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 PE for this class 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.
Note that it was only the boys who were engaging in this disorderly behaviour, as girls (in the Singapore of my days, certainly in my family) were brought up not to behave like fishwives.
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. (Yes, that was his real surname.)
Mr Wee might be 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 (I mean for students to be bigger in size than himself, rather than not difficult for him to deal with them, which was the case, too, because of his position). (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 you were obviously 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. Those of you who had started or who took part in this are also irresponsible, because you had deprived the innocent parties of a fun session.”
Then I sat down and started marking homework, 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, https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2012/02/disruptive-student-singapore.html.)
(Singapore, 1973)
PS (29 March 2025): I wonder if anyone reading this blog might recognise any of the students here, or even themselves? They would now be 67! I would love to hear from them (in the comment box below), with their contact email address for me to get in touch with them, just to see what they are like now.
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