Name games from school days (those were the days)

Yesterday, I mentioned a teacher in my secondary school years was nicknamed "Molecule Shaker". He taught chemistry and had the habit of grabbing and shaking the poor seated sod who could not answer a question when he quizzed us verbally on some infernal chemical formula or the properties of some ghastly element.

Many, many years later, when a small group of us met, we managed to contact him and we invited him to our gathering. He was now an old man but still spry (definitely not chemically inert), and we found him a very nice gentleman actually. Pity no one was drinking martini; otherwise that would have been the only thing shaken that convivial evening.

Then there was "Jap Commander". He was our Chinese language teacher and barked orders like... a Jap Commander! One April Fool's Day, some students (our school was located in a gangster area) removed all four tyres of his car and even propped the bare wheels up on bricks.

Actually, when one thinks about that name, we were being cruel. He must have been a youth when Japanese troops invaded Singapore. There was the infamous "Sook Ching" -- when young Chinese males were rounded up by the Kempetai and many of them were massacred (yes, young people today, wartime Singapore had its mini Nanjing Massacre).

So, our dear teacher might well have become one such victim. Apologies, dear sir (although I never took your class. A small group of us opted to not take Chinese but signed up for National Language instead. We sat at the back during Chinese lessons, half amused by all that barking sound).

I decided to ask around for teacher nicknames in other schools.

If I mention this former principal's name, many people will recognize it. They called him "Bulldog".

One office colleague recalled that her school's discipline master was a Mr Muthu. He was very fierce and bestrode the classroom corridors like a titan. Then he went home, after school hours, on his tiny motorcycle. They called it the "Muthucycle" (okay, this one is not strictly a teacher's nickname).

Science and Maths teachers seemed to elicit nicknames. A biology teacher was "Bio-hazard Wong" while a maths teacher was "Palelelloglam" because she could not quite inflect the "r". When I asked if she was at least glam, I was told she was not. Okay, she had all her squares in the right places, I guess.

Last one: A Chinese teacher was "Alpha and Omega" -- because she was invariably the first subject teacher each day and had an Omega-shaped hairstyle.

Postscript: My daughter Liane asked me this: What do you call the billions that Mubarak allegedly looted and stashed away? Answer: A pyramid scheme. When I said that was a good one, she said I could have replied "Tut, Tut". She's good.