The Last Bench Mavericks

I always sat in last bench since my 11th Std. And I loved it. In fact it is one of those reasons that made my school days in a rather dumb school so memorable. And my comrades in the last bench were amazing. We did everything one could not do in the class room. We slept as we wished, worked on other homeworks, study for unit tests, write scripts for plays. Everything. To make things worse (for the first-bench-so-called-innocent-good-rule-abiding students), we regularly topped the class in the exams :-)


One important practice we followed during my two years at St.John's was appreciating other people's works ,in fact every bit of work. We used to clap for everything. When our class rep starts to speak (so as to inform him to make it quick), when people from adjacent class rooms come to borrow chalk piece or duster (so as to inform them not to come again) and whenever a student comes up with silly ideas (so as to... you know what!). Everybody loved this and the entire class also started this noble practice of appreciating others work in a tremendously noisy way.

Students from other classes were afraid to come into ours. There were times when students just run across our class room in the corridor. Oh it was fun! This rather became very contagious that every class room in our floor followed this benevolent practice. One time, we started clapping for a guy who went to clean the blackboard. Our dear neighbors responded to our applauds by clapping louder and all the class rooms in our floor followed suit. Our Princi (a.k.a. Principal) freaked out and started shouting in the mike to stop the madness. We got strict instructions from our teachers not to repeat this :( And there ended the fun.

This is something that every one of our class members remember even today. And I'm proud that we last-benchers were able to achieve something worthy of remembrance.