College Kids’ Show

Rishi Ram Paudyal

You enter to teach bachelor-level students. But it may turn out that it’s not them who need to learn, it’s just otherwise. It’s a rainy season and so when you ride a bike you need a raincoat. Further, you wear an outer-clothing to protect your inner-clothes from road dust and mud. You also need a pair of gloves. In addition, you have a couple of books to carry with you. For all these, you need a capacious bag.

With instilled enthusiasm and garnered courage, you enter one class. Some students are quicker than others to spot your bulgy black bag and they sing “Happy birthday to you” and soon the other students join the chorus with clapping. You roll your eyes, nod your head and utter “It’s not my birthday”. There are students who are smiling, who are talking to themselves, and who are asking me “Is it not really your birthday?” As you try to calm the class down, you still hear some voices “Where’s chocolate for us?” 

Oh, man, you think you’re there to teach! At different times you meet with different chaotic and abnormal events in different classes you teach. Three girls appear at the class-door to enter the class and some guys at the back start hooting “Wooooo” and the rest of the class joins and soon the class is full of laughter and noise. At this you kind of feel “Where the heck are you? What the hell is all this!”

On some occasion, the PowerPoint slides are on and you begin to explain. There’s a girl just on the second bench who is placing her left hand on the thigh of the other girl – both are pretending to listening to you. On the other side on the fourth bench, there’s a boy who is playing with a girl’s back hair and the girl is seemingly sitting motionlessly pretending to give her attention to the lesson under discussion.

Sometimes you may wonder if you are in academic institutions or in some other weird, chaotic, but ‘romantic’ places. You have many flashes and clips of memories. A class consists of varieties of students. One of the types is “love birds”. A boy and a girl sit in the corner of a class. The girl is sometimes seen holding the upper arm of the boy and massaging it gently and sometimes the boy is seen putting his whole arm on top of her back as she is leaning forward on the desk. 

The next type is “air-pods”. You notice something white on a girl’s one ear and as you go near, she tries to hide it with her hair. Where’s the other ear-pod? She has shared it with some boy in another bench. He doesn’t bother to hide it. He probably thinks it’s OK to plug it in while the class is going on.

In another class, there are two boys and two girls sitting in one row at the back of the class. They are seen constantly talking. The other type is “empty vessels”. They are the students who parade to the class late and want to go out in the pretext of washroom in the middle of the class. 

O, man, are you there to teach? Or learn?