Old Folks Home By Gilbert Koh All day long they lie on the straight rows of white beds or sit in the heavy-duty wheelchairs pushed out into the breezy sunshine of the gardens. Resigned to the prisons of their own failing bodies, they drift in and out of the haze of senility, half-forgetting themselves in the patient wait for death. Still the bright-eyed teenagers come, on Saturday mornings, by the busloads, sent by their schools on compulsory excursions to learn the meaning of compassion as outlined in the ECA syllabus. They bring gifts of Khong Guan biscuits, they help to mow the lawns, they clap their hands performing happy songs and valiantly they attempt the old dialects trying to communicate. Later they will clamber noisily back up the departing school buses, and next week in class they will write startlingly similar essays on what a meaningful, memorable experience they had at the old folks' home last week.
*P.S. This anti-apartheid poem by Andre Letoit, written under the pseudonym Koos Kombuis, stumped students at a Cambridge examination. The poem comprises only punctuation marks. I added this poem into the list because I think it is an interesting way of highlighting the silences of the Other (which is what the poem is about), and also to draw attention to grammar and punctuation. There is also a lot of room for interpretation.
After discovering the Internet, my mother has trouble finding a connection, and calls me up for help while I am at work. We keep miscommunicating. She has clicked open so many windows the computer threatens to hang. And my logic runs out of variations to explain the same thing over and over. Suddenly, I imagine she is looking for her future through that glowing screen and I am really helping her to find back her life after all her children have left for new homes, new families to love. ‘What now?’ she asks. ‘Try again,’ I reply, the phone pressed to my ear. ‘Close all the windows. Tell me — what do you see?’ Commentary: It might be useful to teach students the etymology of words, and how the meaning of certain words alters with the culture and time. Technological change, in particular, has brought about linguistic and cultural changes. Words such as ‘windows’, ‘connection’ and ‘logic’ have been prescribed new meanings...
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