Just saying the word 'Bendemeer' brings back SO many memories :)
From Official Opening rehearsals to Cheerleading to Debates.. ahhhh.. those
were the memories.. makes me feel quite old though :P
Bendemeer in my own lines
I was from these classes throughout my four years at Bendemeer..:
Year
1999 Class 1E2 --> Form teacher was Mrs Chua Ai Kiang. It was
a boring routine kindda life in Secondary 1. Go sch, dismiss, go home.. go
sch, dismiss, go home.. ZZZ.. and during recess.. i was always ALWAYS drinking
carrot juice until my skin was turning orangey. It was WEIRD! I was always
hanging out with Patricia, and every Saturday without fail, we would meet
at 10am outside Toapayoh Swimming Complex and walk to Macdonald's to eat breakfast
before going to Toapayoh library to borrow books. Due to that 'mass borrowing'
of books, I lost a few of them, and since the library didn't send me complaint
letters, I decided to ignore it. Apparently, it seems the library has totally
canceled my membership :)
The major events in Secondary 1 was that I took part in Cheerleading as well as the Official Opening Ceremony of Bendemeer Secondary at its present premise, St Wilfred Road. Cheerleading was fantastic. Trainings went out for long hours, was tough, and at one point, we even came back to school on a Sunday to train. Yup, the gate was locked.. but we CLIMBED over the gate anyway. The WORSE thing is.. ALL TOILETS WERE LOCKED. So we had to TAHAN like crazy...
Year 2000 Class 2E2 --> This is the beginning of FUN because throughout the whole year, 2E2 never had a real official form teacher. There were the constant skippings of Band practices, this and that this and that.. hahaha.. I did try again to participate in Cheerleading, cos of all the happy memories of it last year, but then it was a total flop. They chose the song 'You Drive Me Crazy' by Britney Spears. Its not that I hate the singer or I hate the song, but the dance steps just weren't right. So I decided not to go for practices anymore.. making a 'silent departure' from all the practices they have. I did the right choice. The dance steps were so.. well.. when the teacher came to know of how the dance steps were like, the whole thing was called off, and the cheerleading team had to redo everything, new song, new steps.. new everything.
Patricia became a prefect, and she always had prefect duties at the staircase near the library, so sad to say, we gradually started to hang out less. My buddies became Gek and Fel.. We seemingly went everywhere together. OH YEA.. THIS WAS THE YEAR I GOT TO KNOW XIANG TOO! My impression of him is that he's that little boy that always look so sleepy :P (Goodness knows how the hell did that LITTLE boy became my 1.85m tall boyfriend)
A new programme was introduced to the school. It's called IPW (Integrated Project Work). It's real cool. The entire student population is jumbled up and put into groups, consisting of people from different classes, from secondary 1 to secondary 3. (sec 4 and 5s are excused due to their O'level commitments) Our group project was on Ancient Egypt, and Dr. Lee Boon Yang came over to have a look on exhibition day, where we presented everything we have done for the project. Our group's final product is a calendar. It's really cool, cos the whole thing was hand made. A great deal of time and energy was spent doing up researches to add interesting facts here and there for the calendar to be more interesting than your average calendar.
ELDDS ROX!!!
