My Temasek Times

I walked through Temasek Junior College yesterday afternoon, after Mr Lam had kindly given me a lift from school and dropped me off at the bus stop behind Temasek.

I had been wanting to do this for some time now, considering that my last visit to my alma mater was in 1998, oddly enough, after I had completed a 24km route march during my first year of enlistment.

It was a little strange walking through the confines of what was once so familiar to me. I  mean, I did spend two solid years of my life there after all.

I guess what struck me and what still endears to me is that, in spite of all the new extensions and additions to the campus, the centrepiece of the school building is still that Old Airport-resembling four-storey structure, which in my time housed the General Office on the first floor and classrooms on the second, third and/or fourth floors (my memory fails me).

The top floor of that structure retains a particularly sentimental quality, as I remember that my civics class (the equivalent of a secondary school form class) used to have double-period General Paper lessons in one of the classrooms there.

Those lessons were memorable for two things.

Firstly, it was during those dreaded double-period GP lessons that I really got to know my civics classmates. After a lackluster discussion centring on current affairs, our good-natured, if somewhat tedious, civics tutor would let us get on with our GP essays, which would, of course, require further, um, “consultation” among the class. Those “consultations” were really ice-breakers as we got to know each other better, being as we were a hotch-potch of MEP, History, Literature, Maths C, Economics (least of all Economics!) students.

They were also life-savers, which leads me to the second reason why those GP lessons were memorable.

They were held in the afternoon. 2.30 to 4.30pm. Two hours of blah-blah-blah in the sweltering, stuffy, mind-numbing Singapore afternoon. Baking in a semi-ancient, twenty-year old classroom.

As you would expect, that meant a lot of drooping heads, glazed eyes and palms cleverly-positioned over eyebrows, all in an effort to spare our civics tutor the hurt she might have felt if she knew just how effective a human sedative she was.

Of course.

We were nothing, if not considerate and sensitive to the feelings of our fellow human beings.

We were arts students, after all (Say it and Live it with pride!).

Anyway, back to my second point.

Life-savers, I tell you. Life-savers.