Chemistry Classes

Mrs. Mahmood was our Chemistry teacher. She was a petite, young woman, in her late twenties, and got pregnant in my last year of school. She taught us Chemistry for our last two years, and so by the time we left school, we were very close with her.

At barely over five feet tall, you wouldn't expect her to pack much of a punch. But her punches came fast, and they came hard when they did. Not that we didn't deserve them, of course. She was one of the teachers I referred to in a previous post as a tent pole; teachers that kept the departments functional, and helped the students continue learning while the administration did its level best to push costs down by underpaying teachers, hiring English-illiterate ones and just generally doing what a management shouldn't do to its employees.

Chemistry classes in Grade 13 were interesting. They were held mainly after break, if I recall correctly, and the tasty sandwiches my mother made me would invariably make me sleepy at that time. Mrs. Mahmood would assign us past papers to solve, and we would invariably come to class with them copied or answered clumsily during break time, and we'd all take turns in answering questions, starting from the left side of the class, this Palestinian boy called Tawseef, and ending at Dinesh to my left.

She would walk into class, put her bag down on the elevated chair that teachers had, and pulled out her things. A water bottle was an unusual addition when she got pregnant, and she would ask us to excuse her while she drank during Ramadan.

Most of the time, we knew what we were talking about, even if I didn't. Since the questions were answered sequentially, you could predict which question would be yours, so I basically just answered that single question to perfection so I survived that round.

On more than one occasion, she asked me a question about which I hadn't the slightest clue. She once asked me a question regarding some kind of reaction mechanism, and I didn't know what on Earth she was talking about, but felt compelled to answer. So I did what any desperate student does: I pulled out the first word regarding Chemistry in my head, and said it out loud. "Phenols, miss?" (We called everyone miss, even if they were married.) She was probably asking me the reaction type or the class of a carbon atom, and I was sure that in all probability, phenols had absolutely nothing to do with the question she asked.

She went berserk. "Phenols, eh? Phenols, ketones." She picked up a piece of chalk and arced her armed like a bowler throwing a ball, struck the chalk against the greenboard. It shattered and fell to pieces as she scraped against the board with what was left between her thumb and index finger. She yelled at me for the next 10 minutes, and I took it like a man. I walked out of that room. I survived!

I wasn't the only one she yelled at. A friend of mine, Mo, once came under her glare. It wasn't pretty. She asked him to answer a question from a past paper, and he didn't know an aspect of the question she was asking about. She had been in a bit of a foul mood since the beginning of that class, and Mo did the right thing: shut up and look down. He didn't know the answer, and she kept asking him. At one point, she exploded.

"Why are you not saying anything?! Say something! Speak!" Mo sat just in front of her desk. She leaned forward, propping herself on her elbows. "Am I scaring you?! Am I intimidating you?! Why don't you speak?!"

I wonder. I'm not so sure, but from my end of the room, it looked like a miracle Mo didn't burst into tears and jump out the window. She was yelling at the top of her voice, if I ever saw her do that.

There was the time when nobody, and I mean nobody did their homework. Usually, she never checks our sheets, because, well, she respected us as adults, I guess. She caught on when everyone stopped short, just after reading the statement of the question. (That was how we did it. You read the question to the class, then you read the answer) When Tawseef couldn't answer, she moved on to the next person. She couldn't answer either.

She got the hint. She stood up and threw her copy of the sheet on the table.

"Alright. Who did the homework?"

Silence. She looked at Ishaaq, the smartest boy in class. He looked down.

She just didn't know what to do. She then said, "Okay, you don't want to work, I don't want to work either. We won't do anything for the remainder of the class." This was twenty minutes into class, and we had another thirty-five minutes to go.

For another 20 minutes, we sat there in absolute silence. Dead silence. Not a pin fell for the better part of the rest of the class.

At long last, I did probably the single most bravest thing I've ever done in my life. I raised my hand, and asked:

"Miss. Are you mad at us?"

She fell to bits. She got so emotional, everyone in class was taken aback. We were flabbergasted. We sat there and watched her nearly break down as she told us how we're supposed to answer questions at home so we can move through these past papers faster.

It must have been hard for her being pregnant for the first time, and on top of that she had to handle a group of 18-year-olds who adamantly refused to do what she told them to do. Must have been tough.

