Another Day

I thought the young woman who appeared in my office had come to complain about her exam results from last semester.
“Excuse me, Madam,” she said, “you have a class now.”
No, I said, the class didn’t start for twenty minutes.
“But the timetable has changed.”
“When did it change?”
“Yesterday,” she said.
When I arrived at the classroom with 51 students waiting for me, I asked them where the change had been posted.
“What is the meaning of ‘posted’?” they said.
They pointed to a central area where their exam results had been posted but it wasn’t the same location where the announcements about Easter break and the new deputy provost had been posted. I apologized for the delay to students.
Within two minutes of my lecture, the electricity went out.
While this didn’t affect the PowerPoint presentation that I wasn’t using, it did stop the ceiling fans. At 12 noon when the sun was high in the sky, when the rain clouds had gone and gathered in another region of Tanzania, the lack of air movement was deadly. Eyelids flickered and shut. It was as though a silent sniper above me picked off students.
I had a mental flashback at that moment. When I was a student at Midland Lutheran College, I taught a language skills lab directed by Pat Trautrimas. Her evaluation of each class period began with the classroom environment: “First, make sure the room is comfortable. Is it too warm? You will lose your students!”
Outside the classroom in the hallway, there were growing murmurs that I had to shout above.
A student said, “Madam, they are wanting to come inside.”
“But this is our classroom. We’re supposed to be here.”
“Perhaps you could tell them.”
I went into the hall where another group of 50 students stood. I looked at their timetable. Apparently in the middle of my lecture, between hour one and hour two, my class was supposed to shift from seminar room 1 to seminar room 2. All of us in my classroom understood this was absurd, but the students outside the classroom did not understand. I explained.
When I returned, the room was still hot. I had lost more students. I was recovering from the flu. I had begun the lecture exhausted and I would end it the same way. Time passed.