Life As A Student

It is just not my character to dwell on the fact that 25% of the JC life is gone. I mean, yeah, it may be gone, so the more we ought to treasure the remaining times we have together instead of mulling over the loss of some of the best times in our lives.

I love being a student. Seriously. That dreadful Math test and the idea of mugging for the Physics promotional exam aside, school life is fantastic. It's a time to widen up your social circle, and you get to acquire not just academic knowledge, but also pick up a skill or two through your CCAs or other enrichment courses.

It is colourful. Much better than to sit in an air-conditioned office and do accounting work day in, day out.

Even the acts of forming extremely exclusive cliques with your very best friends, uniting all those in your friend list to ostracise someone you detest, gossiping about each other's work attitude and the rivalry between you and the person seated next to you who threatens to take away the throne of being "Best in Math" are what that spice up and add zest school life.

Imagine school life without all these, where people just 各家自扫门前雪 and 明哲保身. No spreading of scandals, no competition between top students (or sometimes between the bottom students to avoid finish last) and no "mass-ostracism".

Sorry, I can't.

In retrospect, these components are already part and parcel of our school life to give it the distinctive flavour that distinguishes itself from the rest of our lives, albeit sometimes they can be considered as undesirable in name of the so-called "traditional morality", in which students of my age are assumed to do nothing more than studying and obtaining good grades. Politics and relationships should not even appear in our vocabulary list.

To me, what I loved most are the stereotypes of the different schools (usually the "branded" ones) and the immense rivalry between these schools, in fields such as academics, sports, and the arts. Seriously, I think that all the stereotypes and the rivalry could be featured by the Tourism Baord as "Uniquely Singapore".

No schools in anywhere else outside Singapore would give you the same intensity of rivalry like you would find between the Hwa Chong, Raffles, Victorian and the Anglo-Chinese families respectively, just to list down the more prominent competitions. There are certainly more schools involved in this feud.

And no schools on this planet, besides those situated on this tiny island nation, would get stereotypes, often negative ones, being associated to them.

Chinese High guys have hairy legs, Nanyang girls have long armpit hair (I wonder who would notice this!), SCGS' girls are flamboyant and "tai-tai"s and speak bad Mandarin, RGS' girls and RI boys are snobbish and uppity, ACS' boys are squanderers and they speak worse Mandarin than SCGS' girls, River Valley's and Dunman High's students are "cheena"... etc.

The above-mentioned "traits" are certainly not "laws", that is, they are not always true; but they definitely can qualify as a "theory", that is, true only at times.

Despite the somewhat limited applicability, these streotypes are what that inject the fun in our school life. It is with intense rivalry and immense competition do we get the entire school to go through thick and thin together. And it is through going through the hard time together do we forge strongs bonds and a sense of belonging to our respective alma mater.

And this is precisely how we obtain a marvellous, exciting and colourful school life.

But everything is just skin-deep and myopic.

To many adults, all these rivalry and competitions, inter-school or intra-school, are unhealthy, unnecessary, and sometimes even uncalled for. However, I think that such competitions, with a tinge of politics and back-stabbing peppered here and there, is an important transition phase for teenagers of my age to move from the old, usual "flowery" pacific world of theirs filled with only helium balloons and adorable cartoon characters to what I call a "real" world, where it is filthy, polluted and corrupted with politics, back-stabbing and throat-slashing; where the people are no longer cheery, bubbly and would sing lovely nursery rhymes, but forever power-hungry and blood-thirsty; where you would soon be abandoned by the society if you don't assimilate yourself into the mainstream culture, albeit not one which you appreciate, and embrace it fast enough.

This is the real need for competitions within and amongst schools in Singapore. To gear us for the future and not exactly to make school life more lively.

It's an essential learning stage, and sad to say, it is when we get ourselves equipped so that we can survive in the "real" world.

It's the survival of the fittest. Since "time and tide wait for no man", we ought to learn how to keep up with the pace that the society sets lest being eliminated and ejected from this "game of life", in which the eventual winner would win himself power, wealth, status and perhaps, happiness.

What we do in student life is no transgession. Without them, our future would be doomed. Although we are proud to say that all these acts that we performed in school adds vibrance to our normal, boring school life, this "incentive" is only short-sighted. The long term benefits of our school life may be hard to swallow at first glance, but sad to say, these are the hard facts of life.

P.S What is meant to be a short and simple writing on how much I love my life as a student has evolved itself subconsciously into a (well-balanced?) one that resembles an expositary essay. My apologies.