But Mrs. Mahmood was the reason why I got an A in my A-Level Chemistry. God worked through her to get me that grade, which would prove one of my most valuable accomplishments in my academic career. If ever a teacher beat me into shape, it was her. I've never had a chance to go back to Abu Dhabi since I left 3 years ago, but if I do, and if I go back to school, I will thank that woman from the bottom of my heart.

That school was hard and stressful, sometimes needlessly. The students that went there had a tendency to be rowdy and unruly, and the teachers that go there are probably chronically depressed for most of the academic year. But Mrs. Mahmood has dispensed of her duties in the most professional and excellent manner I have ever seen a teacher do. She has left her mark on me.

Careers & Advising

If I was given one word to describe Advising and Career classes, I'd pick the word "ridiculous."

One period every week was dedicated to each Careers, and Advising. Mys. Faysan handled Advising, while the regional director, Mr. Hollandos, handled Careers. Sometimes, a sweet old man replaced Mr. Hollandos, though his name eludes me right now.

Advising was the most nerve-racking of all these sessions. Not entirely dissimilar to military-style inspections, Mrs. Faysan would walk between isles like the footsteps of doom, as the group leader checked every student's diary for omissions.

Our school had an absolutely brilliant diary that they designed in-house. I think it's one of the few diamonds-in-a-dung-heap type innovations that our school came up with, perhaps second only to their insistence not to have a ranking system, which wasn't really an innovation as much as it was a mindset. It is difficult to imagine that the administration had any capacity at creativity given their attitudes, but if they did design the diaries themselves, I'm impressed.

The diary was a detailed table labeled with single letters to mark subject name, material covered in class, homework assigned and their due date. It was a rather arduous task to fill it out to its completion all the time, so Mrs. Faysan made sure we were always on our toes.

One due date out of place would land a poor soul a detention. One subject missed, one single material covered of an entry a week old, and it was to the gallows. I can't recall if I was ever caught, but I don't think I was. I would have remembered the trauma. Other students who fell victim to these ridiculous detentions would actually spend breaks or lunchtimes before their Advising lessons, copying details from one diary to another.

After the diary Witch-Hunt was over, Mrs. Faysan would usually proceed to lecture us directly off an actual Advising textbook. It would have passages of testimonials from her former lackeys or lists of what a good student should be, followed by thinking and discussion questions that we as a class would "discuss."

Overall, Advising was a complete waste of time.

Careers was more interesting, though. Mr. Hollandos, his enthusiasm literally pouring out of his eyes, would pace to and fro at the front of the class, telling us stories of some smart kid in Cornell or some valedictorian in Carnegie-Mellon. And he didn't insist on checking diaries, although sometimes he did.

His replacement, an old man with a goatee and a pot belly who very much resembles Bernard Hill's character Theoden in The Lord of the Rings film adaptation, would rarely put people on detention. I can still recall myself forgetting something, and my group leader pointing this out to him. He lifted my diary, and looked at the missing entry for a moment, contemplating. He then handed it back to me, told me to fill it out and walked away. It was quite a moment, because I knew I was in for it this time, but was saved!

So once again, overall opinion? A splendid waste of time, much less stressful than Advising, and extremely relaxing. No complaints here.

Supervisors

Supervisors were the administration's foot-soldiers. They were in charge of things on the ground, of students picking fights during lunches and breaks, of lunch-time detentions or repeat AMSs or just generally hanging around to make the students aware of who was boss.

There were many supervisors in our school, and to brush them all with one colour would be very wrong. Some of them were really marvellous people.

Mr. Adnan is one of them. He was a short, stocky man, just past middle age, with greying temples. He spoke with a shrill voice, and he was my (and everyone's) favourite of the supervisors. An extremely reasonable man, he would help out whenever he could. Although he was the one in charge of pasting up all the AMS repeat lists in the middle of class (the ones that would distract everyone to no end), and also of going from class to class and reading out the names for detention, everyone liked him.

He would walk into class, and ask the teacher for a moment. "Excuse me, please," he would say in his refined Arabic accent, and the teacher would stop the class.

He would read out the names one by one, clearly, and really fast.

"You have detention today, one twenty, 9C classroom."

9C was one of the few ninth grade classrooms in the eigth grade corridor, and that class was always the focal point of detentions, all throughout my years in Choueifat. Mr. Adnan had several sons who also studied at the school. I never dealed with any of them, but his youngest son was in Grade 8 or 9 the year I graduated. I could pick him out in the middle of a crowd as Mr. Adnan, because he looked exactly like him.

