Noisy Boys

I admit it, if there is a most wanted list for grade school, I would be in it. I always make it to the noisy list even if I could not understand why. It seems like some of my grade school teachers have this nasty habit of simply not going to class, and to cover up for their absence, we are to be punished.

Now here is the unfairness in the system, if you are a teacher, it is an absence, but if you are a student, it is a cut?

Anyway, every time the teacher decides to skip classes, she would appoint the most kiss-ass kid (KAK for brevity) to watch over the class. The KAK would stand in front of the classroom and starts making a list on the blackboard:

NOISY :

BACORRO
MACASAET
CALIMLIM
IBARRA (4x)

The funny thing is that, we are all sitting quietly there. Once in a while, a classmate would make a funny face to entice you to chuckle in laughter. This would usually get you in the list. Even a mere cough or a polite throat clearing will bring your name.

The noisy list is my first experience in criminal justice. For starters we did not have an ordinary KAK, we had a girl named Carrie. Carrie is fit for the role as the Noisy Monitor. She was big for her age, had bushy eyebrows and very muscular for a girl (yes..muscular). She reminds me of what would happen if you cross the Sea Hag and the Goons in the Popeye cartoons. While other girls would charm you, we actually dread Carrie. She looks like she could really do some bodily damage to you if you let her sneak in an uppercut or two.

Carrie is not just the police, she is also the prosecutor, as she would gleefully tell the teachers the sordid details of how we were noisy.

“He said….Ummmmm….ummmm…and then he coughed three times…”

“He said, ‘excuse me’ after he burped”…

The teacher will be the judge and executioner. It would be additional cleaning detail for us or we would be asked to stand in a corner for thirty minutes. No fair trial here, the mere appearance of your name in the “Noisy List” means you are doomed. No explanation will be necessary from you. I actually thought that they provide the noisy list to Camp Crame so that the Martial Law administrator would bodily pick us up and send us to some labor camp.

In the end, I survived grade school notwithstanding the thousands of times I made it to the noisy list—and I was not sent to reform school or to some Philippine Martial Law detention center.

What happened to Carrie? I think she went to Russia and became a Prison Director there.