Kampua Talk

That’s it, kids! Holiday’s over! Time to go back to school!

I started work in December, which coincided with the school holiday so there was not much traffic on the road. However, school is starting today and the route that I normally travel to go to work was so jammed that I can virtually imagine a tortoise overtaking a row of a hundred cars so fast at its normal speed.

Sitting in the car, stuck in the jam, I recalled my first days of school every year back when I was still in school. Going to bed the night before was the hardest thing to do because over the holiday, I was so used to sleeping late and waking up late. But a kid gotta do what a kid gotta do, i.e. study hard, get good result, enter a university and get a degree that cannot even assure a job in the future.

Anyway, back to the night before school reopened, I’d set my alarm clock 30 minutes earlier than usual so that I could reach school earlier. So at 5.30am, the alarm went off. One of my hands would automatically reach for that button to stop the alarm clock from screaming while my eyes remained shut. 10 minutes later my body automatically dragged itself to the bathroom to clean up and get ready for school.

The school bag for the first day was always empty except for a pencil and a piece of paper to copy my timetable for the academic year. It was jammed as early as 6.30am. I normally went out at 6.15am to beat the jam and be one of the firsts to reach school so that I could grab the seat at the first or second row near the blackboard. I kiasu, can? I reached school 10 minutes later and discovered that I wasn’t the only one who was thinking of grabbing the front seat!

Almost half of my classmates were earlier than me! Fortunately, some of them were kiasu for another reason. While the rest of us kiasu-for-first-row-in-front were fighting for the front seat, half of the early birds were kiasu for the first row, from the back of the class. I was a few minutes late, so as expected, the first row in front and back were fully occupied! I quickly grabbed the seat in the middle of the second or third row in front.

Satisfied with the seat that I had selected, I sat there waiting for my friends to enter the classroom while people-watching. In my class, the middle part is always the city/town area where the most noisy bunch of us sat. That’s where all the activities happened, and the gossips too! And those at both side and the back of the class was the rural/outskirt area where the quietest girls sat. There wasn’t much activities around the rural area except for some breathing and blinking

So, do you remember your first days when school reopened? Which kiasu are you: first row in front or the back?