While Mr. Adnan was in charge of reading out the names, Mr. Moammar was in charge of conducting them.

Mr. Moammar was one of the terrors among the supervisors. He was an old man who would smoke to no end, so his voice was deep and had a lot of bass to it, like the rumbling of a volcano. More often than not, the students would literally drive him mad, because although he was scary, he was also pretty maleable. He had a low flashpoint, but he wouldn't send people to Mr. Andari just for ticking him off, unlike Mrs. Faysan. I've seen Mr. Moammar on more than one occassion nearly hit some of the problematic local students, although he never went all the way, because it was against school policy.

He would go up into their faces with his fist clenched around a red pen he always carried, and he would yell something along the lines of "YA WALA!" which means "Boy!" as a warning. Sort of like, "You wouldn't like me when I'm angry, boy!"

But Mr. Moammar wasn't all that bad. He had his bad days and his good days, and having to control the mindless rabble that was the crowd that regularly got detention, I suppose I can't blame him for evolving a predatorial attitude. My dealings with him were minimal, God be praised, but I have seen him smile, which is, by the way, quite a sight. Mr. Moammar, smiling and joking with the same local students whose posteriors were about to feel his boot a few days ago. With me, he neither yelled nor smiled, for which I was very thankful.

Mr. Thomas was one of the newer supervisors. What his function was toward the beginning, I have no idea. He was famous for wandering pointlessly from corridor to corridor during classes and breaks, and it was obvious that he landed the job initially from a contact he had somewhere in school, most probably Mrs. Faysan.

He was famous for a phrase he would use very frequently. When a student was in his clutches, and the student was bad, almost like the secret police would say, "I don't know what we're going to do with you," he would say "What to do?" in his broken English. He was, no doubt, another one of those French-educated Lebanese people with both the courage and the compelling need to work full-time at an English institution.

They made a song about his "What to do?" epithet at some point, of which only two lines I can clearly remember:

"Tommy's there for you,
When you donno what to do."

There were more lines, a complete song, I believe. But that was all I had ever heard in my time there, and I was satisfied with that. Because although Mr. Thomas probably had nothing to do the first few years of his job (and he was made fun of to no end during that time), he later went into the IT department at school, and became a rather important person.

In fact, me and some friends had the pleasure of working under him on one of his projects to design a computer-based multiple choice testing system.

Employee turnover at our school was probably one of the highest in the world, second perhaps to companies that hire daily labours. There was one supervisor whose presence I can remember for about two of the three semesters of a year. He was either an Irishman or a Scot (hard to tell between the two for me), very pleasant and fun to work with. It's hard to tell under what capacity he was hired, but whatever that capacity was, he only lasted about 6 months.

There were others, who came and went throughout the years. Mr. Thomas, Mr. Moammar and Mr. Adnan are the ones that were there the year I graduated.

Naqaanaq and Dew

The school environs adapted with the horde of upper-class, money-heavy patrons of our school with numerous small cafes and sandwich shops to siphon off any disposable income the students may have had. They catered to a wide range of the student's needs. First, there was Cafe Ole, famous for packs of fries, admittedly quite tasty, but with distastefully high price tags. Then there was Abu Haniffa Grocery which was established to cater to the needs of the residentials around Choueifat more than the students that went there. They sold more Polo, Jelly Cokes, Bubblegum, than cooked food, and in the way of real food, more okra, sweet pumpkin, cabbages, tomatoes and eggplant, fresh off the field than anything else.

Then came the Naqaanaq Place. I'm not particularly sure what the word Naqaanaq means in Arabic, or if it is an Arabic word at all. I was told it literally means "chicken frank," but I'm not so sure. Whatever it means to humanity, it means nothing more than an incredibly tasty sandwich to me.

As with many sites of importance and significance, this sandwich shop was so good and sold such tasty sandwiches, that the real name eludes me at the time of this writing. It was "Something Refreshments" but I just can't remember it, because it was called the Naqaanaq Place by us. From here, we bought our Naqaanaqs.

What, pray tell, are Naqaanaqs? They're delicious sandwiches made in toasted hotdog buns, with chicken franks, some french fries, ketchup and a horridly unhealthy helping of mayonnaise. Why do they call it a Naqaanaq? I'm not particularly sure, but it's probably the same reason why they called a milkshake "Titanic." I never had myself a Titanic, but I do remember seeing the name under the beverages section of their menu. No doubt, their others sandwiches bore equally fascinating and mind-boggling names, some of them rip-offs, probably not consistently of Oscar-winning movies, but of other well-known, easily recongisable, super-hyped products of mainstream media.

