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School
By
Mohd. Ghifari Suleiman
The night was
darker and more silent than other nights; I couldn’t sleep as early as
I always sleep. I wasn’t sure why I couldn’t sleep but when the time
had reached 1:00 am, I was desperate to sleep. If I sleep later than
that I’m sure that I’ll be sleepy In school. I wouldn’t want to do
that now that the exams are just in the corner, so I tried my best to
sleep by closing my eyes really tight.
The
next morning I woke up; it was 6:45 am. I thought that I had woken up
late, but then again it saw I was on time. After I took a shower and got
dressed, I went straight to breakfast to catch up on the late dinner
from the night before. Then I just had to wait for my sister to come
down and we’re ready for school.
Luckily
we came to school in time before the assembly started. On that day
school started just as normal as always in the term. The morning started
with two periods of English lessons, I’m not saying that it
shouldn’t start the way it started but the week itself was already
bad. My whole class was already filled with incredible, detailed, full
research projects. But my English teacher came in telling us that
there’s an English project, which was to be completed on the following
week, the same week when most of our other projects were due.
The
most hated thing about the week and the projects was that we had to
complete all projects by the following week, which meant that, we had
less than a week to finish 7 projects. Later that day we were assigned
an art project which made it even more a working weekend for each and
everyone of us. But luckily our art project wasn’t due until the end
of the month. Then again we still had 7 other projects to deal with.
Everyone in my class was still complaining about all the assignments
that we’ve been getting. We had no other choice but to do all of them.
Of course no one dared to ask any of the teachers for an extension of
our projects because all the teachers didn’t want to hear any reasons
why we couldn’t do their assignments
Luckily
for us the week ended well, meaning to say that on Friday we only had to
copy notes given by the teachers. I had already planned for my friend to
come home with me on that very Friday so that we could get started with
our projects. At first we didn’t know which one we should start with 1st;
then we started planning how our weekend should be with all the projects
to be done. We started with our history project, which was quite a hard
job because we had to search everywhere on the Internet and all through
the encyclopedias. Luckily my friend brought his CD-ROM of an
encyclopedia, which made our job very easy, the both of us had to type
the event or topic which was related to our project then all the
information’s that the program had to offer us. We took whole two days
just to finish our history work. But my friend was not in my other group
work. So thanks to that I had to keep calling my Literature Project
group member to talk about our summary on the chapters.
But
at least all of us managed to finish quite a few projects during the
weekend. I still haven’t started on my Malay homework. I was planning
to finish all my homework by the weekends but I didn’t know that it
would take more than a whole day of research just to do one topic. I was
just my luck that my Literature partner had more free time compared to
me, so he decided to finish up all the summaries on the chapters given
to us by the teacher. On Sunday night I thought to myself about all the
homework we had, but when I called my brother who was in university in
Australia, I found myself a lot better compared to him. He told me that
he gets assignments every week but his period of time to finish them was
a lot longer than mine with all the subjects all compacted altogether.
But he advised me to just keep my mind free of everything and just
concentrate on the project and do all the research slowly and steadily.
And even one of my teachers had told me that I shouldn’t do any work
while my favorite program is on the television because it would be very
distracting for me, and my mind would be thinking about what is
happening on the current episode of the show.
A
guy once told me “Destruction only occurs when our head is thinking
about more than one thing”. I believe in that advice because it always
happens to me, but now I’m trying not to do everything at the same
time; that’s what I did when I had too many homework projects to do. I
put all the homework in front of me and then, considering which subject
comes to my mind at the current moment, I’ll write on the correct
subject. But I didn’t want to do that to the assignments I gotten that
week because I knew it wouldn’t work, and also I knew that each of the
subjects had its own format. During the weekends I always ended with a
huge headache, which forced me to take two tablets of Panadol, but I
always had time to rest and watch a half-an-hour on television, but it
didn’t do me any good because all the work made my mind focus on the
work all the time. I always though that I couldn’t finish even 2
projects, but with all the hard work my friend and I put in with all the
effort, we managed to finish most of the work in time. After having been
told by my brother about his work in university, on that night, I
dreamed how I was going to survive there with tons of work. The next day
I thought to myself that we all can’t be angry with the teachers all
the time, like students always do, because whatever they give us is
always useful for us to use on the exams and is stored in our brain.
I realized that this was my third term in school, which will
be a very busy term for all the students because it’s the last term of
the year and everyone will have to pass their exams to be promoted to
the next year. All my friends and I agreed that the teachers should give
use more time to complete all our assignments because all the other
classes had more time than my class, which obviously didn’t seem fair
to our class, but as I said no one dared to ask to it. The boys had to
ask because as usual the girls won’t ask because they wouldn’t want
to break the tradition of the girls being the good ones or the only
students in the whole school to finish all the work on the dateline or
even earlier, and of course they didn’t want the reputation that girls
are the only good students while the boys are the only ones getting
scolded.
But
even the boys didn’t want to ask any teachers because, as usual where
another “School Tradition” keeps going on, even when my brother was
still in high school in fact, even when my father was still in high
school, was that even when students argue with the teachers, they always
intend to the argument. That made me figure out why there’s no debate
between students and teachers. But there are always events in a physical
form within those two groups. About debate only the teachers organize
but they never take part. I knew this when I was talking to my brother
on the phone but teachers will always be teachers. They’re adults
who’ve learned things when they were at our age and they’re now in
school to educate us. And also, students will be students by being
naughty, irritating teachers all the time and disobeying them all the
time especially when they ask us to help them. But even then, there are
some teachers that really want to act like a student so that they can
keep the “Student-Teacher’s relationship” clean. Whenever a
teacher scolds a student or even a whole class, I realize that they
always tell us to “GROW UP” but what they don’t know is that all
we students never want to grow up or even, well, not that fast.
From
all this I experienced that with all the works our teachers give us
during high school is just mostly to prepare us for later surprises in
life, especially in collage and high school. But even though jobs are
not really like a student’s daily format of life, there is a
discipline that we learn from school. I’ve learned that no matter how
much we hate a few of our teachers, including our principal, they always
will be our One teacher told me that anyone that teaches us anything,
anytime and anywhere, regardless of how old the student is, agrees with
most teachers in saying, “If you don’t like it, leave it”. And I believe that most experience starts in school.
