in thoughts...

I LURVE Calvin & Hobbes comics... very cute but so many issues in that small space... about life, about religion, about life direction and purpose, about social trends, about so many things...

Yesterday I was giving tuition to B, my pri 3 going on pri 4 kid... I hope topping the class has not gone to his head... He couldn't concentrate yesterday again... took ONE BLOODY HOUR to let him solve 3 problem sums (he did largely on his own - but he kept drifting off...) and then I took like 4 different approaches to try to guide him through ONE STUPID PROBLEM SUM... WAH!!!!!!!! was damn brain dead by then....

let me recap what he does during tuition... to those who haven't heard me complain before... for a concise summary, see 10 Ways To Irritate Joanna, 21 October 2003... Well, yesterday was one of those days... low concentration span.. kept fiddling with this small little fluff ball he found somewhere - putting on his hair, putting between his lips and blowing it out to see how far it'll go, after blowing it out will look for it... and the whole cycle repeats itself... sometimes when I'm explaining something to him, he'll write on the rough paper - "B (his name) the Superman!"

After 5+ months we have gotten used to each other I suppose.. From time to time when he's not listening to me, he'll suddenly burst into a story he wants to tell me... like how his friend tried to kick the soccer ball but fell down... or how in his friend was bathing in the cubicle in childcare and this other friend broke the door in... and some stories are quite amusing...

Yesterday we were learning about the different states of matter - solid, liquid & gas... he suddenly said, "You know sometimes I just sit there and it feels like I'm drifting somewhere and I hope that the next moment I'll become a gas and disappear? But dun have leh, the next moment I'm still B, still sitting there..."

I dunno... that sounded mildly philosophical to me... But remember he's just 9+ years old.. so for him that's damn philosophical... But of cos he doesn't realize that it's philosophical..I din think about stuff like that when I was that age... I just read Enid Blyton and played with Barbie dolls... damn...

And I suddenly thought: he's like Calvin of the comics... always in his own thoughts about how he's Superman and he's gonna rescue B (himself) from tuition... always playing with his little figurines and imagining those violent scenes of fighting between them... always thinking up of various stupid excuses he can give to escape doing his work (but
amazingly he does almost every piece of work I assign - he'll complain but he does the work) and then this sudden philosophical insight... Calvin has that too...but no, B doesn't have a Tiger friend... probably cos he got this younger brother...

I've always remember this line from Phil Collins' song for Tarzan soundtrack, "You'll Be In My Heart"

In learning you will teach
And in teaching you will learn

He really amazes me sometimes...

oh and he sang this other song to me before... i found it quite stupidly funny... it uses the same the same tune for all four lines...

美国有个 Superman (There's this Superman in America)
底裤总是穿外面 (Underwear always wear outside)
没事做就飞上天 (Nothing to do then fly to the sky)
飞上天空乱小便 (Fly up to the sky anyhow piss)

Yup... yesterday got quite a bit of "Superman's" pee... rained throughout the night also... ;)