I respected the Naqaanaq place because of their consistent sandwich wrapping technique, which was flawless and remained consistent for the 2 years I remained a customer of their shop. The bottom end would usually be twisted shut like they seal candy, forming a good, solid base, and the top end left open. Peering down the top of the sandwich barrel, the sandwich stared right back at you, the chicken frank usually tantalizing visible, coated with some mayonnaise that continued out of view into the middle of the hotdog bun.

I consistently tried teaching Shahed, the smart kid we all copied make-do homework off of, to unwrap the sandwich according to the style I pioneered, but he insisted on mangling the beautiful thing. I can't go into the details of the technique, because it would be too much work describing it, and besides, it's intellectual property. In any case, as with most things with me, I took unwrapping sandwiches to a whole new level of anal-retentiveness with the Naqaanaqs.

After a long, hard day at school, trying to decipher French Chemistry or assuming the fetal position in fear of Mrs. Faysan's colourful webcast Physics lectures, we sometimes had after-school study sessions to attend as well, which were compulsory for those of us that failed AMS examinations, something I did quite a bit in my first semester of Grade 11. So, we would all trudge along to the Naqaanaq Place, walk in, place our order with a brief "Two Naqaanaq", emphasized insultingly, in retrospect, with two raised fingers, and go buy ourselves a cold, green-bottled, classic, Mountain Dew which was only available from the Abu Haniffa grocery, and sit around, waiting for our Naqaanaqs to come.

Sometimes I would ask my parents to collect me late from exams, so that I could enjoy some Naqaanaq and Dew with my friends.

The year before I left, a new sandwich store opened, no doubt to capitalize on more hungry AMS failures like myself. It was called, interestingly enough, Ghuwaifat, which rhymed ever so coincidentally with Choueifat, no doubt the shop's prime source of customers. Good to know Mrs. Faysan's policies were chucking out so many after-schoolers, it was actually boosting the economy around our school.

The Student Life Organisation

The Student Life Organisation, also known as the SLO, was, in my opinion, the biggest farce on campus, second to none other than French-educated Chemistry teachers. In my opinion, they should cut the crap and rename the SLO "Choueifat Gestapo."

Of decidedly negligible benefit to students, it served as nothing more than a gathering point of the administration's top chronies among the students. They exploited the ambition of otherwise intelligent young boys and girls to sell their souls to the administration's personal obsession with tracking down ridiculously over-burdened students who exhibited the slightest hint of disobedience.

The SLO actively maintained at least one or two students from every class who would report friends of theirs for cheating on the outrageously over-rated AMS exams. No doubt, cheating is a terrible offense, but it's one thing to properly track down miscreants and punish them, and something completely different to acquire names from informants just to track them down and superficially "suspend" them for a day.

Many students were caught through this policy of plain-clothed informants, some of them from among the upper strata of the class. Come university application time, however, nobody's records had any mention of these incidents. Personally, I'm glad they didn't put these incidents into students' records, because I don't really think what they did was so big a crime, but surely the administration knows better than me, someone at the receiving end of their policies.

In Grade 11, we had three weekly exams, every week (thus the name) which were full-fledged written exams with or without a multiple choice component. In addition to three hours of weekly exams, we had no less than five AMSs with their corresponding ridiculously high standards and bad implementation, which amounted to a total of 8 tests every week. Any student faced with these, coupled with the numerous external exams that we take, including SAT I, SAT II, APs and A-Levels, the workload is simply unacceptably high.

Students were driven to cheat, and the administration hunted them down, almost for sport, "suspend" them for periods at a time with no mention of these episodes in their academic records, which they knew were exemplary compared to students in other schools. Fed by a greed for more high-brass university acceptances, the administration would blatantly lie about students who partook in the hideous crime of cheating.

But if the administration didn't mention these incidents in their records, then surely the administration didn't think very highly of the offense. If they didn't think very highly of an offense they basically drove their students to, why install such oppressive policies to start with and initiate a fruitless game of cat and mouse?

The SLO played the cat in this story. Apart from that, it was also the central headquarters of the school's money-saving scheme, also known as the extracurricular point system, AMS-repeats and Thursday classes (so maybe in addition to "Choueifat Gestapo" it could also have been called "Choueifat SS"), and the ever-interesting SLOGA, the Student Life Organisation General Assembly, the yearly meeting that I once wasted a weekend on.

