When I think of something, somehow, it leads to another. And another. And another.

And another.

It was Good Friday and Father was giving a dialogue (please, don’t ask what was it about) and I was sitting on the sofa with my three younger siblings with my knees on my chest when I noticed my toenails.

I don’t like cutting my nails coz they tend to chip and I end up peeling them off, making my nails rather uneven and terrible looking. So I started thinking about filing my nails. As I thought about that, I started thinking about my Design and Technology (D & T) classes.

Back in lower secondary school, I remember making an acrylic holder to put knick knacks and we had to file and polish the sides to make them look smooth and shiny. As I thought about the classes, I was reminded of Mr. Lee, our D & T teacher.

And I felt sorry for him.

He was one of the few male teachers found in my school (since I come from an all-girls convent school) and I can say that most of his students do not like him and find him rather irritating.

As a student, I see him as a mumbling teacher, who is unable to pronounce his words properly and he has an atrocious grammer. He was tall, thin, wears spectacles, and has a moustache. One vivid memory of him was the sight of his extremely yellow teeth.

But as I see him from his side, I feel really sorry for him and sorry for what I’ve thought about him and sorry that we don’t really like him.

As I thought about D & T and Mr. Lee, I am reminded of this incident that happened when I was in sec two.

Practically everyone cheats during D & T tests. The only ones I know who doesn’t cheat are the really goody-two-shoes kinds and the quiet-and-nerdy-darn-smart-asses kinds.

What happened was this Normal Academic level girl, Pravinda or something—I can’t remember her name—went into Mr. Lee’s room, hoping to find the answers to this test paper that the whole level were about to take that week.

Any girl who gets caught is a fool. And a fool she was. If I got my facts—or rumours—correct, it was Mr. Lee himself who caught her. That fool was also a sneak. She put the whole seconday two level into trouble when she insisted that everyone cheated anyway.

What a sneaky fool.

So what happened was that it turned out to be a big hoo-ha. The vice principal that time, Ms. Jennifer Loh—nicknamed J Loh, (a claimed good friend of mine by dear Soffie sis) told every girl in our level to be honest and admit whether we had cheated during a D & T test.

Everyone besides those goody-two-shoes kinds and the quiet-and-nerdy-darn-smart-asses kinds admitted to it. But really, the teaching staff couldn’t possibly put almost 360 girls into this tiny cramped Responsible Thinking Class* (RTC). So the decision was to have a mass test in the hall, making it seem like an important exam than a normal class test.

All of us had to drag our chairs and tables from our classes to the hall on the second floor and for my class, being Sec 2.4, we were at the top floor. All of us were not really happy test takers that day, I tell you.

And all these just came back to me just because my dad was having a dialogue. But I was listening. Really! What? You don’t believe me? 🙁

* RTC was this programme used in my school to substitute detention. It is a really dumb programme that I think, if I’m not wrong, is still very active in my secondary school. What happens is that if you do something wrong, like say, talking in class, the teacher (depending on whether he/she is nice or not) sends you to RTC where you sit in this room, accompanied by the RTC teacher (whatever her name is) and you fill in this form where it asks you stuff like “Why did you talk in class?” and “Do you think that Mr./Ms./Mrs./Mdm. So-and-So did the right thing to send you to RTC?” and “Are you going to continue talking in class?” and “What happens if you come back to RTC because you talked in class again?”

The questions are that of what I remember. I’ve never been to RTC besides the D & T test issue and I’ve never seen the form before. I only knew and remembered what my friends who went to that dreaded class told me.