Pandemonium in the classroom (Singapore)

One of the classes I was given to teach as a 19-year-old temporary teacher was a mixed (sex/gender) class of 14-year-olds, and the subject was PE (Physical Education).  

The weather in Singapore means that sports activities generally take place early in the morning or late in the afternoon, so this class’s PE was at 5:30pm, the last session in their timetable before the flag-lowering ceremony at 6pm.

I turned up one day to find that World War Three had broken out:  most of the boys were fencing with each other using foot-long rulers, tossing rubber erasers at each other, using rubber bands to catapult some other form of missiles (balls of paper, e.g.), chasing each other round the classroom.

My immediate response, from my Induction (as one would call it these days), was to go straight to the Deputy Headmaster’s Office and fetch the Deputy Headmaster, Mr Wee.  

Mr Wee might’ve been a LITTLE chap even more vertically challenged than I, but he had a BIG cane.  And a very assertive manner, too, indeed, when it came to dealing with miscreant students, even those bigger in size than himself — which was not difficult.  (Those were the days when authority was respected.  I don’t know what it’s like today.)

The guilty parties who’d started the pandemonium were identified by their peers (for I wasn’t there at the outset) and marched off to Mr Wee’s office.

In the meantime, I told the rest of the class to start packing up, which they should’ve done before I arrived to take them out for their PE lesson.  Then I made them stand up, holding their school bags on their heads, and proceeded to tell them about what they’d missed out on: “I had come today with all sorts of new games for you to play, which you’d expressed an interest in last week, thinking we were going to have such fun.  I had expected you to be all packed and eager to go out to the fields after having been cooped up in the classroom for half a day.  Instead you were misbehaving, so obviously you were not that interested in these new games.  It’s no loss to me because I can always spend the time marking homework.  It’s your loss because you’re missing out on the fun.”  

Then I sat down and started marking homework silently, all the way until the bell rang for the flag-lowering ceremony.  All this while, the students just stood there with their school bags balanced on their heads.

The following week, I turned up in class to find the students all packed and raring to go out for their PE lesson.  No trouble ever again after that.

(Also read blog entry The disruptive student.)

(Singapore, 1973)