Grade 10 Creative Writing: Ten Model Compositions

Ten model compositions of about a hundred and forty words. This is the year the Ordinary Level work begins, and these are built the way an examination answer has to be built: an opening that wastes nothing, a middle with one clear line through it, and an ending that answers the beginning.

Two of the ten put an opinion rather than tell a story, because the O/L paper asks for that as well. The English remains within reach of a second-language learner at this grade.

My father is a mason. He builds walls, plasters them, and lays floor tiles, and he has done it since he was seventeen.

He leaves the house at six and comes back after six. In the evening there is cement dust in his hair and on his eyebrows, and he washes at the tap outside before he comes in.

For years I did not tell people at school what he does. Some boys in my class have fathers with offices.

In April he took me to a site because his helper was ill. I carried mortar for six hours. By noon my hands were bleeding at the base of the fingers.

He does that six days a week and then asks me whether I have finished my homework.

I tell people what my father does now. I say it first, before they ask.

In Grade 11 the year is not a year. It is a countdown, and everybody in the house is counting.

My timetable is on the almariah door. School until half past one, classes on four evenings, papers on Sunday morning. My mother wakes me at four in the last two months.

The worst part is not the work. It is that everybody asks the same question. Relatives telephone to ask how the studies are going, and the only answer they will accept is that they are going well.

I am doing nine subjects. I will probably do well in six of them.

What I want to say, and cannot, is that I am not lazy and I am not confident either, and both of those things are allowed to be true at the same time.

In December it will be over. I am told that nobody remembers the marks afterwards.

Last year I was selected for the school cricket pool and for the English Day debating team. The practices were on the same three evenings.

I wanted cricket. I am not good enough to play for a district, and I knew that even then.

My English teacher did not tell me what to choose. She asked me one question: which one would I still be glad about in five years?

I chose debating, and for about a month I regretted it every time I saw the nets from the corridor.

We won the zonal round and lost the provincial one. I spoke for four minutes in front of two hundred people, and afterwards a girl from another school told me my second point was the strongest of the day.

I still watch cricket. I am not sorry. But it was not an easy choice and I dislike stories that pretend such choices are easy.

The tuition bus leaves the junction at half past three and comes back at half past eight.

There are forty of us from six schools. Everybody has a bag and a bottle of water and nobody has energy. For the first ten minutes nobody speaks at all.

By the second week of any term the seats are settled. The Grade 11 pupils sit at the back. There is always one boy who sleeps with his mouth open and one girl who studies the whole way, holding the notes above her knees.

On the way back the bus is different. The windows are down, somebody plays music from a telephone, and the tiredness turns into a strange kind of cheerfulness.

I have learned less English in that class than my parents hope and more on that bus than they would believe.

In the August holidays I worked in my uncle's hardware shop for three weeks. He paid me a thousand rupees a week.

The work was mostly lifting. Cement, paint tins, coils of wire, forty-kilogram bags that two of us carried between us.

What I did not expect was the talking. Customers want to explain their whole building before they buy a bolt. By the second week I could tell which man had already been to three shops and which one had decided before he came in.

On the last day my uncle gave me three thousand rupees and a fourth note on top of it.

I bought my mother a pair of slippers and I put the rest away.

Three thousand rupees is not a great deal of money. I have never spent anything as carefully since.

Sixty-one pupils were in our class in January. In August there were fifty-eight.

One of the three was Ishara, who sat two rows in front of me. She was good at science and she laughed at things before the rest of us understood them.

Her father lost his job at the garment factory in May. In June she was absent on Mondays, then on Mondays and Fridays, and in July she stopped coming.

Our class teacher went to the house twice. The second time, Ishara was there and she was looking after her two younger brothers.

Somebody said she would come back next term. She did not.

We talk about the pupils who fail the examination. Nobody counts the ones who never get to sit it, and our register that year counted three.

The photograph was taken in February on the steps of the main hall. Four rows, sixty-one of us, the teachers in the middle.

It took twenty minutes because somebody was always blinking or talking. Our class teacher said "last time" four times.

I have the copy in my file. In it I am in the third row, slightly behind a taller boy, and my tie is crooked.

What I notice now is not myself. It is that everybody in that picture was still in school, and two years later we are in eleven different places.

Three are abroad. One is married. Two, including the boy in front of me, I have not been able to find at all.

A photograph is not a record of a day. It is a record of a day being the last one of something.

The bus strike began at noon and by two o'clock it was clear that nothing was running.

Our school is eleven kilometres from my house. Four of us started walking together at half past two.

The first five kilometres were almost enjoyable. We bought ice palam at a shop and complained about the heat and a teacher.

After that the road turned uphill and nobody talked much. My shoes are school shoes, not walking shoes, and by the seventh kilometre I could feel every stone.

At the eighth kilometre a lorry carrying sand stopped for us without being asked, and we rode the last three standing in the back.

I reached home at half past five, filthy and very thirsty.

I have taken that bus four hundred times and remember none of the journeys. I remember all eleven kilometres.

Most schools in Sri Lanka do not allow pupils to bring mobile telephones, and I think that rule is right, although not for the reason usually given.

The argument we are given is that telephones are a distraction. That is true, but a distracted pupil will find a window to look out of.

The real reason is fairness. In my class some pupils have telephones worth more than a month of my father's pay and some have none at all. During the online classes we all saw what that difference does. In school, at least, the uniform hides it.

Against the rule there is one serious point: a girl travelling home at night is safer with a telephone.

So the sensible rule is not a ban but a locked drawer in the office, handed back at the end of the day.

My cousin says that nobody needs to read books any more, because anything a book can tell you can be watched in twelve minutes.

He is partly right. For facts, he is entirely right. If I want to know how an engine works, a film will teach me faster than a chapter.

But a book does something a film cannot. It makes you build the picture yourself, which is slow and is exactly the point. A reader spends four hours inside another person's head and comes out slightly different.

There is also the plain matter of examinations. Pupils who read write better, and every teacher I know can tell within a page which pupils read.

I am not going to claim that books are dying or that they will save anybody. I will only say that twelve minutes buys information, and four hours buys something else.

• Time them. At O/L a composition of this length has to be planned, written and checked in about twenty-five minutes. A model read in comfort teaches nothing about that.
• Make them find the line through it. Every piece below can be summed up in one sentence. A pupil who cannot state that sentence before writing will wander.
• Use the last five minutes on checking, always. Tense, subject-verb agreement, full stops. Marks are lost there, not on ideas.
• Compare a narrative and an opinion piece from the list. The paragraph shapes are different, and pupils who see the difference stop writing stories when they are asked for arguments.
• Do not let them memorise one composition for the examination. A memorised piece bent to fit a different question loses more marks than a plain honest answer.