Boys of Ice and Fire

Teaching Researchers Have a Say

“So four key words must be included,” Ethan tapped his pencil on his notebook as he recapped what Zoe had just explained to him. “That is: rake, pumpkin, snowman, and skate. And the key sentence structure is this: Who do you usually do in autumn/winter? Both the key words and key sentences have to be repeated in your scripts for a certain number of times as indicated in the script template.”

“Yep.” said Zoe, sitting on the sofa Ethan had just slept on at that noon, together with Jojo, the Teaching Researcher responsible for S2 Level oral English class. To ease his condition of slipped discs, Ethan is standing.

“And the theme of this lesson is Autumn and Winter,” said Ethan.

“Yep.” said Zoe, resting her jaw on her chin, looking at Ethan curiously, wondering what a fast learner he was.

“Then where is the lesson for spring and summer?” questioned Ethan.

“Well, let me show you.” Zoe opened some files on her computer, showing the scripts she had already written for previous lessons. As Ethan could see, the previous lesson that was aimed at teaching kids about spring and summer had a similar structure that could be reused. The teacher, Miss Lisa, ordered the main characters Joey, an American boy with freckles and red hair, and Zack, the zebra living with him, to host the spring and summer fun sports meeting. By completing this task, Joey and Zack, together with their friends and classmates, reuse the key sentences and key words multiple times, thus realizing the goal for language teaching.

“I got it!” Ethan’s face brightened. “I’ll write the script this afternoon and submit it to you and Jojo for review.”

“No no no!” protested Zoe. “Do you want to make us all look like lazy ladies by working so fast? We have a timetable. Just write an outline every Monday. On Tuesday, we script writers will have a meeting with the Teaching Researchers to discuss and readjust the outline. When the outline is determined, you can write out the whole script on Wednesday and Thursday. And, taking into account the comments given by all script writers and Teaching Researchers, the leading illustrator, the leading animator...”

“What about Shaun?” Ethan cut Zoe off. “Will he be giving comments?”

Zoe is taken aback at Ethan's sudden mention of Shaun. She looks at Ethan with wondering eyes, as if she could hear his heart now beating violently.

“Of course.” Zoe released the tension by answering with a smile. “He is the leader of the whole animation team. His opinion is very important. He knows what can be animated and what can’t, taking into account stuff like cost and manpower. Normally, scripts just revel in their own world and ignore such things.

“Cool.” Ethan pretended to be calm. But in his mind’s eye, he had already morphed into a wild horse galloping on wind-swept grassland. Me and Shaun! We will have a heart-to-heart talk via words. Creative submissions and thoughtful comments. Isn’t this a beautiful friendship budding between the lines!?

Ethan snapped out of his reverie as he suddenly realized that both Jojo and Zoe were looking at his weirdly smiling face.

“Yeah...” Ethan coughed and replied. “Yeah. That’s very nice of you to go through the whole process of script-writing for teaching purposes for me. I’ll finish the outline this afternoon. Bye!”

Ethan flipped his mac shut and headed for his seat, leaving Zoe and Jojo baffled.

When Ethan walked past Shaun, he could see Shaun had also gotten up and was now working on his computer. Pretending he didn’t care what Shaun was doing, Ethan scrutinized Shaun out of the corner of his eyes. He could see that Shaun was really hunched as he fixated his eyes on the mac screen. Ethan had accepted the fact that skinny guys tended to have a slight hunchback, but he felt Shaun’s neck stuck out a little too much! Well, maybe it’s just his way of focusing while he worked on the computer. Ethan rationalized to himself.

He stalked back to his seat, turned off his thoughts about Shaun’s hunchback, and started working on his outline. As he examined Zoe's script for the previous lesson, he could tell that Zoe split the script into two tasks. In the first task, Zack and Joey had to interview their friends and family for fun things to do in spring and summer based on a questionnaire. In the second task, they had to arrange these fun things into fun sports events at school.

Questionnaire??? What a lousy way to structure a script! Even in a script for oral English lessons! Ethan could see Zoe had already got back from the sofa and was now sitting right beside him across an aisle less than half a meter wide, but he couldn't say it out loud. It was rude to criticize another script writer. All too often, it would backfire and did nobody any good. So he fondled the thought that this group sucks! And then he got back to writing his own brilliant script.

But Ethan would soon find out that it was so much easier to label other people’s script as boring than to create an un-boring script himself.