Impressions from a school takeover

Our week of taking over the school while the teachers are in Spain is now over. It's been... everything. Above and beyond. It's all still very fresh, but I've written down some of the things that stand out the clearest, among the muddle of everything else. Some impressions, if you will.

I step onto the bus at seven fifteen, bleary eyed and tired, and I take a seat up front so that I don’t have to walk very far. One of my fellow students sits down next to me, we look at each other, look down at our backpacks, look at each other again, then we find our respective iPods, plug in, and sit in blissful silence for the rest of the thirty minute ride.

I walk down the hallway towards a group of my pupils, including a tall, lanky boy of fifteen, with both his hat and trousers as far down as he can get them, whom I can never seem to get to sit up straight, no matter how hard I try. We lock eyes and he turns around quickly and starts talking loudly to his friends, the volume increasing even as I draw nearer. “My favourite teacher, you ask? Why, Trine Lise, of course!” He peeks my way to see if I heard, and the grin on his face is so large it seems to split the entire boy in two.

I sit at the desk I’ve stolen for the week, diligently trying to get some work done when a loud yell startles me and makes me take out my earphones. Peeking around the corner of my cubicle, I see one of my fellow teachers-to-be jumping around the work room like a monkey, the rest of the group spurring him on and joining in to make the loudest monkey noises they can.

It’s Friday afternoon and the last lesson of the day. I’m in the noisiest and most challenging of my classes, trying to teach them something—anything—about Hinduism, when my noisiest and most challenging student suddenly gets to his feet, looks around, and yells out: “Oy, shut up, you guys, I’m trying to listen here!”

It’s ten minutes into my lesson and I’m speaking to my class, explaining the exercise we’re going to do, when suddenly there’s a knock from inside the supply closet. I unlock it and out jumps a boy, exclaiming “Hello, fans, I’m out of the closet!” I roll my eyes, point him to his seat, and continue. Five minutes later there’s another knock from inside the supply closet.

I confiscate a large, black permanent marker to stop my pupils from writing and drawing all over themselves, their desks and each other. Five minutes later one of them steals it back for the purpose of writing “I heart Trine Lise” beneath the white soles of his shoes.

It’s early in the morning, the sun is shining I am walking next to the girl I sit with on the bus. We’re power walking, almost running at times, competing with our fellow bus-riding students to be the first ones to arrive at the school. Except, they don’t know it’s a competition. But we win every time.

I sit at my desk in the work room, it’s half five on a Friday afternoon. I’m the only one left and I’m more than ready to go home, but I have six more papers to grade before I can let myself leave. Suddenly there’s a knock on the window, and I look up to see two pupils from a class I’ve barely had wave and smile at me before they walk on.

I correct a paper by one of my brightest students, and I notice that every word written is copied directly from the internet. Disappointment makes me hand it back with a rather sharp comment written in red ink. The next day my student comes up to me after class, his hat in his hand, asking permission to hand in the paper again. “You don’t need to grade it or anything,” he says earnestly. “I just want you to read it. I want you to see what I can do.”

It’s the last day of the takeover and I’ve just had my last lesson of the day. I’m tired and I’m hungry and I really just want to go home. As I walk up the hallway the most wonderful smell of newly made waffles hits me like a wall. Entering the staff room, I realise that it’s not just a left-over scent from earlier in the day, our teachers from the university have laboured in the kitchen for an hour, making us all waffles to celebrate that we survived the week.

I walk down the hallway towards the work room and a pupil from one of the lower classes, someone I don’t know, waves to me and yells, “Hey! You! Teacher! Can you unlock the door?” Hey. Me. Teacher. I smile and unlock the door.