Raymond Chan and Tim Kwan over coffee:-

T:  You and I attended WYK 1961 to 1973, and were at school at the same time in 1968-9.  I was in Form 7 and you in Form 1.

R:  Unfortunately I joined WYK in 1969 and missed the opportunities of seeing you on the field.

T:  Do you remember Football Class (FC)? 

R:  You mean those classes that were not pre-scheduled, but turned out to be FC.  It did not happen too often in our years… 

T:   Oh, really?  I thought you had the same amount of FC as we did.  It was 2 or more times a week at the peak seasons.

R:   You were lucky… a lot of our classes just turned out to be Private Study (PS) classes.  What do you mean by the peak seasons?

Class Picnic

T:   There were periods when classes would go on picnics, so their teachers did not come in.  Also, I think that during the flu season, a few teachers were absent.

R:   I wonder why you did not get self study classes.

T:   I speculate that the administration at my years (62-69) let us have a wonderful time at school.  Notes were sent earlier in the morning to advise FC.  We also did little tricks to get FC too.

R:   What were those tricks?

Mr. Chu

Fr Chan

T:   When no teacher showed up after 5 minutes, our class Prefect would be persuaded to see Fr Chan, Prefect of Studies, to get an OK.  If Fr Chan was not in his office, our class Prefect would go direct to see Mr Chu for permission to have Football Class.  Being the Sports Master, he always granted our request.  Football Class!

      Enough about our years.  Tell me about your experience with FC.

R:   Honest, we did not have too many of those situations you mentioned. If a teacher was absent, usually another teacher would take his place to supervise a Private Study (PS) Class to make sure other classes were not disturbed.   When there were not enough teachers to do substitutions, Mr. Ho would drop in to assign some work, leave some books on the teacher’s desk and move on to other classes with teachers absent.

T:   What did you do then?

Mr. Ho

R:   We simply kept quiet and worked on our own, not knowing when Mr. Ho would return.  We were told he could keep three PS Classes going quietly by dropping in each class for a few minutes.  Only at times when there were more than 3 teachers away from school at the same time, we would have the enjoyable time of Football Classes.  What did you do in FC?

T:  For us, those who wanted to play would change quickly, sometimes just the shoes.  If there were no shoes, we had to go to the classrooms nearby to borrow from other students, while their classes were still going on.

R:  That sounds like fun…  What about the students who did not want to play?

T:  For our years in the higher forms, those who did not play would roam around everywhere – canteen, garden, chapel, etc.  Some might even leave the campus for the shops or wander the streets nearby.

R:  We were not supposed to do that.  There was Mr. Ho somewhere in the campus.  

T and R:  (Laughter!!)