What do you know?

In my days in the university, the popular saying in my department was, ‘If the student has not learned, the teacher has not taught.’ When I was a student I very well agreed with this adage because I saw that most of our lecturers did not ‘teach’ at all. When I switched places however and taught in several institutions, I saw that it was not always true; sometimes it’s the students who have purposefully refused to learn. I remember crying in front of a class I was teaching once when this girl who I was even offering lessons without pay couldn’t repeat something I kept saying for her to repeat. The whole class was sober after I cried and I wasn’t embarrassed at all, it just really hurt.

The students for National Diploma 1 in the institution I work have been writing exams for the past two weeks.

The first day I was assigned a hall to invigilate up until yesterday, students still ask me ‘as their fellow student’ to ‘help them.’ (I’m smallish so I’m used to people thinking I’m their fellow this or that).

Yesterday I caught a girl using her phone to do whatever she was doing, apart from the other students I caught exchanging papers and microchips, all of them went with the ‘please don’t tell them’ because in this institution malpractice is a grave offence as it should be (you get expelled). I’ve not reported any students yet because I can’t come and fling somebody from their destiny but how can from the first week of exams until now all the students claim to have not been taught this or that yet have been coming to the Polytechnic everyday. Who is messing with whom?