If Only Teachers Cared...

A major presentation right after the midterm week is never good. For one, you haven’t slept properly the whole week and second, you have to work your ass off when everyone else you know is busy catching up on sleep and having fun.

I had my last exam on Monday, the first day after the midterm week – go figure. Anyway, right after my exam, I, along with my group members, decided to get started on the research that we were required to do. After like an hour and a half of initial research, we still had not grasped the topic at hand. A friend and I decided to go to the teacher’s office and consult her but she was not there. I looked at the bulletin board that hung beside her desk and saw that she had a class at that very time. We decided to go and wait for her outside her classroom and ask her questions when she ends the lecture. We waited for like 10 minutes in which my friend plopped down on a bundled up carpet in the corner which, I still have a strong feeling, was infested with lizards. I told her about my hunch, but it turned out that she was not scared of lizards and in her day had hunted many lizards with her jooti – the first girl I personally know who has done that (How awesome is that? =P). Anyway after 10 minutes I decided to peek into the classroom to see if the teacher was even there. The classroom was totally empty. Turns out, the teacher did not come to school that day. So we went to our next class and after that decided to go home without actually deciding what we were going to do about the presentation. Well, I actually went to a friend’s birthday party while others might have gone to see the baby (another teacher’s precious little child because of whom our classes get cancelled every now and then).

The next day I woke up relatively late and looked around for my cell phone. There were a few text messages from my friend. One of them included a teacher’s number, asking me to request her to postpone the presentation. I never like talking to teachers on the phone. The last time I talked to a teacher on the phone was back in 2008 and at that time I was pretending to be a friend’s dad – but that’s another story. Anyway to cut the long story short, it was decided that I’ll text the teacher and if she does not reply in two hours then my friend will call her. It took me 15 minutes to come up with the perfect text message which explained how and why we cannot possibly present the next day and that the presentation should be postponed till next class (To which the teacher never replied).

At 4 O’ clock I got a call from my friend. It turned out that she had just called the teacher and the teacher was most displeased and had refused to postpone the presentation. In short we were screwed – 15% of the grade was riding on this presentation. We had till 8 am the next day to get done with everything. We divided the topic and set to work and worked the whole night. I got done with it at 4 am in the morning and managed to sleep for two hours, while 2 of my group members didn't even get the chance to shut their eyes, although I have a feeling they spent considerable amount of time on Facebook. =/

I woke up after 2 hours, dressed up for presentation and drove to school half asleep. Reached school and went straight to class. Sat down at the very back and started going over the things I had planned to say during my presentation. I looked up to check the time and was surprised to see it was 8:30 am. The class was supposed to start at 8:15. I thought maybe the teacher is late, she will show up in a while.

8:40 am - still no sign of teacher.

8:45 am - still not there.

That’s when we all decided that this means only one thing – the teacher is not coming today, and we were quite right, she didn't.

All of our work, the sleepless night, never ending reading, everything we had done was all in vain! (Well no, we presented the next day) But it was total injustice to us for we had spent so much time working under considerable amount of stress and pressure, and the teacher just decided not to show up. Grrr!!!

I really think that teachers should be courteous enough to tell the students in advance that they do not plan to take the class. All it takes is a text message or an email to inform the students. Now seriously, how hard is that? It would save students the trouble of coming to school or discomfort of waking up early in the morning or in my case, considerable amount of stress. I  feel that the teachers should be a bit more considerate than two of my present teachers (this one, and the one with the baby).