School Holidays

There’s a pleasant feeling about the school as the exams approach. At project submission time, students dash about to get their drawings printed. As they file in to submit, there’s a sense of anticipation, to be surprised by good works some times, or to be disappointed more often than not. The staff will then lament that this cohort is not as satisfactory as their predecessors, and wonder how we can change that.

Outside, the trees will be shedding their leaves, as odd as that may be in our mono-season climate. The brown and yellow leaves collect in patches over the shaded green lawns. There will be the holidays to look forward to as soon as the projects are graded. Some parents will be called up to talk about their children’s under-performance, but this will be for the extreme cases. By and large, the campus will be deserted. The books in the library will be fully replenished and the DVD collections will be complete again. Some canteens will remain open, but there will be no queues to suffer from. The toilets will be clean and vacant again; there will be no peak periods. Tea breaks among the staff who are not on holiday will be resumed, and even lengthened as the holiday progresses. There will be time to catch up with emails, and to plan for new lectures. Some serious reading will be done while sipping hot coffee from the vending machine downstairs, which will not be flashing its “sold out” sign for a time. We will look less haggard and harassed, and some will talk about the morning news they had actually read in full from the morning papers.

Walking on the hilly campus, you may walk along the same corridors the umpteenth time, but you will now be struck by how one minute, you’re on the second storey, next the first, then the third, without having climbed any stairs. The terrain changes itself for you. It’s one of the nicest thing about an old campus, built when Singapore hasn’t learned how to flatten all its topography yet.

In mid-Sept, I’ll be taking 2 weeks off to read and write at home. It’ll all end when school reopens in late-Sept of course, but for now, I have to pinch myself occasionally to be reminded that- no kidding- they’re actually paying me to do this.

Chup