My Boring but Rather Interesting One Year School Life

Aku mau nulis tentang sekolah di Palembang dari kapan tau, dan kebetulan dapet tugas recount dan diupload di blog. Waktu yang tepat itu bakal dateng sendiri emang.

Before I do this homework, I thought about the story that I should write. I did not find any interesting story in my life. That means I don’t have a good memory, or my life is boring. I even read my journal and my old blog posts, but my writings were very short and confusing. So I am going to write about my boring-but-rather-interesting-one-year-school-life in Palembang. I only stayed for one year so we can call it “holiday”.

At the end of fifth grade, my father was told that he would move to Palembang the following month because of his job. Then, we had a family discussion, and my mother decided that she and my younger siblings would move along with my father. But my parents let me make my own decision, whether I stay and spend my last year of elementary school in Jakarta, and live with my grandparents, or go to Palembang and live with my parents. That was a tough decision for a ten year old kid. But then, what I thought was simple. I could not imagine living without my parents, so I decided to move along with my family and stay in Palembang.

After my father searched for good schools in Palembang, my sister and I were told to choose one. Finally we chose a school that we thought has the coolest uniform. They had shirt, vest, and jacket, like the show that we used to watch back then in Nickelodeon, House of Anubis.

It felt strange being the only new kid. Especially when you don’t actually understand the language your friends are speaking. Yes, they did speak Indonesian to teachers,  but not to one another. I just knew about the Palembang language at that moment. My classmates had already known one another, and I am not great at making new friends.  But they were really nice, all small groups in my class accepted me as their friends, but I did not choose any. I would rather be friends with everyone.

I also met different kinds of teachers in this school. There was the teacher that everyone afraid of, the kind-hearted teacher, the funny teacher, and also the one of a kind teacher who drew decarations in the corner of the whiteboard before he taught, often hangout with the students, and told me to breakdance in front of the class in my first day of school. My homeroom teacher. He always came up with the weirdest ideas (read: ngide).

My school life in Palembang was different from when I was in Jakarta. I also went to school on Saturdays, the school ended at ten o’clock in the morning on Fridays, got good grades without trying, frequently skipped additional classes, got a Palembang-Indonesian dictionary made by my friends, helped one of my friend made her Coboy Junior fanfiction, got my nails cut by my teacher,  wore sandals to school once, left a horror  message in one of my friend’s drawer, skipped courses, and many more.

My favorite part were of course the skipping school, course, and additional classes legally. At that moment, my mother told me to study harder so I can go to Labschool Kebayoran Junior High School the following year. She knew how tough the competition was to be accepted in that school. Honestly, I was not actually interested in Labschool, but I said “okay” to my mother. So she signed me up in a private tutoring class, and did the exercises in a Labschool exercise book. The tutoring class was clashed wih my other course so I skipped the course for about three months. The tutoring class was not clashed with my additional class at school, but my mother told me I could go home if I wanted to. So I joined the class if I thought the subject was interesting, fun, or easy like math, science, and English. If the subject was social studies or civic, I would rather stay at home and say that I couldn't attend the class.

On February, I went to Jakarta to take the test, and waited a week in my other grandparents’ house in Bandung for the test result. I also bought a registration form from a school in Bandung. So if I did not get accepted in Labschool, I would lived and studied in Bandung.

Luckily, I got accepted. So I went back to Jakarta the day after the result came out to do the re-registration. My mother asked my hometeacher and the principal’s permission for me to be absent from school for two weeks. Forunately, they allowed me to do that because they knew that I had worked really hard.

That was one of my story. I honestly cried in the middle of the year once, because l missed my old school, and it seemed a lot more fun in there. I regret my decision moving to Palembang and I wanted to go back. But now I realized that moving to Palembang was the right decision for me because I got so many experiences, and I’m glad I did not choose otherwise.

Ayutari Dian P. (8) – 11 MIPA 2