Taking My Weight In School? Ugh!

For every Singaporean student in a Primary, Secondary or Post-Secondary institution, it is compulsory to have the P.E. teachers measure our height and weight after every major holiday (which is the June holidays and the end-of-year holidays). This measure is predicated on the assumption that students typically pig out during the holidays and gain an unnecessary amount of "holiday weight", which is apparently unacceptable and therefore has to be monitored.

I'm really tall, so I like the part where the teachers measure my height and tell me that I am well above 1.7 meters (that's above 5 feet and 7 inches, thereabouts).

But THEN, I have to face the dreadful moment of stepping on the weighing scale and watching the needle swing past a very very very large number on that scale. In fact, sometimes I don't even dare to look. I try to stand in certain ways to decrease the number, but nothing works because the scale is too damn smart.

I'm not afraid of knowing what my weight is, because I KNOW that I am heavy. I am simply infuriated to have my (extremely private) weight made known to:

1. The teacher who is measuring my weight
2. The student who has been commissioned to help the teacher record down the weights of all the students
3. Any other students who are near enough to hear the teacher read out the number on the weighing machine to the student mentioned in point number 2

And what's worse - everyone is dying to know the weight of the fat girl! Heck, even I would rather know the weight of a fat girl than a skinny girl, though I really cannot explain this phenomenon. But it's true. When it's time for the fat girl to step on the scale, everyone stops talking among themselves, and tries to act like they're not interested at all in the fat girl's weight (but trust me, THEY ARE). They turn sideways so that they're not directly facing the height-and-weight area, but their eyeballs are rolled in the direction of the poor fat girl who has just stepped on the weighing machine. Then their eyes turn toward the lips of the teacher who then utters the number that everybody is simply dying to know, while everyone reads the teacher's lips and has the satisfaction of knowing just how damn heavy that fat girl is.

This is why I always dread the first day of school after June and December. I hear all my skinny friends saying, "Oh my god! I gained soooooo much weight after the holidays! Now I'm like, 54kg!" Thanks a lot. It's not as if they don't know that I'm definitely much heavier than they are - I am visibly heavier.

I hate the Ministry of Education, and the Health Promotion Board for having this stupid rule that students have to take their height and weight in school after the holidays!!! Just leave us alone, wouldn't you? I would like to have the privacy of being the only one who knows my weight! Not to have it keyed in some stupid system viewed by health freaks who go "tsk" at all the overweight teenagers.