By Pascal Mwandambo
Our first staff meeting after schools reopened was a stormy affair. This was due to the new Covid-19 regulations, requiring among other things, that students wear face masks, have hand washing facilities and be spaced about five feet apart.
My argument was that it was pointless to space the students while they had been mingling out there.
I argued that while that was possible at the moment, since only candidates have reported, the rule would be impossible to enforce when the whole student population was back in school.
“Our school resources and infrastructure have not improved a little bit and here we are trying to enforce the Covid-19 protocols without forethought,” I had opined.
This did not go down well with Obote, the principal.
I gave the other members the benefit of doubt.
However, other teachers seemed to agree with my suggestion, including Marashi, the English teacher who was nodding like an agama lizard as I spoke.
The meeting ended inconclusively.
As we left the meeting, I began musing over our days in school when things like corona were unheard of and the only thing that came close to a health scare was stomach upsets caused by eating raw tubers.
Then, a desk was shared by not less than three pupils. Sometimes you were assigned a desk mate you didn’t like and you would come up with all manner of excuses to have them removed.
My worst experience was being partnered with a bedwetter whose smell could hardly be described as romantic. My protests saw her replaced by a boy we nicknamed Zinja, short for Zinjanthropus, largely because his face reminded us of that ancestor of ours.
To add insult to injury, the fellow seemed to have the mental faculties of the good ancestor, and many were the times I’d allow him to copy my multiple choice questions’ answers, to save him the embarrassment of always leading from the bottom. But one day, Zinja was so carried away while copying that he copied my name too. That earned us both a thorough beating. It didn’t take long before Zinja decided that school was not his thing and quit.
I have been thinking about this incident and that a social distance arrangement would have saved me the agony of that beating.
The teachers of our time were also very creative.
For instance, one of our teachers told us that a dinosaur was an “elephant with the head of a snake”.
In the absence of chalk boards, we would use the dusty ground to write the alphabet, spell words and write basic math.
Once in a while, all the literature would be blown away by the wind and we had to start all over again.
Now that is becoming a thing of the past in the digital era where a teacher can comfortably sit at one corner of the classroom and use a projector to beam lessons on a wall.
Anyway, I hope our next meeting will come up with tangible solutions.
That’ s when Obote will realise that with this social distancing rule, some students might end up in the kitchen and others even outside the school compound.
