So, in one of the many schools that have been burdened with my insubordinate presence, as a newcomer, I, along with another girl, was exempted from Arabic since our classmates were already too far ahead for us to catch up. During midterm exams, we wished our classmates good luck as they went in for Arabic. We were rudely called upon when the supervisor, a teacher of another class, spotted us. He demanded to know what we were doing dodging a paper. We told him that we were excused from that particular subject but he laughed and dismissed our explanation as utter rubbish. “Who drops a subject in S2?” he asked. We told him we had simply been excused because we joined late. This, he dismissed as even more rubbish, saying it was our own problem we hadn’t joined early! The man forced us into the paper, making students giggle as they knew we couldn’t do Arabic to save our lives. He unknowingly sat us next to one of the best students in Arabic, Ahmed (not real name). Ahmed was a decent boy and was always out to help others. Naturally he felt the need to help us. Let me first mention that this paper was fully in Arabic – yes – even the part that asks you to fill in your name (and you are supposed to write it in Arabic). Gosh! I felt like I was looking at something a chicken had scribbled on the ground and was being asked to make sense of it. Ahmed helped us out. It’s not one of my most dignified moments but I was given no choice – so we copied off him. The supervisor kept leaving the room to smoke as the ‘coping duo’ put Ahmed’s answer sheets to full use. Arabic is like some kind of bizarre drawing – it’s not the easiest to copy but with a steady hand, trust me, you can do it! After two hours, our papers were collected and we sat there, very contented about acing the paper. Come result day, the ‘copying duo’ was the first in class – too keen on getting our brilliant results back. When the teacher walked in, he had a sarcastic smile on his face. I believe I wasn’t moved - not at the time at least. He assured us that we had all done well – others - a little too well. He called out names for individuals to go pick their paper and when he read the last one, the ‘copying duo’ and our master had not received ours. He then asked the boy we copied from to step forward, and proceeded to ask him if he had done the paper three times! Confused, he said no. “I don’t normally like to call people stupid,” said the teacher, “but some of you are quite daft. This young man let two people copy from him and he didn’t even have the sense to tell them to write their own names on the sheet.” Yes – we had copied the boy’s name. Since the whole bloody paper was in Arabic, we just copied and I guess Ahmed was too busy trying to complete his to remember to tell us that the first question was ‘what is your name’! Let’s just say the teacher had a blast with our rear ends!
