Tribute to Mr Lee Hoong Yoong

Crap. I went to TPJC.net and then I saw that nerdy display pic of Mr Lee, and then I thought of Mr Lee himself. And then I burst out laughing. What a character!

I was imagining him teaching cosmology in Physics lesson, time travel and all that stuff when he should really be teaching electromagnetism or Newton or something like that. And then he wouldn't care if we did Mathematics or Chemistry in his lesson. Sometimes he would even discuss with us. And he wouldn't care if Pey Yuan didn't attend his lessons, or the fact that he can hardly command the attention of 1/10 of the class, 1/10 of the time. One word to describe Mr Lee: eccentric. Yet I sincerely believe we need more of these kind of teachers who can inspire learning beyond grades. Singapore students care too much about grades. I remember writing a message to him when I was in tpjc, requesting that he start to teach us tutorials according to the A level topics rather than randomly discussing Physics that are outside the textbook.

I must admit I was wrong, and we need more of these kind of teachers. Maybe not overly eccentric, but at least able to inspire learning of the natural world, rather than trying to put an 'A' on our certificates. Mr Lee, til today still strikes me as a teacher who has a funny way of talking and explaining, "Yah, yah, yah" he would say, as he nods his head comically.

And then I recalled Jianyong, who asked, out of the blue one day, 'Mr Lee, are you married?' to which Mr Lee replied, "Ahh...this question, not important.."

And then he turned our attention to Physics.