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(Thanks, Fernando)
"As an example of how were the punishments at my school
I will give one case, but the ritual was repeated many times.
An Autumn morning, 10:05 AM. The History teacher enters the room ready to
begin the hour as everyday, interrogating about the previous day’s notes.
He sits at his desk and calls my last name. My knees tremble as I leave my
place and walk to his desk. As soon as I arrive he asks “let’s see, the
Medic Wars”. No idea. To buy some time I begin “The medic wars… the medic
wars…”
He gives me no time to repeat it for the third time. He shouts an emphatic
“Here!” pointing to a floor tile near him. I hesitate, knowing that what
awaits me is not good. “Here!” I hear again, with a sterner voice.
Resigned, I go as a lamb to the slaughterhouse.
As I arrive I get a good slap leaves my left cheek burning. The silence and
the tension in the classroom could be cut with a knife. Still dazed by the
slap I hear “On your knees!” I get three steps away and kneel near the
teacher’s desk at front of the class, knowing that all my classmates are
watching me.
For the first minutes you are ashamed. As this feeling fades, you begin
feeling the pain in your knees. After ten minutes, the smallest dust
particles on the floor bite in your knees.
If you try to seat on your ankles, you receive a warning about not doing it.
If you try to alternate the weight from one knee to the other, you just get
more pain. Experience tells you that you will be so until 11:00, time of the
break. Then the bell will ring, the teacher will leave and you will be free
to get up and go.
Until then, it will feel as an eternity. You watch as he dictates his notes
for tomorrow from a greasy old notebook, how he pauses and repeats the parts
of the sentence, how dictates the punctuation marks.
You can appreciate the ridicule of the whole situation. And you feel
helpless in front of an old fashioned system against which you feel
impossible to fight.
Fernando"
Published: 03/21/07
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