A Tribute to
Ms. Subramaniam

A student's gratitude

In his own words

In 1992, Phoa Tai Han was in her chemistry class. Thirty-four years later, he returned with these words.

I am writing in support of formal recognition for Ms Subramaniam, who taught me chemistry and was my class teacher in Form 5 in 1992.

Ms Subramaniam was a demanding teacher. Her standards were high, explicit, and consistently enforced, and she made no apology for any of it. That alone would make her memorable. What made her exceptional was the teaching craft behind it.

She taught chemistry in a way that made the subject genuinely compelling, and she taught for understanding rather than recall. Concepts landed at a conceptual level and stayed there. Just as importantly, she could read a room: she knew the difference between a class that had understood something and a class that had merely stopped asking questions, and she would not move on until the former was true. That diagnostic instinct is the hardest thing in teaching to learn and the easiest to skip.

The result was that her students left her classroom actually knowing chemistry. She cared about educational outcomes and she had the ability to deliver them, and I would observe that those two things do not always travel together.

I have spent my career since in engineering and investment, both fields in which the ability to reason from first principles is the whole game. I trace a meaningful part of that capacity to the way Ms Subramaniam taught me to think. Thirty-four years later, her influence remains one of the clearest I can identify from my school years.

I would be glad to expand on any of this, or to help gather testimony from her many students she faithfully served in her many years of teaching at our school, I have no doubt would say much the same.

Yours faithfully,

Phoa Tai Han

Form 5, 1992