Photo Courtesy: Unknown
School life is one of the most interesting phases that we go through. It is where we grow up, learn to be independent, become who we are as adults, form our personalities, create friendships that could last forever and the memories that you would live to tell to your children. Living through school life has proved to be quite tough especially with the 8-4-4 system where a class three child carries a bag that can pull them down due to the heavy weight of the books they have to carry. Many have dropped out, some repeated classes; some struggled through while others just had their tasty cup of tea of school life. However much you may have hated school you must admit there are memories of school worth keeping.
In every class we don’t miss the early bird. The one who is always the first to come to school and however early you try to wake up you would still find him/her there. This fellow isn’t really interested in school as such but what actually brings him/her early to school is the homework that he hasn’t done. He would struggle with the homework just until the arrival of the second person in class. He would quickly borrow the book and do copy pasting without even bothering to look how correct the answers are.
Then of course, there is always that late comer who is always late. Come rain, come sunshine he/she would still come after the class started. A child like this one, you would expect that they have exhausted all the sleep they needed but funny enough, he/she is still the one to dose in class. Most of the times, he is untidy and the homework is not done. Just one word to describe them; lazy!
Another interesting character is that intelligent child who would always perform highly in the exams but whenever you go seek help from them, they would always have an excuse not to help. He/she is clearly selfish with the knowledge they have and they would always prefer to study alone. During the exams seasons, you would always hear them complain of having not read ANYTHING and they would whine and panic so much to the extent of making you panic too. Funny though, when the results are out the difference between your result and theirs is incomparable. They could be topping all subjects while you are still playing safe at the average marks.
One of the characters that rarely miss out in every class is the one providing us with classic comedy; the one who doesn’t perform so well but still has all the stories to crack you up in all the lessons. Sometimes it isn’t even the right time to crack up a joke but they would still do it, however much inappropriate it may seem. They are always the class favourite. They create a lot of mischief and give the teacher’s a very hard time. Their performance may vary for there are those who were naughty but still performed excellently while others still performed awfully in their examinations.
I personally would never forget the ones that would give us a free drama to watch when it was their time to be punished by the teacher. The circus they do is just hilarious. They would scream even before the stick touches their skin and they would twist and turn round and round like a monkey in a cage. By the time they get the first stroke, almost five minutes have been wasted. This sometimes would just make the class teacher give up and let him/her go.
Another character that we all had to hate is the class teacher’s right hand side man. The one who would be very quick in reporting every small or tiny mistake we did which included you being a noisemaker just because you asked for a rubber from the next desk. They always yearned for the teacher’s praise and love and worked very hard to attain it by crucifying others and sometimes they weren’t even the class prefect or monitor.
The list could go on and on from the quiet and timid ones, to the bookworms, to the hardworking ones, to the ones who had two faces; the very noble one towards the teachers while they were in fact silent killers, to the ones who jut sat back and enjoyed all the dramas created by these different personalities, to the noisemakers whom without, the class would just seem abnormal, to the very aggressive ones, to the attention seekers etcetera etcetera. Without forgetting the kind of teachers we had varying from the very boring ones, to the very harsh ones, to the popular and likeable ones, to the story tellers that would spend half the lesson just narrating, to the lazy ones who would even drag their words, to the ones that were just a pain in the neck being very sarcastic, pessimistic and like a sadist in everything and to the teachers that dedicated all their time and even their free time to ensure the children have all they need. We all know in which category we fall in the above and though we may have had a tough time through but you will all agree with me, there is a time you just sit back and remember all these and laugh alone. Maybe it was worth it after all, for without all these experiences we wouldn’t be who we are today.
