English Crisis

Everyone has issues. That’s for sure. Even cats and dogs have their own, Mr Derick said. I’ve many cats at home and one of them named, Citch, bore 4 kittens. Her cousin, Orion which is my favourite cat hated her for it. Rion gets pissed-off everytime she sees Citch or her kittens. When Rion could stand no longer, she ran away. I was devastated and almost burst into tears when I heard the news because throughout of the history of my cats, not one of my favourite ones were found dead but they were gone, vanished into thin air. I lost Gremlin recently and now I’m losing Rion. After a couple of days, Rion returned because she was starving. She left again after filling her stomach. Rion is a loner. She never ventured far from the house and she never cared to look for a mate like her brother and her cousins. She has weak hind legs and has a smiley face. I’m sure if you look long enough into her face, you’ll notice she is actually smiling. This is true. She smiles! She always played with her impish brother and she loves her family. Now, she’s lonely and hurt. I seriously wish I could stay away with her for a while wherever that is. Rion, I’m always here...

I am always crusty in English classes. I thought learning English is not that hard compared to other subjects. I was totally wrong!!! Among my marks for the 5 subjects, I scored the worst for English. I thought speaking was easy because Mr Derick said it was and we should not be worrying over it. It was easy actually and thank God I got myself a not-so-make-me-stunned topic. The trouble was not the topic. It was me!! I don’t know what happened to me and I don’t know what language I was speaking. I traumatized myself for a while until I saw Mr Derick nodding again and again as his response to my answers. I was amazed! How could you make heads and tails out of my broken English, Mr Derick? I can’t even figure out what nonsense I was talking.

That was about speaking. Now is the essay. Any essay I’ve ever done this year. Often, I understand what the questions want. What always makes my essays so awful is my true understanding of the questions. Maybe my understanding is not so bad. It’s how I arrange the sentences into paragraphs and finally into a complete essay. It’s not that I forgot how to make a good composition, like what I learned from Mr Derick. It’s how I think. Everything is jumbled up in my mind. Planning always takes a long time and writing while thinking take a hundred times as long. The most recent one I did was the one which was the made-believe test, which all of us did each by ourselves, at home, while being honest to not exceed 1 1/2 hour. My supposed-to-be introduction was not one at all. I’ve got no thesis statement or whatsoever that are needed in a real essay. I didn’t even have a conclusion! I can’t make out heads, body or legs out of it myself. Let alone Tati who is going to be THE ONE to mark it. Oh, goshh.. I’m terribly sorry Tati!

Next.. is reading. Well, frankly speaking, I do not understand what the texts are saying!! I always waste a lot of time trying to get the picture or the idea. I always read the texts several times during tests and also in simple exercises. I would go to Nadira, begging for her help. I often ask her to rephrase everything so that the texts would finally make sense to me. She always helps me but it’s my obstinate brain that’s making it all so difficult. After an hour or so, then I am able to finally grasp it. There’s no such time in tests and exams. What am going to do? That particular problem always leads to a mountain of others. Answering the questions related to the texts. I would always scribble down all my nonsense thoughts and ideas which only I thought would do my paper good, when it comes to these. Nothing will ever do my paper much good if I keep on doing that.

Those were hardly real problems at all...