siao hai bu ben

chinese is one of the most educational classes that i take at school.

no, i'm being serious.

ok, when i say educational, i don't necessarily mean that in the most conventional sense.

i mean, there's much to be learnt from a bunch of deluded chinese teenagers put together in a room with a fire-breathing dragon for a teacher. literally.

let me just outline the structure of our chinese class to you. first, the room itself. it's room number.. err... 25 or 26. could be 24.. no that's upstairs. i think it's 25... you know what? WHO REALLY CARES? ahem... it's a little room in the LOTE corridor [the one famously rumoured to have chewing gum that wasn't peeled off before the walls were whitewashed].

i don't really know how to define our seating arrangement. it's a mixture of chosen seats, allocated seats, and people who have to sit next to each other cause they've done something bad and have to be punished. in my case, i don't know whether Ms. Yip's trying to punish me, or Joe. whereas in the case of Sarah and Melvin, i can safely say that Melvin's being the one punished.

there's a poster at the back of the room that says "white man, black man, yellow man, red man... GERMAN".

half the people in the class do ESL. that's not a bad thing, mind you. it's actually really interesting, cause the ESL people are usually the ones who can swear in about 300 different languages. or at least, interpret normal things in such twisted ways, there's never a dull moment in class [i won't elaborate on this].

this is a class that sees many new asian kids to our year take. there's between five and ten new people in our class this year. we're a mixed bunch, we are. there's the guys, the girls, and then there's those that cannot be classified, as yet.

the latest addition to our class is Nigara. no, it does not mean 'country', and you can't call her 'nigger' for short. the guys did this, called her nigger, i mean, which is really mean cause her english ain't that great, and she doesn't know what it means.

she does, however, totally belong in our chinese class. a welcome addition to a class already filled with total nutcases, she's already established herself as someone who can take any of us idiots on. made to sit next to Alfred, her reply to a cheeky remark about how she shouldn't go out with him if he asks was "i wouldn't pick him anyway." when asked her hobby, she said "sleeping", whereby the class immediately went "OH LYNDON. SHE SHARES YOUR HOBBY".

Lyndon, of course, put his foot in his mouth when he said "OH COOL. WE CAN SLEEP TOGETH- OHSHITNONONO THAT CAME OUT WRONG. I DIDN'T MEAN IT THAT WAY. ITCAMEOUTWRONG!!!"

good thing he wasn't actually yelling, so only a handful of us heard it. the look on his face was priceless, though.

it's not only the people in class that we can learn from, however. we learn from out textbooks as well [never let it be said that we don't do any work]. in fact, Joe read a very interesting diary entry to the class today. he shared his feelings and thoughts on his boyfriend, Leemoumou. to Joe, Leemoumou is perfect - in looks, talents, and character.

all this, of course, is aimed at teaching us how to describe a person. and since the diary entry that Joe read was was so positive, and we only learnt to use words like handsome, can play guitar, perfect, awesome, great, lovely, bright black eyes, smart, talented, modest, and all other forms of... goodness [this shows i need to brush up on positive vocabulary]... the book also had an entire section devoted to teaching us negative words.

it went something like this:
"...and now, for the mean words...
UGLY, OBSCENE, SMELLY, SNOBBY, SNOTTY, EVIL, SHITS-HIS-PANTS, STUPID, SLEAZY, SILLY, ANNOYING, SHOULDJUSTGODIE..."
this little exercise has made me realize that most negative words begin with 'S'.

what makes this class even better is that most of us are in this class together for the third year in a row. we've gotten so used to each other, we don't blink at anything anyone does. once, Jiadou managed to walk round and round the classroom about 30 times, and the teacher didn't even notice even though we were all laughing our butts off.

most of us do alright in chinese. as in, we're not brilliant in the tests, but we're only... borderline retarded. a large part of this is due to our supreme powers of... innovative initiative. Gordon's the master of this. his best effort yet was the time he came to a roadblock in a test, and he banged his head on the edge of his table, appearing to be bouncing ideas around in his head. what he was actually doing was 'thinking' about the answers that were in the book concealed under his desk, conveniently flipped open to the relevant pages.

see... we do learn stuff in chinese.