Repeated as farce

A few weeks ago, I felt like a real teacher for the first time. I was walking back to school through a little waste ground after lunch when I saw a child get his head split open by a well aimed rock. I screeched ‘MAIS QU’EST-CE QUE TU FAIS????’ at the culprit, who hadn’t seen me coming, and dragged him into school while trying to reassure and hold up the bleeding stonee, who was half his size and very dazed. The stone thrower was this hulking kid called Hugo who sulks through English lessons refusing to attempt any activity, so I wasn’t inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt when he gave me what seemed a comically poor excuse: ‘I was aiming for his arm’. Apparently François had called Hugo’s mother a whore. The teacher on duty took François off to have his head seen to, and asked me to guard the school gate and the miscreant. This meant repelling the crowd of children who gathered to hurl insults at him, including a little girl who marched up shouting ‘is it you who threw a rock at my cousin!?’. Perhaps this is the start of a new vendetta…! I suppose that despite teaching for five months here I am still surprised when I have such an obviously different status to the children, and genuine responsibility for them.


Then today I thought a child might have died in my lesson. They were all standing up ready to sing ‘heads, shoulders, knees and toes’ (the only song I ever do, because they remember it from last year so it doesn’t require hours of me agonisingly singing the song again and again while the kids stare at me with a mixture of amusement, horror and scorn). I heard a loud crack and assumed it was a chair falling over, but it turned out to be Ayoub’s head hitting the floor. I don’t know how he contrived to fall over, but he was lying there looking very pale and spaced out, and the teacher ran over and immediately dragged him up, berating him and the class for being so agitated! I was just worried that he was having a brain haemorrhage. She dragged him off to the headmaster, I have no idea why, but he was walking and talking so I assume he was alright. It was slightly terrifying, because another teacher has told me that I ought to have personal liability insurance in case I injure a child in class and the parents sue for medical expenses. The example she gave was hitting a kid in the face with her ring encrusted fist. That afternoon, up in the village school at Monticello, I was teaching the youngest class to say that they are happy, sad, angry and so on. We were doing charades, and as a little girl called Claudia got up to the front ready to act out an emotion, she fell flat on her face and lay sprawled motionless on the floor. I honestly thought she was out cold, but was alerted by her giggles to the fact that she was just acting ‘tired’, albeit in the most melodramatic way possible.