Bad day

Day 23 – May 28

Today was my worst day at Mangi Sabas.

It began simply enough. I was supposed to have the morning free, as I wasn’t scheduled to supervise an exam, but the second mistress was late or absent so I was asked to sub in. Not a problem. The Form II classes are pretty good and cheating never seems to be a problem. The students finished the exam fairly quickly and we had over an hour before the next was set to start at 11am.

Around quarter after 10 I noticed something going on in the second mistress’ office (she had arrived). Various students were being called in. At one point, a student was beat with a stick so many times that he started crying. It was horrible to hear and really difficult to tolerate. Afterwards, more students were called in and after that even some teachers were called in. I had no idea what was going on at the time but it was taking a lot of time. As 11 o’clock rolled around and I got my papers ready for the second exam session, another teacher told me that the exams wouldn’t be taking place until whatever it was that was going on in the second mistress’ office had been resolved.

And it went on…and on… and on. Finally, around 1pm, there was sudden movement and they said the exams were to start. By this time I had been wondering if we’d even continue with the plan to conduct the afternoon session, and when they finally decided to, I was angry.
I was hungry, since I hadn’t eaten since 6:30 that morning and they were planning to start a 2 ½-hour exam right when we should have been eating lunch. But more than angry for me, I was angry for what they had done to the students. Going through a week packed with 10 exams is hard enough by itself, let alone being made to wait in between for no reason, disturbing your mindset, etc. On top of that, instead of dealing with the matter at the end of the day, the administration had pressed on for more than two hours with their handling of the matter and now the students were to sit down to write and exam on very empty stomachs. How can they expect students to do a good job on term exams when they are starving hungry. During the exam I was so hungry that it was hard for me to concentrate on watching the students, so I can only imagine the situation the students were in knowing that the marks counted for a lot.

So I was already displeased with what was going on when, just after half-way through the exam, I saw a student toss a paper across the row to another girl. I immediately went over, looked at the paper, and found a question of the test copied out on it: they were cheating. I asked the student to write her name on a piece of paper but she was to shocked and afraid to. It didn’t matter. At the end I kept both their tests separate and called them into the office where I and another teacher had a talk with them.

As it turns out, what I had seen was the return throw of the cheating, and in fact the second girl had thrown the paper back refusing to answer the question for her classmate. I told her, though, that just doing that can be perceived as cheating by a teacher, since all they see is the passing of the paper. The girl who originally asked for help admitted to the offence. These two girls are Form I students, taking term tests for the first time, it was a difficult physics exam and they probably just made a stupid mistake. To boot, neither of them benefited. I hated to punish them, but it couldn’t go unpunished. So the other teacher and I discussed the punishment. I didn’t want to tell the headmaster for fear that the students would receive a beating, and I didn’t want that happening at my hands. So we decided to keep it quiet and punish them by deducting marks off their tests. We called them back, told them our decision, but also that they had gotten off fairly lightly all things considered. I hope it was a lesson for them.

However unavoidable it might be, punishing kids leaves a bad taste in your mouth, especially when they are remorseful. That, on top of what I had witnessed earlier in the day had me feeling none to good on the walk home today.