crickets

I don't even remember her name but I feel a certain shame in remembering what my class put that poor woman through. She was our second year Language and Literature teacher at the Luis Espelozín secondary school in Catia. She was a middle aged woman, blonde (probably dyed) had cats eye-shaped glasses and very overweight. Our classes were horrendously over-subscribed (I, with a surname right in the middle of the alphabet, was No. 31 that year) and it probably would have been just impossible for anyone to keep a close control on my group. Her ordeal would arrive when she arrived to school in a taxi. The boys would stand near the car crouching and when she got out of the car they would jump upwards, playing at being the suspension of the car jumping up in relief of being rid of that weight. She had a little high-pitched but sweet voice, she would clap to get the attention of the kids ('niños, niños...') to no avail. There were paper missiles being launched, gross jokes being shouted, a lot of the time it was -at least as I remember it- total mayhem. We were supposed to stand in line in the beginning of the class to wait to go into the classroom -it was a very rough, who-survives-wins tumble except on the day that the boys and the girls swapped places.One time they hid the chalk, they filled the raised teacher's podium with crickets (no idea how they got so many; they were very noisy) they put the desk drawers (full of stationery and things) upside down so that when she would open them the contents would spill on to the floor, to the noisy rejoicing of the savages in the class. I'm afraid I never thought at the time of what she, a human being just like myself, was going through for a miserable underpaid teaching job. I was too busy surviving, knowing myself different and as vulnerable, making myself small so the vandals wouldn't notice me. This is not a proud memory.