The scheme

Fukara Alim dragged his feet with false confidence as he walked along the corridor of the second floor balcony of Hekima Academy’s tuition block. He had a double lesson in Form 1 East class and he tried to summon all his attention to the task ahead of him.However, confused thoughts bombarded his mind at will: Tajiri his landlord was coming this evening for his rent, heaps of unmarked books lay on his desk, and there was a staff-meeting scheduled for this mid-morning.... ouch he nearly head-butted Jemo Audi the Chemistry teacher, who was rushing out for another class next door.

‘Morning class’, he hoarsely greeted the class as he entered in.

‘Good morning Sir.’ chorused the young eager faces of the Form 1 E.

‘Now, who can tell us where we had stopped last time?’ Fukara asked the perplexed group of fourteen year olds.

Meanwhile he flicked through the worn-out pages of his copy of Integrated English Book 1. He knew he was guilty of having not looked at any book since last Friday afternoon, but had instead been on a bender till last night. On his way to this class, he had glimpsed through the staff-room window, three heaps of exercise books on his desk awaiting his attention. Good practice required that he marked the last exercise before embarking on any new topic, but what could he do?

He had reached a point in his career where all interest in his work had reached rock bottom. He neither read much, nor tried to search for any new techniques to motivate his pupils. Indeed they respected him because of the good reputation he had built over the years. However, his Head of department always complained about the delay with his schemes of work, and even when they came, they did not reflect any achievable objectives.

Now as he flicked through the class textbook, his mind was in turmoil and his confidence at its lowest. He yearned to be alone, locked in his room and lying down on his bed for the rest of the day. His hands shook as his fingers reached chapter eight where several familiar passages and topics flashed by; African myths of creation, phrasal verbs, noun phrases, vocabulary ...... we must have done all these. Oh God I need help, he thought. These children must not realise what I’m going through.

‘Sir, you asked us to read the passage Anjiko Joins a New School in chapter nine, which we did and answered all the questions. Our books are on your desk in the staffroom’, calmly offered Florida, the class prefect.

That’s my girl, thought Fukara with relief as he quickly reached the page. He had to do something desperately quickly to occupy this class in the double lesson period which lasted an hour and twenty minutes. He wrote words and phrases used in the passage on the black wall. He went through with them each vocabulary, phrase and expression as they were used in the passage. They inferred their meanings from the passage and compared them with actual meanings in the dictionary.

Experience had taught him that younger pupils who had just joined High School were highly motivated, and enjoyed interactive language learning. Many, particularly the extroverts, aspired to show off their knowledge of new words and phrases in their second language. A lively discussion proceeded which covered an entire forty minutes of the first lesson.

However, he couldn’t tell whether they could see through his bluff or not. He thought he heard suppressed giggles from the class at his confusion at the beginning of the lesson. And something in the eyes of Florida alerted him that she could see through him. It was as though she felt very sorry for him. It reminded him of his eight year old daughter Rachel. In his moments of doubt and confusion, Rachel would offer to take off his shoes, polish them and offer him a cup of coffee. During such moments, Rachel was like his mother, and he was a small boy again. Today, his mind was elsewhere as he went through the motions of teaching, like a zombie. He secretly yearned for the lesson to end.

When the bell rang to end the first half of the lesson, he asked them to read the next passage as he hurried to the staff-room to complete marking their books. Hardly had he gone through a couple of exercise books when Buri, the Form three North class prefect brought another heap of books. He slapped them carelessly on the big table in the middle of the staffroom, and without a word turned to walk out.

In Fukara’s depressed mind, he felt as though the whole world had hatched a plan to destroy him professionally. At the corner of the staffroom, he sat with shoulders hunched behind his desk like someone who had been defeated in a fight.

‘Hey Buri, whose books are those?’ Mteja the Kiswahili master asked Buri when Fukara said nothing.

‘They are so-forth’s, sorry... I....err meant to say Mr. Alim’s Sir’, stammered Buri, letting slip Fukara’s nick-name.

‘Come here Buri’, Mteja commanded. Bury walked timidly towards Mr. Mteja’s desk fearing the worst. As he approached Mteja, he was mortified to see Alim calmly seated behind his desk, laboriously poring over a sentence in a book as if he hadn’t noticed him. He went on with his business, as Mteja, now enjoying himself to the fullest, seized the Buri’s unguarded moment to torment him.

‘Buri’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Who is so-forth?’ the evil smirk on Mteja’s face left no doubt in Buri’s mind that he was in deep trouble. It always amazed him how this man never tired of causing trouble for pupils. Pupils knew they were in hot soup if Mteja caught them breaking a rule. It never mattered whether the culprit committed the offence inadvertently or if it was premeditated. This was particularly sticky for Buri because the so-called felony was committed in the staff-room which Mteja claimed was within his area of jurisdiction.