The Necessary Vice

Mornings in Abu Dhabi were really beautiful. The morning dew would render windshields literally unusable without a strong wipe, the humidity would make little patches of condensation on the car windows where the air vents were directed, and late winter sunrises meant the sky would usually be a dull grey by the time I got to school.

As beautiful as the mornings were in Abu Dhabi, between 7.30am when most of us arrived at the Table Tennis area, and 7.55am when the first bell rang, we ignored and defiled the morning air by shamelessly copying homework.

I can positively say that I had personally never copied a letter of homework before I hit Grade 11. By the end of Grade 12, though, my class and I had homework-copying down to an art form.

By the end of Grade 12, homework copying was an every-morning occurrence. Over-burdened with largely needlessly advanced schoolwork, it was no longer the aberration and abomination it was during our earlier, more naive years when we took schoolwork seriously. It was stream-lined to a point where it didn't take much to pull off a successful copying session in the morning, and no matter what the assignment was, it never took more than 5 minutes. All you needed was a diligent student and willing friend.

"Hey, did you do the Physics homework?"
"Yeah, sure..."

Without having to ask further, the fellow would pull out his notebook, and like a swarm of flies descending upon a fetid slab of meat, we got about our business. The primary source material would usually be put in the centre of a table tennis table so that others could crowd around it in a semi-circle, their notebooks laid on the edge of the table. Hunched over and setting the supplier of the material on watch against one of the wandering "supervisors" set loose on us to weed out the copiers, we got about our business in the most professional manner such business could ever be attended to.

If a supervisor swooped in on us, and they did from time to time, the fellow who supplied us the homework and didn't have to be bent over an uncomfortable table under visual cover of other people's bags, would notify us.

"Hey, guys. Someone's coming."

Immediately, 7 or 8 guys, hunched over at the side of a table tennis table rise up and look around casually, one of them takes his copybook and walks off in a carefully plotted tangent that brings him back to the table in exactly eight steps, frowning deeply as if he were revising something, one of them flips pages and shifts his weight casually as if looking for a piece of information at the tip of his tongue he just can't find, another one with the skill of a master magician, tucks the source notebook under his own as he bites his pencil and ponders deeply over what may, in five more steps, be the Grand Unified Theory.

The problem, however, inevitably came down to sheer crunch of time. Time waited for no man, even if he was copying homework to avert the wrath of Mrs. Faysan, the terror of our school, the prime source of undoable homework, oppressive policies of weekend study sessions, and general unpleasantry. Choueifat, however, had tremendous selection pressures, and in the true spirit of Darwin, by the end of Grade 12, most of us could copy down 5 pages worth of arabic numerals, mathematical notation and greek letters in under 3 minutes. That's more than a page a minute.

Toward the end of Grade 12, with numerous external exams on the horizon that had little to do with the super-advanced rocket science we were doing in class, when the going got really rough and the crunch seemed inhuman, even the diligent smart kids stopped doing their homework. Rest assured, though, the homework was religiously allotted day after day, and we dispassionately brushed it aside night after night.

The following mornings were among the most memorable and fondly remembered copying sessions of my academic career.

We would place Shahed, a brilliantly intelligent young man on the far left end of the bench. He was the key, the only guy who could both solve to any appreciable extent the problems assigned in under 10 minutes, and have the sense of humor to not bother doing it at home. He began by drawing the diagram and writing out the basic equations with which to solve the problem.

To his right would be the rest of us. A would copy off Shahed, B would copy off A, C would copy off B, D would copy off C, and so on and so forth.

Copying homework is a lossy process. It's not as simple as one may think. Students and teachers in Choueifat underwent a sort of co-evolution, not dissimilar to the Darwinian concept of a physiological arms race between predator and prey. As students devised new ways of circumventing the outrageously oppressive system, teachers, likewise (namely Mrs. Faysan) developed keener skills on homing in on miscreants. Having an identical copy of a person's work risked detection under Mrs. Faysan's hawk-eyes.

As such, students used creativity to alter the work as they went along. A range of methods were employed: an extra equation here, scribble marks on the diagram at certain points showing we put our pen on a point several times while we were thinking hard the night before, rearranging the equations, not copying intermediate steps, using different variables and conventions.

