Welcome to high school, where your teachers’ expectations of you are higher than your parents’ could ever be.
Why do you think it’s called high school? The only thing that doesn’t get higher is your height, since you’re stuck lugging around what might as well be an elephant instead of a school bag stuffed with books you’ll never use in class because all you need is your tablet and worksheets, which apparently makes you shorter because gravity hates you and your bag. Then, all your friends make fun of you for having a centimetre deficiency.
If that previous paragraph felt like getting hit with a ton of bricks, that’s exactly what being a high school student feels like.
Academic stress, social pressures, acne – oh, don’t even get me started on acne. You get hurled into a confusing and unfamiliar pre-adult world when you step into freshman year, and now your face decides it wants to become a strawberry plantation. And you live in Malaysia, where it’s hot all year round, which does wonders for encouraging breakouts all over your skin. How delightful.
So, after you finish wrestling with your uniform and doing the 47-step skincare routine you saw on YouTube a week ago, you finally make it to school, though not without incident. You must’ve angered some celestial deity this morning, because your bladder thought it was a great idea to start bursting in the middle of a traffic jam on the way to school.
You had to walk into class doing a little “holding-my-pee” dance just so you could put your bags down and hightail it to the nearest restroom. Your classmates were merciful enough to not mention it to you, but you can already hear them jeering at you in your head as you slam the stall door shut and find sweet relief.
You’ve done your business. You leave the restroom with your hands still wet – don’t bother with the hand dryer, because it’s usually broken, and don’t even think about tissue because some girl keeps using half the roll to wipe her hands every time, and now, they’ve completely run out.
Of course, the cleaners are missing in action and hate their job just as much as you hate being a student, so you have no other choice anyway. Finally, you can head back to class.
The first period of the day has you meeting your teacher who tends to talk big in front of your parents at parent-teacher conferences, when he does barely anything during class. He assigns you a mountain of homework that could rival Everest itself.
Your second lesson is with the teacher who only treats students well when complimented or flattered with kind words and the occasional chocolate bar, whose mood swings are often more unpredictable than your own pubescent hormone-driven moments of emotional whiplash. She spends the first 15 minutes of class shouting at everyone because she isn’t a morning person and she hasn’t yet had her morning coffee, even though the cup is right in front of her.
The bell rings for recess and you beeline for the cafe with your friends. Today feels like a good day for a sandwich … a RM5 sandwich with a layer of egg-mayo, thinner than your single-page exam answers between two slices of depressing white sponge, which might not seem particularly expensive, until you realise that you could get the entire loaf of bread at a much lower price.
The line is unbearably long and by the time you reach the counter, your 25-minute break is over.
If you’re anything like me, RM5 is way too much money to spend on a soggy sandwich (prepared by unwashed hands that have touched a dustbin, mind you) after almost half an hour of queuing. So, you bring your own cheaper, much tastier sandwich from home, and get to spend your 25 minutes eating instead of standing in line until your legs cramp.
End of recess! It’s time to go back to class. You’re full, your homemade sandwich was loaded with garlic so you enjoyed it immensely and you drank lots of water to wash out the aftertaste.
Just one tiny problem: your bladder. Again. Uh-oh, it sounds like your stomach wants to join in on the fun too, this time.
Under most circumstances, this wouldn’t be an issue at all since you could just raise your hand and the teacher would grant you permission … but not in this case. For the third period of the day, you’re in that teacher’s class. The Anti-Toilet Teacher’s class.
No matter how urgently you need to tinkle, the Anti-Toilet Teacher will do everything in his power to hold you back and make your class a living hell, even if you start “holding-my-pee-AND-poo” dancing in front of him. He tells you he can’t let students loiter around the restrooms during class hours because it has a negative impact on their future.
All you want to do is survive the rest of the day with clean underwear. The school hired a sadist to teach you, as if Mathematics being a compulsory subject wasn’t torture enough.
Rewind to recess. In the amount of time you have left after you finish your food, always be sure to pay a quick visit to the restroom so you don’t fall victim to the Anti-Toilet Teacher in the next hour. That little pit-stop is actually a life-saver; a dignity-saver, too.
In the unfortunate scenario that you make a rookie mistake and happen to forget your recess restroom time, there’s only one way out. Not going to the restroom before class is already losing the battle – now, you have no hope of winning the war. Shed the little dignity you have left and shout, at the top of your lungs: “I HAVE EXPLOSIVE DIARRHOEA!”
This method is tried and true, tested by experts whose names are all Aedlycia, and has a 100 per cent guaranteed success rate regardless of the target. Almost all the time, even the most tenacious Anti-Toilet Teachers will be too stunned to form a coherent response. This is your chance to make your great escape to the sanctuary of the restroom and let it all out.
God is testing you. You must be one of His strongest soldiers, because all the stalls are under maintenance, occupied, or bidet-less, except for one. The enemy of all bulky uniform skirts: the squat toilet, a glorified hole in the ground. For any modern mind accustomed to sitting in comfort while doing a number two, installing squat toilets in school restrooms is like showing iPhones to cavemen. Squat toilet users also definitely never skip Leg Day.
After an intense lower body workout, you head back to class. You sit through the remainder of the lesson under the scrutiny of your Anti-Toilet Teacher’s bombastic side-eye, which suddenly doesn’t feel nearly half as bad as what you have to endure next with your fourth period language teacher.
Her prattling spans the entire hour – if you’re lucky, she gets so immersed in her “back in my day” TED Talk that she completely forgets that the homework’s supposed to be handed in today, or she has an epiphany and shovels another truckload of essay questions onto your class that she wants to see on her desk tomorrow morning. Before the first period. You don’t even have class with her tomorrow!
And when you do complete the work on time (thanks to a begrudging all-nighter), she deducts your marks for spelling. Spelling. You’ve never spelt a word wrong your whole life. The last time you did was in fourth grade, when you threw a tantrum over missing one of the ‘g’ in “skullduggery”.
“I didn’t deduct your marks because you made spelling mistakes,” she says. “You spelt everything correctly, I just think you could’ve used more impressive words. Yeah, I know that’s technically part of the marks for language and style.” Then what in the nine hells does it have to do with spelling?
That’s not even the worst part. I’ve barely gotten to the teachers who will throw a fit if a student so much as breathes louder than them, or the traditionalist teachers who are so exam-oriented that they suck the life out of their students and absolutely forbid them from having fun.
They do this to us poor teenagers for years, and all for what? A lengthy means to a fleeting end; an exam lasts less than two hours, just so they can judge my decade’s worth of knowledge with only one letter of the alphabet? They’d consider me unintelligent for forgetting under time constraints that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but who’s the real unintelligent one here?
Phew, that was only the beginning of my grievances with high school. As a graduate, I’ll still remember these moments fondly, no matter how ill I speak of them. Every experience is different, though – so good luck, freshie!
To give the younger generation an avenue to express themselves, Twentytwo13 has a dedicated space called Young Voices. If you are a young writer (aged 17 and below) and would like your article published on our news website, send your contribution to editor@twentytwo13.my.