Year 2001 Class 3e3 --> Another fantastic year for me,
I must say. Took part in Speechday, Debates, Racial Harmony Forum, as well
as Cheerleading (yes, again!). I must say most of my acheivements in secondary
school was earned in this memorable year. Mr Stanley Ho is my form teacher
and when I learnt of this, I went like "oh shit!".. but after all
the "oh damn it" cursing and swearing of him being my form teacher,
I realised.. hey.. its not that bad. He's still human, though I just can't
understand the fact that why not everybody in the class get along well with
him. He isn't a very good teacher, and he isn't that bad either. There was
a significant improvement in our English grades, though sometimes, if he is
having his 'down' days, we all can prepare to go and die ;)
For Speechday, I was one of the four MCs, basically, I was delighted
in the fact that I get CCA points just by going up to the stage, and reading
out a list of names. Those were the names of people who have won CCA awards,
scored top in their class and levels, so it was a looooooooooooooong list
of names, mind you. It isn't simple. All the MCs were personally trained by
Mrs Tami Mohan. She's also my Humanities teacher. She's fierce and tough,
which is why everyone did our work nicely, so our grades were also naturally
decent :P There isn't a single person who is not afraid of her, as far as
I know. As for Cheerleading, well nothing much said. Enjoyable trainings although
they were not as tough as the time in Sec 1. As what they say: the tougher
the times, the sweeter it is to look back when they become memories. I got
that phrase from those moving text signboards at Boon Keng MRT, hehe. We didn't
win cheerleading that year. Debates was a very united thing. It was a '1 for
all, all for 1' situation. The team spirit was great, so was the fact that
repeatedly expressed his wish of Hwee Liang wanted to CHEONG all the way to
win the competition. He's a great leader and motivator, though sometime I
find that it is quite difficult to 
communicate
with him, so I preferred to talk more with Valerie. We did our school proud
by entering the quarter finals, and after that, we almost flooded Raffles
Instituition with our tears when we lost out in the quarter finals. I CLEARLY
remembered that there were five judges that day, and the decision was 3:2.
It was a close fight, a great fight. Hmm.. thinking back.. I CAN'T remember
the name of the school, but I can still clearly remember the faces of all
the members in the opposition team, lol.
This is also my last IPW year. It's real sad. My whole team from last year requested to came back together, with all the same people, with a few new additions from the new batch of Sec 1s of course. This year we did a topic on animals. Pets, to be exact, and on exhibition day, we helped raise funds for the SPCA. It was great, the response was overwhelming. In just a day and a half, we raised around $300 for SPCA. Miss Sebastian, the kind lady who helped us get the SPCA stuffs to help raise funds, even gave us a keychain each to thank us. A few hours later, my keychain was spoilt. seemingly, the keychain 'hook' had somehow came out.. (-.-") The bestest thing of IPW exhibition day this year was that Chubby got to go to school. He behaved terribly in the library, sniffing every corners, threatening to pee everywhere, so I had to put him on the trolley to prevent any mishaps.
IPW team @ SPCA
Year
2002 Class 4E3 --> This year has got to be the toughest year in
my whole four years at Bendemeer. Well, after all, it IS the year we are taking
our O's. Looking back, the only detailed stuffs I remembered were the constant
RErunnings for 2.4km run NAPFA test. I kept on failing, so did Valerie. So
we ran together most of the time as we were around the same pace. As we ran,
we chatted non-stop about everything. From Chubby to Sentosa to Volleyball
to gossips of the teachers (especially our Home Econs teacher, Ms Joan Ng).
It was great!
Then of course, there were also the stressful times. I hate Mondays, We have IRP (Intensive Revision Programme) where we have to stay back waaaaaaay beyond normal school dismissal time in order to revise with our individual subject teachers. Mondays were the worst because it was MATHS.. and we had to stay back till 5pm. If the subject teacher is lenient, we would usually 'give face' and attend that teacher's lesson, but most of the time, we choose not to :) It is waaaay boring to do the same subjects over and over again, and at the same time, the afternoon heat was horrible. Our classroom was located at the highest floor of the school, so it sometimes actually feels like the heat is penetrating through the roof and shining right on us. I wouldn't be surprised if the heat was able to penetrate through our skulls and damage our brains :)
Towards the examination, I started to hang out very often with
Yin and Queenie. Of course there was still Valerie's gang hangout and lasermania
nights once-in-a-while, but closing to the end of the year, I somehow got
stuck learning a new sport. Pool. And without knowing. R10 was formed. Sure
you have heard of them. I've been talking about them non-stop in my previous
webpage.
RoCk On :P