After five guys of "skipping intermediate steps," little is left in the way of recognizable science by the end of it. By the time the information was transmitted to the poor sap sitting at the far end, the work was understandably unintelligible, a hodgepodge of greek letters, arabic numerals and mathematical notation.

We didn't mind, though. That hodgepodge was good hodgepodge, because we engineered it to look good; that was our job. The equations didn't have to work (the problems were usually impossibly difficult), they had to make the sell. In large part it wasn't dissimilar to cooking in a ship in the 15th century: it never mattered what was in the food, as long as it tasted good, and it's not like the crew had any taste left after 9 months of hard tack and gruel.

Unexpected Holidays

Living in the United Arab Emirates was an interesting experience for me.

I was always very grateful for the unexpected holidays we received when members of the royal family died. Such gratitude, however, is easily misplaced, as happened with me during my latter years when before one of my usual weekly exams, I was actively hoping the president would die so I wouldn't have to do the exam the next day.

It was always a joke between those of us that saw the irony in students celebrating a holiday the government officially labelled as a day of mourning. Personally, I still don't see a justification for calling a national holiday on anybody's death, and so I will disregard any "bleak" aspect of this holiday for the rest of this entry.

The beauty of these holidays was how unexpected they were. On some occassions, the government wouldn't get the chance to notify newspapers on time to make the announcement in the morning paper, and so nobody would know about it. One such case happened when I was in Grade 9 or 10, and the local newspapers couldn't get the word out so they informed the schools personally, probably. The administration got their cleaners and other staff to line up at all the entrances to the school to stop cars and give them the good bad news.

It's an extremely refreshing experience, when you're depressed having to wake up in the morning, planning which period you would have to spend doing homework for the following period or revising some God-awful French Auto-Dictee, and then voila. No more school for the day! And you're up early, so more hours of fun!

I remember on that particular day, I saw students dancing on the grass isles of the parking lot. Me, I wasn't dancing. But one thing's for sure: I wasn't mourning either.

When Sheikh Rashid died, the ruler of Dubai, I was still in Falcon's Private School, the school I was in for kindergarten and Grades 1 through 3, and we got four whole days off. Wow! Four days!

We were watching the funeral ceremony on national television where the entire royal family got together, and my brother mentioned dreamily without looking away from the television, "Look at all those Sheikhs. Imagine, if someone dropped a bomb here, we'd get the whole year off..."

Environmental Prefects

Memory blurs this particular aspect of TT area life. I can't rightly recall much about the environmental prefect, partly perhaps because the phenomenon largely died off as me and my friends hit senior status in the TT area, which meant we were less badgered by the over-zealous seventh grader that got his new prefect badge.

The environmental prefect was in charge of garbage. You heard me. Garbage. Just like most of the Student Life Organisation, they handled garbage (in one form or another) to achieve the SLO's primary goal: to alleviate the financial burden of the school. In this case, to reduce the need of, or possibly eliminate, cleaners.

Breaks and Lunchtimes would take their toll on the school campus, with students littering their numerous sandwich wrappings, juice cartons and other such superfluous paraphernalia, and so the environmental prefect's duty was to make sure people didn't litter. They were "insiders," plain-clothed policemen, perhaps. If anybody littered the prefect came down on them like a locust.

The trick, however, was to see someone commit the crime, which is, needless to say, an extremely difficult and tedious task because it requires constant observation. On some occassions, the environment prefect would probably pass by a group of people sitting around, eating and come back a while later when they're done and see sandwich wrappers and juice cartons on the floor. What would follow is an extremely entertaining conversation between the prefect and his victim, who is, in most cases, guilty of littering:

"Pick that up."
"What?"
"Pick that up."
"It's not mine."
"I don't care, just pick it up and throw it in the trash bin."
"No."
"What?"
"I said no!"
"You have to."
"Why?"
"Because I'm a prefect, and I'm telling you to."
"I don't care what you are, I'm not picking up trash. It's not mine."
"I'll report you."
"Go ahead."

Usually nobody got reported. I don't think even the SLA took the whole idea very seriously. It was probably just a "shot in the dark" attempt, some new guy probably came up with the bright idea and they tried it and figured it just didn't work, but didn't have the heart to remove it, with all the seventh graders hanging on the bell of their office all day, wanting a job.

And usually, the prospective garbage-man that the prefects victimized were normally not responsible for the specific piece of garbage the prefect wanted in the trash can, but rest assured, some piece of garbage lying around there was his. Litter doesn't come from nowhere.

