final draft

I sat in my room, holding 3 cards which I decided to send to my three best friends of friendship day, thinking of them, it always dawned on me how important friends are. I am a Singaporean, who is currently in secondary school. I came from a neighbourhood primary school and made many friends there, and we are friends until now. This is the reason for our long lasting friendship. I still remember the days when I was not a good student as compared to others in subjects which required a lot of remembering, such as spelling and listening comprehension, that’s because I have amnesia, which is basically a illness which makes me forget things really easily, for instance, I forgot my bag at school, I forgot my laptop on bus, I even forgot about an English test and the results are not good. And thanks to that amnesia thing, I was considered the most “blur” student in class

All these happened before I met three of my best friends, Paranee and Shail, who are both Indian boy, and Wang Jia Xin. My three friends have many other friends who always topped the class, but they still preferred to help a D graded student like me to improve my results. They also topped the class often too. The teacher loved to scold Wang Jia Xin and the reason is his parents were too “kia su” which means scared of losing in Chinese dialect.  Whenever Wang Jia Xing’s academic results drops, his parents would make a lot of complaints to the school and that did not make the life of our teacher easy.

            My friends were always finding ways to help me improve my memory. They started to teach me how to remember difficult vocabulary. At first, we tried to do it the hard way, which is forcing me to remember the words and testing me every day, but that didn’t work, I always ended up forgetting the words. Next, they changed their strategy to splitting the words in two, for example, similar can be split into simi and lar. As for the single words, they had me to remember them by linking the pronunciation other words with similar pronunciation. These helped me a lot and I fared kind of well in my spelling. I used to get only 3 out of 20 but I got at least a 13 now in spellings. My friends helped me in many other ways, such as inviting me for lunch in their home whenever I forgot to bring my keys and is locked out of my house. Through the meals, I found out the different type of meals eaten by people of different races, Paranee is from south India and his family ate spicy vegetables or curry with some rice but he will eat meat sometimes, but Shail is from north India and is a full vegetarian. He usually eats chapatti and vegetables. My friends made my boring life in the school more bearable and they even protected me from bullies. Shail is physically capable and always fends off bullies who were trying to hurt me.

            These friends were really important. Without them, I don’t know if I can remember these difficult spelling words. I will not even know about the different culture of different races. I will also be bullied everyday if it’s not for them. I did not forget my friend until now, even though we are in different schools and we called each other often and visited each other as much as possible, because they are my true friends. Just then, the sound of doorbell woke me from my trance. I approached the door and opened it, greeted grinning faces of Paranee, Shail and Wang Jia Xing, and each of them held a card. Friendship can exist in any forms and with anyone of any skin colour, which is common in a multi racial country like Singapore.

(656 words)