Thursday, November 04, 2004

Shadow Eyes

School's officially out. In that, I no longer need to go in just so that I clock hours. But the holidays haven't started. Each year, when it rains like cats and dogs and every canal and long kang, both big and small is flooded, 16-17 year olds and 18 year olds take an international exam which requires invigilators from a centre that is not their own.

So, because of that, I'm back at my alma mater, invigilating.Translation: Sitting there, staring at kids do an exam that I did ten or so years ago, in a classroom that perhaps, ten years ago, I did an exam in.

As a grown up would, I did some sort of mental comparison in my head. Not the paper, because for the life of me, I cannot remember a single thing about those/these dratted exams. But I did look at the students taking the exams. And I compared them to those I knew, my own school kids. But then again, I wasn't being fair in comparison. These were Arts students I was invigilating, so they sure had a whole lot of spunk than mine, whom R very kindly called sweet.

My observations:
A girl named Fair XXXXX (insert any name)- and as luck would have it, she's not fair skinned at all. Some sense of humour, albeit bad, on the part of the parents.

Another girl, from the same class that I was invigilating, could have been barred from the exam hall. She had goth eyes to the max, as in, deep, dark eye shadow, on her eyelid and below her eye so major goth and at 7 in the morning, it looks seriously misplaced and inappropriate. Plus, the uniform! Most school skirts were designed to look unflattering. But this school, had the distinction of a rather flattering school skirt. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough for our goth candidate, so she took a huge pin and pinned the A-line-ness of the skirt down to make it short and extremely tight which once again added to the extreme unattractiveness of her entire get up.

I shudder to think about what I deemed as attractive when I was 18. And I shudder to think about what my teachers or other adults thought of me at that age. Here she was, dressed as if she were a halloween reject in the exam, obviously thinking that she was one attractive babe. And to make matters worse and further exacerbated by her extremely, tight short skirt, the girl had no idea how to keep her knees together, so me, the long suffering invigilator had to studiously keep away from looking up her skirt. Had I been a male invigilator, I think I would be permanently beetroot or that entire aisle would have the liberty of cheating because I wasn't going to go anywhere near that vicinity.

The conclusion is, this school sure has a whole lot more characters than mine does. I'm not sure if it's a good or a bad thing, but it sure makes it a whole lot more colourful. It does make me wonder, like I say, how myopic and daft we must have been at that age.

Ah... the wonders of 20/20 hindsight.

Ondine tossed this thought in at 23:12

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