Tower Of Babel

Well, whoever would have though that the post I made about the Vampire prisoners in Trinidad and Tobago, would glean the type of comments that it did? Now, I must say that I have thoroughly enjoyed the comments as well as authoring the “missiles”. It has turned out to be a ‘dissing’ contest of no mean order. Prodigal Son, myself and Infamous Bert all were in the same high school class (so was Mad Bull, but I guess he has decided to remain on neutral ground in this ‘war of words’, at least for the mo.) My sister Rufie and Mad Bull’s sister, Seven, have decided to start throwing stones at the decent graduates of the better, and perhaps only side of North Street, (hope there are no K.C. old boys reading this site) parading as ‘young ladies’ who have graduated from the PINK PRISON as I’ve heard them call the hallowed halls of Immaculate!

It has brought back many pleasant memories of my high school days to me. I had done a post previously about some of the nicknames that we gave each other at my alma mater, which if you wish to read, you can click here .

Now back in my days, one of the things that we were famous for playing as a pastime, was ‘Money Football’. I never did get a good hand at the game. But it involved the use of a coin as the ‘ball’ and fudge sticks were used as the ‘players’ to ‘kick’ the ball on the ‘field’, which in many cases was either a concrete bench or the wall along the driveway at Emmet Park.

Another craze was the Rubix Cube, something that I’m sure would amaze many of the children today who are lost in the technology of Playstation and the likes.

Another thing guys (and girls, lest you feel that you are being left out of the discussion), do you remember those mathematical tables that we were required to use for Sine, Cosine and Tangent? Hell, give that to any child today and they would be at a loss without their calculator, or PC for that matter. I guess that in my short lifetime, I have witnessed a technological hurricane, and I suspect that if I live long enough, I will have to barricade myself up in order to survive even further development in the future.

Then we had our fair share of strange teachers, no disrespect to any of them, we did learn something from them. I remember in 6th Form, a certain priest of Oriental ethnicity (to use the more politically correct term, Chiney (Chinese) is perhaps what I really want to say) used to teach us Religion. Now as many of us at that stage of our development were concentrating on discovering all there was to learn about love, lust, sex, parties etc., Religion was not very high on many of our lists. Hence, it wasn’t uncommon for some guys to ’skull’ this class. There were far better things to do with the time; talk about Immaculate girls and their various merits, smoke cigarettes and other stuff as well, trade videotapes of porn and Kung Fu movies, etc. Anything but work.

I was not by any means a part of this rowdy crowd (I can see the stones being hurled already), I was a good student who concentrated on his work and did not skull class. On the other hand, I was no angel either, I knew how to give trouble and get away with it!

Now, I must admit (I’ll soon stop), one of my weak areas in school was Mathematics, the nemesis of my school days. ‘Till this day, it haunts me and looks like a black mark on my University record, as M080 (Introductory Maths) is the ONLY examination that I failed in my University career. (I’m straying from the point, but hey, I’m enjoying it!) I remember the day when we took our CXC examinations (sort of the equivalent of SATs in the US). The day came for Maths. Of course, it was not my thing and so I was a nervous wreck. Anyway, I did the exam.

On the way home from the exam, I was taking the bus with my usual crew. Unfortunately, a post mortem regarding the exam took place on the bus ride home. I can remember the ‘crew’ quite well. Mad Bull, Twin Batty, Twerb, LaaamBert (who is not the same person as Infamous Bert) and myself. Now, though Twin Batty is my good friend, he always had the habit of making you feel that he knew far more than anyone else on just about all school matters. Well, he started to take the Maths paper to peices and was asking about the answers that I had come up with to the questions. At the end of it all, let’s say for discussion sake, that the maximum possible score was 150 marks, when Twin Batty was finished with my paper, the best I could perhaps have scored was a dismal 30. A definite FAIL! Well, when the results did come out, we both got a II (which is a good pass). I could go on further, but my hands are getting tired from typing.

Those of you non -Jamaicans from abroad will have to excuse me, but please feel free to share any of your good high school memories, they are most welcome. With life being the way that it is today, it is good that we can look back at our younger days with fondness. I’m sure that I will have a sequel to this post. Comments?!

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 3rd, 2002 at 9:13 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.