This appeared in straits times Life Sunday.

A certain Miss L asked me to forward this to the class (No prizes for guessing which Miss L it was). In case you didnt read it in the newspaper, here's the article (words are not the same as the actual article I think)

In 1988, right before my Secondary 4 preliminary examinations, a group of us students wrote a song for our favourite teacher and went to a professional studio to record it.

The song was eventually performed onstage in the school hall on Teachers' Day, much to Miss L's delight and to the surprise of many other teachers.

The two weeks leading up to that show were traumatic, but more than 20 years later, they had faded in my memory to a few vivid recollections.

I remember feeling somewhat surreal, that time had been suspended as we went about doing this critical task that we thought was so important.

But at the school's recent 75th anniversary dinner, I was reminded by a classmate of the details of what had happened.

Apparently, I was quite the reporter back then and had documented the whole process in a 13-page account.

Last week, Miss L. e-mailed me the scanned pages, handwritten in my schoolboy scrawl with the 'i's all embarrassingly dotted with cute circles. It was quite a story.

It all started on Aug 18, 1988, when Yazz's The Only Way Is Up was the No. 1 song in Britain . Sitting around in KFC Toa Payoh after school, we decided to write a song for Miss L. for Teachers' Day.

J., a Yamaha organ-playing prodigy of sorts, went home to write the melody and the next day, he recorded a 'minus-one' instrumental. The song was great but it sounded awful because it was recorded on a tiny Aiwa mini-compo.

The following Monday, we took our English Language oral exams in the morning before trying to record the song again on a better mini-compo.

But it still didn't work and my notes said I went home and tried till midnight to erase the hissing sound from the original tape using my dad's equalisers.

I was somewhat successful, so we took the next step of booking two hours of studio time at a place called K-5 Studios in Singapore Shopping Centre on Saturday night to record the vocal.

The day came and eight of us turned up at K-5 Studios, but we were told we couldn't record because of 'technical difficulties'. Instead, we got referred to another studio downstairs (Resonance Studios), but they said they were booked solid till Monday.

Desperate, we opened the phone book and secured a rare last-minute weekend booking at Zigzag Studios in Peninsula Shopping Centre at 10pm.

We arranged to meet again at 8.45pm at Centrepoint in Orchard Road . But it was the night of Swing Singapore and the street was jam-packed with people. We took more than half an hour to cross the street from Centrepoint to the Somerset MRT station, all the time panicking and thinking we were going to miss that precious studio slot.

According to my notes, we managed to arrive at Zigzag at 9.35pm and waited for a heavy metal band to finish, a memory that has persisted till now. The band members had long hair, tattoos and tight tees, and looked at us through the studio windows amused.

Having waited the entire day to do his thing, our singer L. gave a mesmerising vocal performance. But luck was not with us because the finished tape sounded horrible. We were back at square one.

Eventually, we were recommended another studio, RC Sound Engineering, at more than double the cost, which agreed to take us but only on Monday morning. With only three days left to Teachers' Day, we grabbed the offer.

On Monday, five of us skipped school and turned up at RC at 10am sharp. The studio opened at 11am, but the owner, Robin, was nowhere to be found.

He finally arrived at noon and looked surprised to see us. It seemed he had forgotten about us and told us the studio was already booked for the afternoon. His wife felt sorry for us and tried to persuade him to change his mind. But he only got angry with her and they had a big quarrel, so we left.

We sat in Funan Centre having lunch in glum silence. The money we collected from the three classes Miss L. taught was half gone and we were nowhere near doing what we set out to do.

We were just kids. Had we bitten off more than we could chew?

Then magically, the stars aligned for us. J. decided to call up 'an old boss' (I didn't dare ask how a 15-year-old had such a contact), who recommended a ritzy place in Rangoon Road where some local artistes recorded.

By 3pm, we were done. The equipment was professional, the staff friendly and the finished product was literally music to our ears.

The bill, however, was a shocking $125 because we used their multi-track recorder. We said we didn't have that kind of money and thankfully, the kind people at the studio brought the bill down to $75.

The rest, as they say, is history.

We put on a great show on Teachers' Day and Miss L. cried and cried, touched and amazed by the whole spectacle.

Most of us went on to junior college and university. W. did a PhD in molecular biology and then became a top-notch biotech analyst in Wall Street. J. became a professional concert pianist and a music teacher.

Reliving those moments again, I was most struck by the enthusiasm of our youth. We didn't care that our prelims were just a couple of weeks away or that we were just naive kids who could have been swindled because we didn't know any better.

It was clear from those pages that I wrote that we felt so intensely about it, and it was only because of that intensity that we hadn't given up halfway through.

Had my friends and I ever felt the same way again, I wondered? How soon before they become jaded by the practical limits of life in Singapore ?

The question that most people ask is what's the point? They can see a reason to study hard and ace an exam, or to finish a project to get a promotion.

But who's going to remember the trouble you went through for something so seemingly insignificant? It would all seem so silly years from now.

It's a question I have asked myself over and over through the years. And as a newspaper editor, it's a question that I ask almost every day.

Being able to look back with a critical eye, 22 years later, at the events of August 1988, I guess I've found the answer.

We may not have achieved very much that Teachers' Day, and the fuss and drama probably wore off in a couple of weeks.

But it remains one of the best untold stories of my life and just maybe, in its own small way, one of the most inspiring.