The first day of our last year at school, the first day of tenth class. I was really excited at seeing all my school mates again after a while. Everything around was new, brighter uniforms and shoes, cooler school bags, heavier text books and a new class room. Our new class room XB was located on the ground floor which was ironic as it was right adjacent to the basketball court and if we peeped out from the window we could see the canteen area too. I wondered who had come up with the brilliant idea of having the tenth standard classrooms on the ground floor where we could be easily distracted. It was like making a difficult thing even more challenging. But then my eyes drifted a bit to the right and I noticed that the Principal’s office was too close to our comfort. I don’t know how many feet or meters away it was but it was so close that if he farted I am sure we could have smelt it. Maybe that was the reason our class rooms were on the ground floor so that the Principal could keep an eye on us.
Dhawal and I sat on the same bench and wondered who our class teacher would be and hoped it wasn’t the boring Miss Suzie or the too strict Miss Madre. Hardik was late as usual and we watched from the windows if he was going to make it before the assembly started.
The bell rang and the whole school gathered in grounds for the first assembly of the new academic year to be greeted by an unfamiliar sight on stage. A tall man with a weird hairdo and lots of marks on his face stood before us in a white cape and all of us started speculating, whispering, murmuring and guessing as to whom he could be and why couldn’t we see our principal. The man walked up to the mike and there was absolute silence now. He welcomed all of us back to school and introduced himself as the new Principal for our school and informed us that our outgoing principal had been transferred to a school in Warangal. His name was Brother Franklin Aroona, he said he was a gold medalist in biology and had been educated in USA. Andy started smiling and whispered what the point in being a gold medalist in biology was, when you have taken a wow of celibacy. Because for him, biology only meant Human Reproduction and he had been eagerly waiting for that chapter to be taught in class and had mentioned it to us at least a 1000 times since the Nepal Trip. The reverend also said that he was a state level basketball player at which my eyes wandered in search on Hardik, who was standing near the gates and finally made it to school 20 minutes late. He looked pleased as he had wondered if tenth class students would be allowed to participate in sporting activities and the signs looked good for us so far. The assembly ended and we headed back to our classes and waited for our class teacher to arrive. It was relief when Mrs. Sheela, the biology teacher entered our class as she was very friendly and helpful. She had been teaching for the last 10 years and all of us respected her a lot. But the disadvantage was that she knew us all too well and immediately changed our seating arrangements in a manner that our gang was separated and we were sat next to the nerds.
Weeks passed by and class tenth so far was largely incident free. All the hype and anticipation had died down and there was nothing special about the tenth class except that we were going to have board exams and pre finals. The subjects too were much easier than what we had expected. All of us felt that the 9th standard math’s was much tougher than what we were studying now. The examination format was easy too. We were given a lot of choices like answer any one from the following three and so on, which made it very easy for us to decide on what to concentrate on and what to leave out. We also had the additional help of Model papers and all our seniors had always told us that the questions would be from these model papers only. Jogesh had also found out that the persons who correct our papers would get 7 rupees 50 paisa per paper that they check, so they wouldn’t be too keen on giving too much attention to any answers and would only be bothered by the amount of papers they corrected. It felt like a mockery of our hard work and learning. The most important year of our lives would be judged by people who got small change for their work. Chottu was particularly agitated by this and said that our education system is run by a bunch of jokers and all of us agreed with his views. So all the build up, all the exaggeration about the tenth class being the most important year of our lives had come to this. We had special classes, expensive tutors, we had stopped going on our weekend trips to Treasure Island in anticipation of our Board exams and then we found out it was all just a Hoax. Like Amir Khan said in 3 idiots, our education system will make all of us well trained but not well educated.
No comments:
Post a Comment