Went back to MSS (Methodist Secondary School -- as we fondly remember how it was called in our time) in my hometown over the weekend. The school had its 100 years anniversary dinner in the school square on Saturday night. A special occasion for us classmates to fill two tables.
Reunion, nostalgia and memories.
When they played the school anthem, our two tables sang along and we made sure we loudly sang the original lyrics which had the last line, "Hail to MSS" -- now they changed it to "Hail to Methodist School" which does not rhyme with "...success" in the preceding two lines!
Several of us reunited for the first time after more than 30 years. We had to put our memory cells to maximum work to remember the faces and the names. Photos tremendously helped, from one photo album taken along by Norizan Wahid that had our photos during those years, and from many photos of members of our batch in the special edition magazine released during the dinner, that included photos of us as schoolkids and our present day photos.
Still, we did embarrass ourselves by not remembering. One of us thought a classmate, Noraini Ismail was our Bahasa Malaysia teacher, Cikgu Habsah. Two of us fondly reunited with a Rubiah Haniff look-alike who played along. Confession -- I thought Noraini was Badariah but kept quiet.
With KH, then with Md. Nor, I walked the school compound checking out our Form 1M1 classroom (where's the stage and where's Miss Norjan?), the door that slammed with the wind to take away KH's finger nail, the staff room which is now a co-op shop, the art room behind the canteen which now has murals all over the exterior wall, the same exact canteen, the bicycle shed which is no more,..., etc. Yes, there are more buildings now, the wooden walls concreted, and freshly painted, but the character of the old buildings I still felt. This is still my school.
There were delightful performances by the present students, and there were guest speakers who reminisced the schooldays and most of all praised the dedication of our teachers. I met a few of these dedicated teachers. Mr. P Subramaniam, who was the Principal when I was there, was happy to meet us again. As was Mr. Thanaseelan, our Geography master who said that he's mostly relaxing these days -- all of us remember how easy he made Geography for us.
Cikgu Habsah, always the smiling teacher who made learning fun, amazingly remembered more of me than I of her -- that I lived in Kampung Melaka, that I was lazy at homework but did well, and that I went overseas for further studies and I returned without finishing to continue in-country -- she's got better memory cells. And now after retirement, Cikgu Habsah is still teaching -- English language tuition.
I wanna teach, too. It's probably in my DNA. My grandfather, Cikgu Dollah whom I lived with in Kampung Melaka was a teacher and headmaster. Mum wanted to teach but didn't get round to it. My two younger sisters teach. Many of my cousins teach. Eventually I will be a teacher, too, I think. And over the last couple of weeks, I've been working to enroll to do part-time studies for a doctoral degree, majoring in higher education -- I am going back to school.
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