Here are some class photos taken during my CCHS days that I've just dug out from a dusty stash. I like to see how much we've all grown over the past 9-10 years; both on Facebook and in real life. Like how the super tomboyish Ah Long's transformed into such a lady now, or how ZL's lost so much weight after secondary school, or how much Boss' not called Xiao Pang any longer... hehe good times. I hope everyone's doing well these days...
sec one - all so cute and innocent *ahem*
No secondary two picture, didn't buy it because I wasn't in the photo; even though we had a really good-looking relief teacher in it instead of everyone's favourite Mr D.
sec three - fiercest teacher I've ever had; kept me on my toes during chemistry lab sessions. i hate to say this, but she might've been the reason why i was so scared of chemistry!
sec four - someone heard my pleas, and gave our class a much friendlier chemistry teacher this time round!
I'm not sure if anyone else's noticed, but the skirts (at the front row) got noticeably shorter as we progressed from secondary one to four. Hur hur hur. Vanity and girls... Oh and the shoes too; they 'legalized' track shoes after secondary one, I think.
If you were from one of my classes back then, I hope you had as much joy looking and groaning at these photos as I did.
Anyhow, #13 - Someone I wish could forgive me, can be seen in all 3 pictures that I've posted up there. To the people who were in my classes, I'm not going to point out exactly who it is though, I'm damned sure you can infer from what I'm going to say next. To everyone else, you probably don't need to know who it is.
#13 is a girl in my classes, who was ostracized and picked on by nearly everybody else merely because of some bodily issues that she faced. We didn't say it in her face that we had problems with her, but talked about them behind her back, even at the expense of making her look really bad. Everyone was just nasty, and whenever we were assigned to work in a same group with this poor girl, people condemned her right from the start even before she was able to do anything.
Sad to say, but such is the effect of peer pressure and conformance in schools back then, and most probably these days too. There wasn't a need to question whether what I did was right or wrong, I went ahead blindly with what everyone else usually did - because it was accepted as a norm, and since everybody does that, there's no harm in me doing it either, right? Nobody tried to put themselves in her shoes to think about what it felt like, being ostracized and mocked at constantly, day in and day out. And even when she does something that you feel is awfully nice, you keep it to yourself and not say a thing about it to your friends because everyone else feels that nothing she does will be enough to redeem herself, even when she was never at fault to begin with.
It was plain unjustness (such an irony that I was in the classes 1/2 Justice) and we really ought to have known better back then, but we didn't, and we never thought about the consequences of our actions - basically, ruining her secondary school years that were supposed to have some of the greatest moments in her life. I feel like a moron/awful and terribly ashamed of myself as I'm typing this, but I am truly apologetic and sorry for being such a shitty person back then. I understand that no amount of Sorrys will ever right this wrong, and even though we really don't deserve her forgiveness, I hope she's got a much bigger heart than us (I know I'll never forgive someone if they did this to me) and is not too mad at us anymore.
It might be too early to say/conclude, but I hope to do my best to prevent such things from happening to my students in future.
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