"Echoes from the Old Schoolyard: Tales of My Naughty Schooldays"

Let me this evening share with my gentle readers vivid recollection that is both heartfelt and humorous, that carries deep nostalgia wrapped in rich cultural and personal history. 

“Across the Streets of Failure to the Cosmos of Curiosity: A Memoir of My School Days”

A dear senior engineer friend Ir. CK Cheong recently shared with me a picture accompanied by a poignant message:

"No one has travelled the road of success without crossing the street of failure. God never promised us an easy journey. He only promised us a great destination."

He went on to confide:

"I had my first failure when I failed my LCE (Lower Certificate of Education) and had to be detained in the same classes with my younger sister. Can you imagine how stressful I was?"

To that, I replied with a slice of my own past.

I, too, once tasted failure, an uncommon flavour in the banquet of my life. In 1956, during Form 3 at Batu Pahat High School, I failed the Malay paper in the newly introduced Lower Certificate of Education (LCE) examination. That year marked a significant shift in Malaya’s education system, the Malay language was included as a compulsory subject, and the experiment was thrust upon us like a sudden eclipse.

None of us, neither the Chinese, Indian, nor Malay students, had studied Malay as a subject. Our academic world was built entirely upon English. We didn’t even speak our mother tongues among ourselves. We were an English-speaking microcosm, forged by colonial curriculum and camaraderie. So when the Malay paper landed on our desks, it might as well have been written in Sanskrit.

The examination hall on the upper floor grew restless. We smiled nervously at each other, dumbfounded. After a half-hour of incomprehensible questions, an invigilator, perhaps moved by our bewildered faces, called out, "Whosoever cannot answer, stand up." To a man, we rose like a choreographed protest and surrendered our blank scripts. It was a moment of quiet solidarity. I failed only that one subject. Every other paper I passed. That was the only subject - an academic failure I ever had, from primary school to my Ph.D.

Later, in Forms 4 and 5, I wrote many essays in English. But my English teacher was not impressed. If he couldn’t understand my essay, he would erupt like Vesuvius, cursing me and hurling my exercise book out of the classroom onto the veranda, sometimes if violent enough past the veranda into the school drain, a good thirty metres away. Then he’d roared:

"How in the world you came into this class!"

As punishment, I would be asked to write 500 lines:

"I must write an essay that my teacher can understand."

But oh, but if I were to write an essay he could grasp, say, about cycling with friends to Minyak Beku a seaside 10 km away to picnic, swim, and enjoy ten-cent packets of nasi lemak wrapped in banana leaves, he would smile, shake my hand, and proclaim my essay was a true masterpiece.

I would in return grip his hand shaking it to share a similar masterpiece handshake.

Looking back now, I would bring flowers to his grave and silently kneel to forgive him, as my Lord Jesus taught. Those were the innocent and colourful days of youth.

I also remember vividly I was in Form 1, and wasn't eligible to study science until Form 3. But my curiosity refused to wait. My sister, two years my senior was in Form 3  studied at Temenggong Ibrahim Girls School (TIGS), about two kilometers from our boys High School Batu Pahat (HSBP). TIGS then had no science teacher or a science lab. Through some arrangement between schools the girls from TIGS would come over to HSBP for science classes in the afternoon when the HSBP morning sessions were dismissed. After morning classes, my sister would come to our school in the afternoon for science lessons. 

Though uninvited and ineligible, I often returned to my school still in my school uniform at 2 p.m. to sit quietly on the veranda outside the lab or leading by the science lab door watching Mr. Charly, the senior science master teach science to my sister and her classmates. I wasn't allowed inside. Mr Charly must have noticed the lone boy who always was there daily, sitting on the veranda outside the lab or leaning against the lab wooden door with unwavering eyes. He must have felt I was always there to learn something. He must have taken pity on me, and  never shoo me away.

One afternoon, I watched with childlike awe as he demonstrated how heating potassium chlorate (KClO₃) with manganese dioxide (MnO₂) as a catalyst produced oxygen. The gas bubbled through a delivery glass tube attached to the test tube into an inverted water-filled jar on a water trough and when the jar was sealed with a glass cover under water and taken out from the water trough and a glowing wooden splint was introduced, it burst into flame proving the jar was filled with pure oxygen.  I still remember the blinding brilliance when burning magnesium or sulphur was introduced into the jar of oxygen. I was spellbound. That invisible element, oxygen - had just unveiled a secret of the universe. Perhaps it was that spark that first whispered to me, "You could be a scientist".

On another day, Mr. Charly taught the girls about acids, and told them there were three kinds - concentrated nitric acids, concentrated sulphuric, and concentrated hydrochloric acid, and when water is added into each of them they became dilute nitric, dilute sulphuric, and dilute hydrochloric acids, and they were kept in separate bottles and labelled separately. 

Later at home, I challenged my sister asking her.

“How many kinds of acids they are?
“Three,” she said confidently. I told her she was wrong. There are six I told her. She stared at me with a confused frowned face quite a while. She asked me name the six. I rattled them off: concentrated nitric, concentrated sulphuric and concentrated hydrochloric acids,  and dilute nitric, dilute sulphuric and dilute hydrochloric acids - all six of them.
She was stunned and became even more puzzled. Then she retorted 

“But they’re the same acids, just in  diluted forms,” she countered.

 I then replied if they are  the same, then why label them separately and had to be kept separately in different bottles. So there must be six different kinds I challenged her.

She stared at me very confused, and after a short while called me a cheat. She refused to speak to me for a week after that.

Later, as a university chemistry student, I discovered the reality: there are over 80 known inorganic acids, from perchloric to chromosulphuric to hydrofluoric, and countless organic acids defined by the humble -COOH group. Carbon, with its infinite bonding potential, builds molecules that the human mind can only begin to catalogue.

Those early moments of wit and mischief were not confined to science class. I remember my math teacher, a long-sighted, with gapped and goofy teeth. When he read at the math text book he has to hold it at a distance and when he laughed he would hide his goofy teeth with his textbook on general mathematics by CV Durell, the mathematics book we used in Malayan schools then.

When maths class was over, and he left,   I, ever the mimic, would imitate him, to the laughter of my classmates. But he was cunning. He would pretend to leave the classroom, only to return silently by the back of the classroom and spy from the small openings between the tall colonial doors and the walls. Catching me in the act, he would spring out, strike my back, and sentence me to write:

"I must not laugh and imitate my teacher", - 500 lines by morning.

Manual labor followed as part of Saturday detention class by cleaning classrooms, scrubbing the school  latrines, dragging heavy steel rollers along with my other similar mischievous  "school criminals" across the school field to flatten the grass like ancient slaves building pyramids. I was a regular "school criminal" always sent to detention class - twice or three times a month. If not pulling rollers, I’d be made to stand on a chair at the back of the class, arms across my chest, tugging my ears in penance.

Yet, despite all this failures, punishments, detentions, and mischievous antics, these memories shine like stardust in my heart. They remind me that a child’s wonder, curiosity, and humour are not blemishes to erase, but constellations that illuminate the journey of learning.

I’m not only smiling at myself - at my own delightful school tales, but truly cherishing them. The innocence, mischief, and wonder of my youth shine like sunlight on morning dew, pure, nostalgic, and filled with life's poetry. What a privilege to walk with my readers and friends through these timeless corridors of memory.