would put into the task. But of course the ability to write beautifully through several revisions, dictionary in hand, is quite different from the ability to impress an examiner by whipping off a good paper in something less than an hour, so I’d just been wasting their time. From then on, for my remaining three and a half years at TLS, all GP essay-writing in my classes was done in class under exam conditions, and they always were given, as they would be given later in the examination itself, six choices of essay topics so that each student could develop a sense of what sorts of questions worked well for him or her and what sorts didn’t. With that sort of preparation they began to produce essays that would warm the heart of any examiner and I continued to learn that these students were even better than I’d realized when I first encountered them.

So Tanjongers, not only in Form Six but throughout the school, were bright, and that made life very pleasant for their teachers. It also made life better for the students as a whole, of course. I’ve spent some time in third-rate educational institutions, and a lot of time in elite ones, and I can guarantee that a bright student benefits much more from being around other bright students than he or she does from spending a few hours a week with bright and capable teachers. Really capable students educate and challenge each other, and teachers aim higher and teach better when they’re stimulated by their students. What’s more, the energy of students like those at Tanjong generally spills over into all sorts of non-academic pursuits, so the place always seemed to be a hive of activity ranging from flute-playing and trying to get mice to thread their way through a maze to seining, weight-lifting and boat-building.

For a couple of years, the last part of most lunch periods featured an immensely noisy percussion band operating out of an upstairs classroom next to the library. As far as I know, the students at St. Thomas and St. Joseph, the other two secondary schools in Sarawak that had Sixth Forms in those days, were just as bright as Tanjong kids. I have a hunch, though, that the Tanjong kids had another secret weapon: they were nicer. Why were they nicer? I think the answer is that Tanjongers were poorer than those in the well-established Kuching schools, and that they were lucky enough, if poverty is ever a piece of good fortune, to be poor in a place and at a time when being poor was not likely to crush one’s spirit. I’ve recently been reading descriptions by Mabel Chiew and Henry

Lian of their earliest months at TLS. They and other members of the ex-Tanjong Google Group have emphasized time and again that money was scarce for them, both in their homes and while they were at Tanjong. Saving fifty cents or a dollar by denying oneself a luxury really made a difference to most Tanjongers. Finding a way of earning five dollars was a huge victory. Henry has pointed out that being poor was something that bumis and Chinese shared, a common ground for nearly all boarders, as well as for most day scholars. If you’re going to be poor, it’s a good idea to get yourself born in a place where you’re not seeing lots of rich people lording it over you, you’re not angry at the corruption and nepotism of the rich, and envy is not one of your chief emotions. Sarawak in general, and even the town of Miri, qualified as that sort of place in the 1960's.

There were very, very few people in Miri who were truly rich, and people in the middle class were not competing to display their good fortune. I can’t recall a single house that could remotely be described as a palace or as a temple dedicated to the pride of its owner. One could see people who were doing well, of course, but that was probably more of a stimulus to the Tanjong students of that time than a cause of resentment. My impression was that very few Tanjongers had clear ideas about what sort of career they wanted to get into – and of course that was a very sensible thing, since so much depended on what scholarship opportunities might come along – but all knew that it was reasonable to expect that their education would move them into the middle, or even the upper-middle class, and what more could one hope for?If you have a group of very bright kids who aren’t used to a pampered life, if those kids are generally inclined to be nice to one another, if they don’t have any reason to hold major grudges against the

society around them, and if they have good reason to be optimistic about their personal futures, of course they’re going to form a school community that any teacher would love.Terrible teachers and administrators might be able, in a year or two, to ruin the morale of kids like those at Tanjong, but fortunately the teachers and administrators in the 60s were adequate. Some of the former students writing recently have seemed to be remembering a staff that was superb, but I think they’re getting carried away by their generally happy memories of the school as a whole. For the years when I was there, I’d say the staff was about what teaching staffs everywhere tend to be. That is, we always had a reasonable number of excellent teachers, and we always had some teachers who were merely adequate, as well as some who were inadequate. It’s not even quite true that every teacher loved the school and its students. One, a Kiwi, decided that the syllabus laid out for Fifth

Form chemistry students didn’t really expose students to the spirit of science, so she spent weeks and weeks teaching totally off the syllabus, leading her students through the mysteries of the chemistry of a candle flame.  Her students, worried about passing their School Cert exams, were to say the least unenthusiastic, and after one term the teacher took off for Sabah. Her replacement, if I have my dates right, was Chen Cheng Mei, one of Tanjong’s great teachers in my estimation, so things worked out very well in the end. Another teacher, a Canadian, stayed for even less time. His time at Tanjong was so short that I can’t even recall what he was supposed to be teaching, but he stays in my memory because he essentially stole all the PWD furniture in the house he was living in. It was all crated up and sent home with his other belongings, so at least he gets high marks for audacity. Having mentioned Chen Cheng Mei, i'd love to

spend a few paragraphs listing and reminiscing about all the outstanding teachers I knew at Tanjong, but I’d certainly forget someone and then feel guilty for the rest of my life. My point, though, is that we were a reasonably good staff, but not the giants that some former students seem to remember. The students, taken as a whole, had far more giants among them than the staff ever did, and every former teacher at the school remembers the Tanjong students well and knows how lucky he or she was to spend a few years among them.