Chalk, coins, and other dishonors: chronicles from the classroom

Edmilson Panguana"

We were coming off a two-week stretch of long weekends. I was feeling bored; I'd already read all the books on my shelf and had also blown the last few coins from the previous month's salary going out with friends. So, I decided to read the diary of a mysterious student teacher I'd found in my locker.

It was late Sunday afternoon, October 4, 2026. I opened the diary and began to read. The first paragraph oscillates between metaphorical richness and philosophical depth. As one reads in the first lines: when we realized it, the virus had already degenerated the entire immune system. Nothing was left; the infection had already spread to every crack in the school. Even the air that circulated there had been infected by this evil that plagues the nation.

The teachers' council had unanimously decided to abandon the art of teaching in an attempt to keep up with the "evolution of the world." From the other hemisphere came good news, preached by pedagogues and didacticians who advocated more engaging and affective teaching methodologies. In this twisted sense, the student ceased to be seen as someone in search of knowledge and became a potential client—or, worse, an object of satisfaction. At that moment, reading the diary increasingly captivated my attention. In the following lines, the author narrated what her first day as a trainee teacher had been like, a true culture shock upon arrival.

The professor, a war veteran weary of utopias, greeted her with pedagogical advice that should serve as her survival code. “Today’s students don’t like to study, my dear,” she blurted out bluntly, as if dictating an undeniable truth of physics. And the practical guidance followed immediately, devoid of any academic scruples: “So, if you’re short on cash and need coins for a photo, don’t worry about theories; just make a photocopied notepad, sell it at an affordable price to the class, and problem solved.”

The intern's mind was immediately invaded by intrusive thoughts. Her stomach clenched. As she listened to this, the voice of the university echoed in her head like a distant and naive echo: But weren't students supposed to be guided to research their own notes, to become autonomous, as the new teaching methods advocate? Right there, at that moment, she realized that the gap between paper and the school floor was an insurmountable abyss. The lecture hall was no longer the altar of knowledge; it had become a marketplace.

In her diary, the intern recounted her stubborn resistance. She refused to sell the "life-saving card." Armed with manuals and methods imported from across the hemisphere, she tried to apply them blindly, completely ignoring the coordinates of that terrain. She wanted autonomy, investigation, and constructive debates. However, the class's response was a bucket of cold water: pure disappointment. The students, accustomed to the law of least effort and the logic of survival, saw no emancipation in those modern methodologies; for them, it was nothing more than an unnecessary nuisance. And while she struggled to elicit a single critical word from that apathetic audience, the tenured professor was having a field day.

For the veteran teacher, the class was a market with extremely high turnover: she sold note cards on top of the intern's lectures and administered routine tests that functioned as mandatory tolls. In fact, acquiring the note card was a primary condition for taking the test. Each class day turned into a mental ordeal for the young intern. The exhaustion came from the physical effort, from the desperation of trying to sow wheat in reinforced concrete, realizing too late that the theory she had learned at university was a useless mirage in the face of the material and moral misery of that school.

The weight of those words began to accumulate in my chest. The description of that exhaustion, coupled with the tragic irony of the system, brought a dense, almost palpable sadness. Sip by sip, the mixture of reading with the remnants of a cheap, lonely wine in the room almost brought tears to my eyes. It was a mirrored reflection: the suffocated intern in the past of those pages was, deep down, the reflection of any lucid educator in the present. With a heavy sigh, I slammed the diary shut, like someone trying to lock a monster back into its box. I threw my head back, but my mind continued to churn in circles, a prisoner of that spiral of unanswered questions about the disastrous course education had taken.

However, amidst all the accusations of corruption and disinterest, one specific phrase kept nagging at me, refusing to let go: that ominous insinuation about students being seen as potential clients or... objects of satisfaction.

If an empty mind is the devil's workshop, a mind full of them must be the devil himself. Because I wondered, how far had the depravity of that professorship gone? What else did the following pages of that diary conceal?

2025/12/3