For fourteen years, I struggled to survive in this fucked up school. The things this institution enforced could be the subject of anthropological studies. It was the best in town, with star students winning accolades in sports, academics, and whatnot. However, not a single friend I know spoke fondly of this place. “Jail” they used to call it. Where harassment of student and parent was the constant means of ensuring submission. This will be a multi-part series visiting all the bullshit my school put us students through.
Spin the wheel
It was a Christian school. You know, you start the day at seven, five hundred others gathered around, singing some silly song or two, and then the national anthem. Our school had a reputation beyond all its achievements. It had a reputation for extreme disciplining. What does that even entail? Well, you can’t speak any language other than English. What if I speak in Hindi or Marathi in front of the teachers to my friends? Censure, corporeal punishment, principal’s office, or your parents. I never enjoyed “spin the wheel”. And spin the wheel it was for everything they considered an offense. Some faculty members were all too willing to run to the principal regarding a student. Seemed pathetic that they would run over to the big man for the smallest things. I despised these fools the most because our principal was perhaps the most involved principal of all. He would go over to student’s residences in the morning if they did not show up, heck he would come over with the vice principal to my house too. He was pretty feared.
Brown uniforms with brown socks and shoes were the dress code. But they managed to create hell there too. You would not be permitted to stitch the school uniform for cheaper from some tailor other than the one the school appointed. It was a constant battle between parents and faculty for years to come. Some parents really could not afford the more expensive school tailor and fabric. One could tell the difference between the fabrics half the time and it would always end badly for the kid with custom threads. My memory recalls seeing a mother cry in front of the principal on the day I too was apprehended, because of this absurd requirement. No other school in town would force the cash strapped so threateningly.
Corporeal punishment is not a thing anymore. I was roughed up a dozen times sure, but some classmates got it worse. The kind of worse where a worrying hush would befall the entire classroom. Following the thrashing, every gesticulation, every step the teacher took, made nearby students flinch, face away, and unable to blink for the next several minutes. Some of those men and women really flew off the handle. Complaints regarding such acts would be responded with, “Oh so you don’t like the teachers? You probably don’t like the school either. Here’s your TC. You may leave”. What parent could cope with such a reply? Oh yeah, that was another option on the wheel.
In third grade, we had this teacher with a short fuse. She would scream, throw dusters at students, and slap the notorious kids in the face with a steel ruler. Man, she knew how to terrorize. There was this one kid who would walk over to the dustbin too frequently to sharpen his pencil. Well, one day she got irritated with it, called him over, slapped him on the right cheek. Then she took his pencil and threw it out the window, and then the sharpener. What none of us understood at that moment was why she reacted that way. It was not really apparent as per our 9yr old brains.
On the first day, the first class of 8th std, we had an art class. A newly transferred boy was sitting in the first row, on the first bench. He did not know we stopped using crayons in 4th std. The art teacher, a cantankerous old lady, with a greying bun, drew some figures on the board and ordered the students to paint. The kid pulls out his new set of twelve crayons. She glares at him a moment, grins, then asks him, “where is the paint? You didn’t bring paint?”. The boy conveys his innocent reply shyly and then BHAM! In under five seconds of the reply, she hits him with the extra thick A3 art book flat on his head, like some cage wrestler would with a steel chair. Poor fellow cried on his first day at his new school. Yeah, he did not shed any tears since that day, but in the years to come, the school did plenty to upset him and everybody else so they would die inside all too often.
The most egregious thing of all was punishing the entire class just because a few delinquents could not behave and the faculty did not know who was to blame. Imagine, one boy, just one fuckboi laughs or so much as grins during a lecture in high school, the entire class would be made to either sit an extra hour after school or made to sit in the hallways or quadrangle… on the floor. It would get extra perilous when our principal would be out on rounds occasionally. There would be another earful and more homework as a result or an earlier reporting time for everybody the next day.