As my time in that school wore on, I could see some of the environmental prefects give up on the whole get-students-to-clean-up-after-themselves approach. I vividly remember one of my very good friends who happened to be head of the Chess Club and also a "senior" environmental prefect, going around picking stuff up. Not full-time, like a cleaner, but as he walked around the TT area, just notice a wrapper for the straw that came with the usual Al-Ain Orange Drink or Mango Drink, pick it up and chuck it.

I suppose in popular perception, environmental prefects were the bottom of the food chain at school. That would probably be why, for a short while, I was one myself, though I never had any "conversations," and generally did a poor job of it. I just needed the points.

French Classes

Adapted from author's personal log, entry date circa summer 2003. Names have been changed for privacy.

French was compulsory in our school. They divided students into different levels of difficulty, based on a student's familiarity of the language. French "High" was for advanced speakers, where most of my latter-day friends were, French "Beginners" was for the novices and French Low for intermediates like me and a handful of other unwilling souls.

I hated French with a passion. The textbooks were extremely colourful with comics and pictures and characters, I suppose to attract students and make learning "fun." I didn't quite appreciate that. The colourfulness and "fun" aspect of it insulted my intelligence and served as a discouragement. I was mature enough to realise that comics aren't always for kids and pictures and fun stuff doesn't make a total drag like learning French any more interesting. I'm just lazy. But true enough, I wasn't interested in having fun while learning French. They're oil and water, they don't mix. I believed if they believed in teaching French, they should just teach French.

The books were so colorful and touchy and feely and “fun” that most of the real French to be learnt was from our copybooks, stuff the teacher made us write down. Now, I'm not one to be renowned for my consistency in attendance and attentiveness. Having to write things down in my copybook would often interrupt my thoughts, and so my French copybook was somewhat similar to the dental profile of an ice hockey player: full of gaps.

Our teacher was a particularly clucky woman by the name of Beded. She both loved and hated me, for I was that kind of student. First term was wonderful, she made everything so easy, I got good grades. Then came second term and she realized my true face when she turned up the heat just a little bit. I was lazy and uninspired, with absolutely no interest whatsoever in the subject. Let’s face it. Studying off a copybook analogous to a hockey player’s smile wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

Once, we were told to write an essay about nature and the seasons in our own country. Well, I’d been growing up on Bengali culture, where we’re so proud of six whole seasons (the specifics of which elude me till today), I couldn’t resist putting something like that into my essay! When she was handing our homework back, she held my submission back for a moment. In front of the whole class, she said, “I understand you want to add something interesting into your essays, but six seasons?” She glared at me for a moment and turning her gaze away, passed my essay to me.

Poor me, the whole class was snickering and laughing. How could I tell her, it’s true! Well, I’m sure she’d believed me in some way, but my absolute lack of sentence construction ability in French rather ruined the supporting sentences. My friend, Kamal, who used to sit in front of me then said, “Six seasons? What, the four seasons and two flood seasons?” Rrrright.

Of course, I wasn’t the only person she hated. There was the guy sitting next to me. Another totally uninterested and uninspired soul, Nithin. The boy was forced to transfer to my school, because his father who was rolling in cash at the time wanted to give his son the best education. Unfortunately, Nithin didn’t share the same ambitions as daddy dearest, and hated the school with a passion. What skills as a bully he had back in Indian School were being used on him at our school. Poor fellow was bullied into seclusion, and he could care as much about French as Saddam cared about the Kurds.

There was the time Nithin and I decided we’d challenge one another to lift each other’s chairs. I was huge at the time, a whopping centurion, a 100-kilo behemoth. Nithin, a skinny Indian, a bare 60 kilos was no match for me, so I’d regularly ruin his day by lifting the side of his chair closest to me, especially when he’d be writing something important in French class, like when he’d be writing letters to his cousin in India (yes, that’s the closest to ‘important work’ Nithin would get in French class).

One fine day, I decided to lift his chair while my teacher was writing something on the board. With all my strength, I heaved on his chair real subtle-like under the table, out of view, when my teacher unexpectedly turned around to check her book. Unknowingly, in my enthusiasm to ruin Nithin’s day, I invested so much energy into the task that a look of extreme exertion was painted across my face. My teacher couldn’t help but notice the quick transition between excruciating effort and casual attention on my face in her peripheral vision.

I spent the rest of the term sitting alone, in the corner.