High School Memory: Religion Teachers

When I was in the first year of High School, we had this super cool and fun and funny religion teacher. He was a big, tall, dark-skinned man with glasses. He had HUGE hands (he could hold a basketball with one hand) and yes, he loved basketball so much. His body did look like the body of an NBA player. He used to throw lots of jokes and each session was fun, so all the students loved this cool and laid-back teacher. Each teaching session was just as laid-back and relaxing and fun as the teacher himself.


He resigned when I was in my second year of High School for some reason (I can't remember anymore), though he did start teaching us first. In my second year of High School, I was in a notorious class. There were around 40 students altogether in a class and there were 7 other classes. This religious teacher was replaced with an older, serious guy who was rather "rigid" in teaching the class (Who wouldn't if they were compared with the first teacher?). 

He started off the first day of teaching by citing some rules and I could feel the whole classroom's spirit went down drastically. He was a systematic teacher, so he wanted us to write down systematic notes as well (if I remember correctly, the notes would also be a part of his grade system for us). He'd write plenty of notes on the blackboard (yep, back then we still used chalks and blackboards) and he also expected us to write down a weekly Sunday sermon report in our own respective churches and he wanted us to add the church's stamp on the side of each report. We had to give him this report each month or so for him to check. And of course this weekly report was also a part of his grade system. 

I remember that one day one close friend (let's call her P) who was in another classroom had forgotten to write down one Sunday's report, so frantically she asked for help. Fortunately for her, one classmate was active at her own church, so she had the church's stamp with her at that time. So P copied that classmate's Sunday report and added the stamp. Problem solved! So she thought at that time. After all, there was no guilty conscience because she DID go to her own church that Sunday. It's just that she had forgotten to write down the report that week.


After the teacher took all the reports and returned them, he asked P to come and meet him and he gave her a punishment (I can't remember anymore what it was, but it must've been related to writing more reports or something like that). Apparently the Sunday sermon report that she had copied was the sermon that had happened in the teacher's own church and he knew that P wasn't a member of the church. Doh!!!

Anyway, back to the teacher and our class...after being taught by this second teacher for a while, my classmates became more and more restless. They were unsatisfied and they wanted the first fun teacher to come back to teach us. One day out of nowhere a classmate gave me a slip of paper filled with my classmates' signatures. On top of the paper somebody had written: "We, the students of class 2-8, want to protest about our current religion teacher. We want the first teacher to come back to teach us bla bla bla bla bla..."

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I felt pressured. Even though I liked the first teacher better myself, but it was a tough call to finally sign the paper. I didn't want to be the odd one out, you know? I didn't want them to think that I was rooting for this second teacher (which wasn't true), but I did respect him as a teacher and human being...but anyway, in the end I signed it anyway. Apparently after all our signatures were there, someone took it to the headmaster he he he he...

And yep, not long after that the headmaster asked us all to come to his office separately (his office couldn't possibly hold all 40 of us at once, so first he called all the boys and then the girls). Diplomatically he reasoned with us about why the first teacher couldn't be brought back and that we should give the second teacher a chance. I don't remember anymore what he had told us, but he managed to appease us all anyway. I gotta hand it to the headmaster, though, who was able to be the peacemaker only in one sitting and it even took less than half an hour 'coz I don't remember being in the office for a long time. Actually, it was the first time ever that I had ever been in the headmaster's office ha ha ha ha ha ha ha...