As the Master in charge of the staffroom, he reined terror on all pupils to the chagrin of teachers like Fukara. But today, Fukara felt a kind of satisfaction, some sort of poetic justice being done on the bloke-headed Buri. He ignored the pleading look on Buri’s face as Mteja interrogated him further. Mteja was a short slight man, hardly four feet three inches, and was the same height with some of the boys in forth form. In fact Clara, the deputy head-teacher was recently overheard saying that he instilled fear in pupils to safeguard himself from any potential threat from them.

Fukara somewhat felt that Buri had paid enough for his sins, and decided to intervene. He ignored Mteja’s line of interrogation but proceeded to pin him down on account of bringing the books at the wrong time.

‘Buri when were you supposed to bring these books?’ he asked feigning annoyance.

‘Last Friday, Sir.’

‘Well, Buri you’ll have to explain to Form three North that the books will be marked first before I can come to your class’, he said lamely.

‘I will Sir, but you still owe us two lessons. Last Friday’s doubles went untaught’, he cheekily retorted. Before Fukara could think of what to say, the bell rang for morning break, and Buri dashed out of the staffroom. There was heavy movement of chairs and desks as pupils rushed out of their classrooms, and teachers streamed into the staffroom. Across the staffroom from where he sat, Mteja felt disappointed with Fukara for letting Buri off the hook so easily. Buri will have to answer for his arrogance next time, he thought.

‘Excuse me teachers’, suddenly announced Mr. Busara, ‘Due to unforeseen circumstances, our staff meeting scheduled for this morning has been postponed to next Friday.’

Fukara hadn’t noticed the head-teacher coming into the staffroom. Deep down in his heart there was a sigh of relief. He was neither in the mood nor in a mental state for any meeting. But when the head-teacher asked him to come to the office immediately, his heart skipped a beat. Perhaps it was the way he said it, or it was just his own premonition that warned Fukara that the summons to Mr. Busara’s office was about a complaint about his work.

As he walked down the stairways to the ground floor, he thought of all the possible shortcomings in his work of late. He could only think of the heaps of unmarked books in the staffroom. His mind was clouded, and he felt thirsty and dizzy, but there was no time to waste. So he walked up to the head-teacher’s door and knocked gently.

‘Come in’, came Mr. Busara’s booming voice from inside.

He was surprised to see Mrs Binafsi, Florida’s mother, seated on the visitor’s chair inside the office. Noticing his discomfiture, Mr. Busara quickly hastened to explain.

‘Take a seat Mr. Alim’, he said cheerily without any trace of pretence, ‘You know Mrs. Binafsi who is a parent as well as the chair-person of the Parents Teachers Association.’

He explained that she was there on routine BOG business but thought she needed to talk about her daughter’s performance in school.

‘I’ve noticed in particular that her English exercise book has been marked only twice this term’, she chipped in matter-of-factly even before the head-teacher could finish, ‘Some of the exercises are marked with a pencil which she said was done by a classmate. I wanted to know the truth by myself.’

Caught off guard, Fukara tried to explain as convincingly as he could, why there were few teachers’ marks on Florida’s exercise book. He did not know whether his reason for asking the pupils to mark their classmate’s books was convincing enough. He broke into a sweat when Mr. Busara commented that he had noticed the work he had covered did not tally with his schemes of work. Did he have an explanation for that? He did not seem to have an immediate answer. The head-teacher, however, assured Mrs. Binafsi that Fukara was one of the most experienced teachers in Hekima Academy, and that any oversight will be ironed out.

Fukara walked out of the school office in a daze. He thought about his twenty odd years of teaching English language, and wondered whether there was any tangible achievement he could show for it. He felt small and cornered like ant in a square room full of spiders. As he walked into the staffroom, he could sense all eyes probing his face but ignored them as he sat down heavily on his chair. He felt tension building in the staffroom as nobody was saying anything to him. It was as if they had known all along, and had been waiting for this to happen.

The leeches, traitors, he angrily thought to himself. For the umpteenth time, he told himself that he would tender in his resignation, and concentrate on his own private business where he was his own boss. As he tried to calm himself, his mind went back to the good old days, when a teacher’s word was his bond. Motivated by a desire to impart knowledge, and an in-built self-regulation, he worked at his pace and required no interference from ‘stake-holders’ as happened these days.

As far as he saw it, a modern teacher’s career expectancy is short-lived, if not doomed.

The glare of probing eyes from the head-teachers, the parents, government and the public can break any iron-hearted individual. The last straw is the empowerment of the pupils, to do and to say as they will. It is an inadvertent scheme to bring down, and to destroy one of the noblest professions in the world.