Every year, as the end of the year draws near,
Miss Loi finds herself performing several important rituals to bring the season to a close i.e.
1. Eat her bak kut teh.
2. Eat her tok tok mee.
4. Buy some Christmas presents for herself because she gets very few presents each year.
5. Have her nails done up for the new season.
6. Have her head/neck/shoulder massaged and hair washed at this neighbourhood salon.
7. Have her feet massaged …
… and her sore back (accumulated from 12 months’ of teaching at The Temple) unknotted and ‘reborn’ 🙁
6. Plan her 2011 Weekly Schedule, and at the same time issue preliminary warnings to all potential “aeroplane pilots” who are going to be heavily involved in their CCAs next year – especially academic life force-draining ones like SYF. (somehow Miss Loi has a phobia of events that contain the word ‘Youth‘)
7. Umm … get more practice on the chapter of Probabilities, Permutations & Combinations.
8. Most importantly, she gets the chance to stand idly and stare at little fluffy clouds in the sky (when it’s not raining), and place her thoughts far from the maddening world of trigonometry, geometry and quadratic equations …
Greetings my Sexy Maths Tutor!
boomed a Darth Vaderish-voice in her head.
“It’s you! I haven’t heard from you in a long, long time – not since you saved me from the tsunami!” she replied.
So how art thou, my Sexy Maths Tutor?
“I did as you told. I’ve built the Sanctuary of Learning and it has grown. Correspondingly, the number of devotees has grown, and I try to save as many as I can.”
Thou never answer my question! Minus marks! How art thou?!
the voice thundered.
“You say leh?! More students means more phone calls, more scheduling, more preparations and longer hours. I hardly have time for myself and you have no idea the number of meals and Hong Kong drama episodes I’ve skipped! Now my Chinese sinseh is complaining that I often sleep and eat too late. On some nights, I even dream that I’m teaching when I sleep! The many hours of standing and bending over to check my students’ work have left my back resembling a Lego® brick! Frankly, all these seem to have taken a bit of a toll on me, as I find myself feeling tired easily these days 🙁”
There was a brief moment of awkward silence and then …
My soon-to-be-not-so-Sexy Maths Tutor, thou art getting OLD!!! OLD OLD OLD OLD OLD OLD …
*clap of thunder*
The background receded rapidly away from her, a couple of birds fell from the sky, and those little fluffy clouds morphed into a dark swirling mass of Cumulonimbus, as the cold, stark reminder sliced through her soul like a hot knife through butter.
And so, while she turned and ran towards her long-neglected health & fitness & beauty centre, she decided that her New Year’s resolutions for 2011 (in true ‘O’ Level math question format) would be:
(i) To learn to let go of certain things. [2]
(ii) To get help in the running of The Temple. [4]
HENCE, by using the results of (i) and (ii),
(iii) To stay fit & healthy and thereby … umm … age ‘gracefully’. [5]
and
(iv) Umm … umm …. umm … perhaps settle down? [Bonus mark]
NOTE:
Fulfill all resolutions.
The number of marks is given in brackets [ ] at the end of each part.
Partial or incomplete fulfillment will result in loss of marks.
The use of a calculator is not expected for (i) and (iv).
As with many tricky math questions in the pasts, the above may look simple but Miss Loi is pretty sure that this will be one of THE most difficult problems she’ll face in her life – far more difficult than any found in a top school’s killer prelim paper.
Oh well … at least she has one whole year to complete and hopefully score full marks (not counting that bonus mark) for this.
So what’s your (hopefully more achievable) New Year’s resolution(s)?
