Wednesday, September 26, 2007  12:44 AM
4PE class reunion
Five years on, and we've all trodden on different paths after that last exam paper, when we knew it would be a certain end to one part of our lives - those wonderful four years in secondary school. And how time changes things, the fleeting element of time strikes me as a frightening prospect, at twenty-one, some of us are already working. In the United States as a producer of documentaries and films, as a research assistant at a local university, some of us have gotten an overseas education - UK being the most popular choice - and yet some of us are still stuck here sunk in the depths of this education system that we've been desperately trying to get out of since we were eight. Yet when we come together, it is all smiles, loud outbursts of laughter and hours of reminiscing those days. It didn't seem like that long ago, yet five years sounds like an eternity. Being an SCGS girl is something I'd never give up for anything else, and thinking back, oh how wonderful and carefree. Everyone remembers the same funny moments. The physics lesson in the lab where the small Vietnamese girl in our class got scolded because the teacher thought she wasn't standing up to greet her because the benches covered most of her, the time when the same teacher mispronounced a girl's name, calling her "dung" literally of all things, the loud shrill voice of our English teacher when she breezed into class, always fifteen minutes late, claiming she was "in a meeting" with some "important people". And that time when the form teacher in secondary one tripped and fell over some wiring, cracking the overhead projector, and everyone could see that crack right in the middle on the lighted screen above her. The nicknames we used to give our teachers - professing some lesbians just because they live together and shop at supermarkets together (although I highly believe that one is true), the one who should really live in an igloo because she looks like an eskimo - we called her ginamo - or the Amath teacher "mosquijoo" just because she looks like a mosquito. And who could forget the Chinese teacher Lizard Cheong who thought it would be a miracle if I could get a B because she always said my "造句"'s were literal translations from English to Chinese (hah, I proved her wrong). The category games and Kallang waves started by my best friends during Amath lessons once Mosquijoo's back was turned, the backstabbing when some people tried to tell us off for doing the Kallang wave in class, the race for meepok every recess - it came down to the sprinters running down to chope places in the queue. I became a category game expert as well, with answers to every movie, actor, actress, flower, country, song or brand starting with any letter from A-Z. And unlike Bo, I didn't have a secret cheat sheet which she prepared at home just for the competition during Amath lessons. But that also meant I never grasped relative velocity. Being sports representative in secondary school meant my class had slack PE lessons, because we always fought for baseball, netball or the occasional soccer. We would pretend to be the famous players in leagues. I was only good at appearing fast around the soccer field, but no one really passed the ball to me. In ten years our lives will change again. And that moment when we sang Vitamin C's "Graduation Friends Forever" on the stage during graduation day will only seem like an even more distant memory.
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