See Me!

Christopher Mlalazi On the Lighterside 
MOST of us had private nightmares about primary and secondary school days. I had several too, but today I want to dwell on those that I know always haunted my friends, and which we would laugh over when they had gone by.
The most laughable was the fear of composition writing, be it in Ndebele, or in English, that always had several of my friends even thinking of running away from school to South Africa.

Yes, all the way across the Limpopo, and not minding the crocodiles, just because the teacher had said go and write a poem about “The most memorable day of my life.”

But why did they fear something that for some of us who could write good compositions at the drop of a coin was such an easy task?

This was so because they said they had no stories to tell, and even if they had, they just did not know how to compose them into a coherently written story.

Imagine somebody with no story to tell, and you catch them outside the class and they would be chatting louder than all birds put together.

And so, when composition writing lesson came in class, they would be the ones craning their necks like giraffes, trying to copy from friends.

But can you copy a story and hope to get away with it? Certainly not. You could get away with it in Maths or multiple choice, but not with the composition, as this one is always 100 percent self creativity.

I am reminded of that famous joke, that there were some guys who so much copied at letter writing that they even signed by the name of the person they would have been copying from.

This might sound funny, but I guess it happened, as there is no smoke without a fire.
I am reminded of a time when I was in Grade 7 when elders in the township would ask me to read or write letters for them addressed to some relatives in the villages. Sivela khatshana zihlobo.

And I wonder if today’s kids are also asked to write letters by the elderly, most of them who would be illiterate? This was a nice thing to do, and I would happily recommend it to any kid to try, as it gives a sense of responsibility to young shoulders, that you are being the centre of communication between adults, almost like some human social media.

And so, if you copied in class, and the teacher caught you, your exercise book would come with a very threatening SEE ME!

Getting this SEE ME had its anxious moments too. I remember one school term my friend and I got that, because we had failed a Maths exercise that was supposed to be simple, but was not that simple to us and do you know what we did?

We tried to work some juju so as to make the teacher forget that he had given us that evil command.
We had received back our exercise books with the SEE ME when the teacher had gone away from the school for the day, and, poor us, we were supposed to sleep with that sentence hanging over our heads, and then hand in ourselves the following morning.

And so that afternoon we were put to hard task, trying to think of all juju stuff that could make a teacher forget he had some punishment lined up for some of his pupils, specifically us.

Of course we got several prescriptions for that from our school friends and other sympathisers, and the one I remember the most was that we were supposed to take a small stone or pebble and put it under our tongues until the following day, and that would make the teacher forget.

I remember we did place the pebbles under our tongues in the afternoon of the same day, but I don’t remember much about what happened afterwards with them, but I guess I got fed up with it when I got home and spat it out.
The following day we did see the teacher, and you can guess what happened.

I think you guessed wrong. No, the teacher did not punish us, but he told us that we must stop playing when we were home and ask our parents to help us with our homework.

So you see, if that juju had worked, we wouldn’t have got that vintage advice, which ultimately might have led to our improvement in class work in the school terms that followed.

School is not always that fearsome!