10 shits we all definitely remember about Primary School

Last Updated on 2016-05-18 , 3:50 pm

Primary school was a period of time where our minds were still innocent and holding hands with the opposite genders was icky. Here are some of the things we all have fond memories of.

TAF Club
Short form for Trim and Fit (TAF), being in the club meant that you were overweight. It was depressing to have to jog around the field during recess while your friends ate nuggets and mee rebus in the canteen. This program has since been scraped and replaced with the Holistic Health Framework (HHF) which includes all schoolchildren.

Scary School Dentists
If you ask around, no one will ever remember having a school dentist who was nice and kind. It was as if all the primary school dentists made a pact with each other to terrorise the hell out of students. Every visit that I had to the school dentist meant leaving with one tooth lesser. Which brings me to my next point…

Dental Roll Call
When someone came back from the dentist with a bloody gauze in his mouth, you could smell the fear in the air. It felt like a death row experience and you would pray very hard that you would not be the next person called.

Overhead Projector (OHP)
The teacher would ask someone (usually the AV representative) to setup the OHP. Everyone would then watch the person pull down the white screen, roll the fricky bulky OHP to the centre of the classroom and turn it on. Sometimes, the OHP would be faulty and the person would be tasked with another unfortunate friend to borrow (and return) one from the neighbouring class.

Worksheets made of rough brownish papers
Boy do these papers stink. You also could not write properly on them with pencil. If you make a mistake, good luck trying to rub it off with an eraser without tearing the paper.

Country Erasers Game
You would try to collect every country and would take great pride in honing your erasers flipping skills. Sometimes, if the stakes were big enough, losing also meant that you had to give up the eraser in play to your opponent.

Fancy stationaries
Before Smiggle even existed, the most sought after stationary was the pencil box with magnetic flaps. At the push of some buttons, you could get surprises such as a hidden drawer, thermometer or compass. Also, if you had a shaker mechanical pencil, you joined the cool club automatically. Some rulers also had a magnifying glass on one end while others could be extended and flung open like a nunchaku.

One-Hit Wonder: Trolley Schoolbags
These were the trendiest bags for a certain period of time. You felt seriously cool with one…until you realise your classroom was at the fourth floor.

P1 buddy
You felt extremely grown up when you hit Primary 3 and was assigned a Primary 1 kid who you had to “take care” of.

Autograph books
And finally, just before graduating, you would pass around fancy notebooks and ask your friends to write something for you. Some of the most popular poems include “Rose are red, violets are blue…” and “Birds fly high, hard to catch. Friends like you, hard to forget.”