Marsha Maung:: Freelance graphic designer and writer

It continues to bug me, despite my best efforts, that my kids are not avid readers. It bugs me BIG time! How come, how come, how come? You see, ever since I was very young, I’ve always read a lot and if you can’t find me, it’s because I am hiding somewhere reading my novels at high speed fantasizing and immersed in my own world of princes and princesses, thanks to a heavy dose of Enid Blyton. I sincerely believed that, at one point in time, if I wished hard enough, I could actually make a bed fly and whoosh around. I honestly thought that goblins and fairies DID exist. Oh, the countless times I sat outside in the wee hours of the morning looking out of the window wondering if a fairy was slumbering under closed flower petals.

 

And yet, why oh why can’t my children find the same joy I did when I was a kid.

 

It seems that Joshua (in particular) is a very visual person. Ask him to sketch something out and he would, without much hesitation, ink out a picture of whatever it is that you’ve just mentioned – be it flying dragons or triceratops-robot-cars, whatever! He’s very cartoon-ish in his drawing as well – with those tell-tale signs of clouds behind someone who is running very fast, and bubbles around wrongly-spelt words to show that the character is thinking or talking.

 

English. A very funny language indeed. With Chinese, you recognize the character once and for all – and that’s that. No two ways about it. With Bahasa Melayu (Malaysia’s national language), B-A is Ba (as in goat and sheep Baa Baa), P-U is Poo, T-O  is Toe…etc. But with English, it’s a little bit more different.

 

You see, it’s hard to explain to a kid how come things are different all the time. Sometimes you have double Ts and sometimes not. sometimes you need two Ss and sometimes you don’t. sometimes Chair and Mare rhymes but they are not spelt the same. How come you add a T at the end of ‘Go’ and it’s not ‘Goat’. This is the problem I have with tutoring Joshua.

 

It’s sad because, as a writer, I am thinking to myself, ‘Teaching my own kids to read and write in English should be a breeze because I am like such a PRO (Cough! Cough!), right?’ PRO-fectly wrong. I am not a PRO, of course, because I make so many mistakes in my grammar and writing that I wince, sometimes, after writing some stuff for my clients. I am particularly bad with punctuations and I think it will be a challenge in the future if I decide to pursue this tutoring thing with my own kids. I am not the best English teacher on the planet – no, wait. I am not teacher material – period.

 

Or maybe I am a good teacher (because I used to tutor other kids and did a credible job at that) but just not to my own kids.

 

Or maybe it’s best that I just teach whatever I DON’T like or have NO passion for…like maths instead of something that I like so much – the English Language. Bah, I think I’ll just teach my kids how to enjoy life, have fun, live with wild abandon and shun responsibilities. Hhhmmmm….I think I won’t have a problem with that at all.