School days

We’ve had some good times together. We often talk about that class we had back in Sec 1 and 2, even though we have been in each other’s class on other occasions. That was one memorable class, and an extremely difficult class to control. We were 1O, as in we got the 15th letter of the alphabet. To the best of my knowledge, we were the only class to use that letter. Ostensibly the reason was it was confusing to use letters that look like numbers (even though the letter “I” was used time and again). Another possible reason was that there was never a need to use that letter again. But we liked to think that it’s also because the teachers never ever wanted to deal with a class like mine ever again.

I’ll never forget the science teacher telling us all, at the end of sec 2, that they were going to break up our class, and either it was a good thing, that they didn’t have to deal with us anymore, or it was a bad thing that “the cancer would spread”.

There were no real reasons why we had so many problems. Academically, while we didn’t have any top performers (that was the first year in school I wasn’t a top student) we were the only class where everybody got promoted. But we were also the only class with no prefects, and we were isolated there, at the end of the hallway, so it wasn’t easy to police us. In the end, we just wanted to have fun, bully the teachers, bully each other, and we didn’t give a shit about the rules. We were the crazy gang.

I only regret that my 2 years in that class coincided with a personal crisis. Those were not the happiest years of my life, but those guys made it better.

There were people who were usually very serious about their studies, but they played hard too. There was this guy who was known as a rather repressed mugger. But during those 2 years we saw his crazy side when he started telling everybody that he idolized Hitler, and he made plenty of Nazi salutes. He was also very good at shooting rubber bands.

There was this guy who was well known as the hamsap guy in my class. He used to call the English teacher over (at that time she was in her early 20s and vaguely sexy) and ask her questions about stuff. He just liked to see her bend over. There was one time when that teacher was bending over some other guy’s homework, and somebody actually shot a rubber band at her ass. I think you start to appreciate the audacity of some of our folks.

There was some teachers who screwed us, and other teachers, we screwed. I think basically most relationships we had with our teachers were like that. That English teacher was one of our victims. There was one time when we reduced her to tears in class, and she had to run out of class because somebody (Mr Hamsap) made a comment. I can’t remember what that comment was but it was in the spirit of “this comment is so stupid, I can’t believe that I’m teaching this class. I can’t take it anymore.” We had to send Hamsap outside to go apologise to her.

Then there was this time when she suddenly had to run out of class, into the female toilet (conveniently located next door) because she had menstrual cramps. We were all sniggering at this. We had to call in the teacher from the neighbouring class to take care of her.

There were many pranks, like how we locked a classmate in the toilet for fun. There was somebody in my class I didn’t like, call him Mr prickly, and I set up his desk inside the toilet. Somebody took his Shakespeare, and threw it into the urinal, and I had to go buy him a new copy. Of course one would hesitate to do this to him now because he is a commando LTC.

Another encounter I had with Mr prickly ended up a little more happily for me. We got into an altercation. He started aiming kung fu kicks at me. This was half hostile, half playful and we both knew that. But during one kung fu kick, he slipped, and ended up having his face slammed onto the leg of a desk. He lost half his front tooth, and he never hesitates to remind me, almost 20 years later, how I was the one who took out half his front tooth.

David Bowie has got a lazy eye, much like one of the VPs in the company I work for, and that lazy eye was the result of a school fight. I wonder what the guy who gave him that eye thinks about it now.

This other time when we were asked to draw a sketch of a hand in art class. My classmate drew a severed hand, with all the veins sticking out. Everybody was passing that sketch around and laughing their heads off. My art teacher, who had always talked a lot about creativity, was forced to excuse this infraction.

There were people who played squash in class, and invariably before the class started the whole blackboard was covered in squash ball dots. There was a soccer game in the void deck outside that I hardly joined in, but usually watched.

There was this practice of making paper mache on the ceiling. We took toilet paper, wet it, and flung it against the ceiling. It was hilarious. The level head was incredulous that he had to get people to scrape toilet paper off the ceiling. I heard that he once threw wet toilet paper into the ventilator fan of the toilet, and in the process ended up jamming the fan so badly that it shorted.

Then there was the time when we stole somebody’s wallet, and then turned off the ceiling fan. We then tried to toss the wallet onto the ceiling fan, and there would be laughter as we turned on the fan and watch that wallet get flung in some random direction.

Of course, our horsing around didn’t get confined to the classroom. We had a classmate, a rich guy, and he kindly consented to have a barbeque held at his house. Little did he know that at the end of the evening we would have to pick Mr Prickly out of his garden pond.

There were minor infractions. Our practice of “zapping” people was carried on from primary school. To “zap” somebody would be to hit him in the balls. Not too hard, of course – we knew the limits.

There was the gay guy in our class who wore tight pants and colourful underwear that we could see because everybody was wearing white shorts. Usually Mr gay would be subject to a lynching, where people held him down by all fours, and everybody would tickle him for half an hour. It was during one of these sessions, invariably loud and rowdy, that the sec 2 head would come in and bark out, “who is the class monitor?” Dishevelled, Mr gay would raise his hand. Of course the monitor could say he was not in a position to do anything.

It was standard practice to take off somebody’s shoe and throw it around for fun. But once it happened, and the teacher caught us. This was the English teacher who screwed with us, not the other way around. She asked us to hand over the shoe, which we did. She then took that shoe, and threw it out from the 3rd floor onto the assembly square. We let out a gasp of horror as it happened. We were only allowed to get the shoe back at the end of the period.

Another time, our class faced the assembly square, and the class monitor and myself were in class, either tidying up the place or running some errand. At that time, everybody was gathered down stairs for flag lowering ceremony. (This was the last year that my school had both morning and afternoon sessions). We were on the verandah outside our classroom, in full view of the rest of the school, when, to our horror, the bell rang. We were caught outside. When the national anthem was being sung, we decided to inch our way back into the class. Unfortunately we were spotted (duh what were we thinking?) and we got into trouble.

I would like to think that I was partially responsible for this. I usually start out the class each year establishing myself as the class clown, and I did the same that year, even though that was the one class where I could not claim to be the class clown – all of us were class clowns. I like to think that I was one of the first people who gave them the idea that it was fun to be rowdy and crazy. I cannot be responsible for how it caught on like fire. That class really had “class spirit”. The teachers in my school always encouraged some form of tribal identity with the school, with the class. But I’m sure they would not have been entirely happy that it turned out like this.

In our lives, we make decisions. Conventionally, we think that students should be well behaved, prim and proper. I didn’t think that it was that way. I didn’t think that we were breaking rules. Rather I felt that we made our own rules, and we stuck to them. I usually go by this principle: can I brag about this in a few years’ time? Should I look back and think that I should have done this differently? I had little regrets about how our class behaved. We didn’t hurt anyone. Everybody had fun, even mr Gay, who later became a good friend of mine.

Conversely, would I have lived with myself if I had followed all the rules in school, and become a teacher’s pet? No. I think that smart teachers have to realize this, you can’t enforce too much discipline because it’s counter productive. Students of that age have this psychological need, that they have to be a bit of a rebel. The smart teachers realize that there is a level where you can compromise, where the student gets to be happy seeing himself as a rebel, and at the same time he’s not harming anybody, and he needs to keep it at this level.