Monday Column: The boy at the back of the classroom

School days are a good reference to look back to. They don’t only bring back memories but they are an important source of information. The funny thing is that, with no apparent reason, one occasion has always been a vivid memory in my mind.

For a group of fifteen year-olds, it is always fun to roll papers and throw at each other in the classroom when the teacher is not looking. But that was not one of the proudest moments of my school days. Many of the turning points came when our teacher got fed up with our pranks. One day, he picked up one of the rolled up paper, put it gently on the table and looked sternly at us. When the giggles from the naughtiest girls died down, the teacher raised his right hand stuck out four fingers.

He very calmly asked," who is the cleverest of you can count these fingers?" The answer was obvious but we kept quiet, our minds busy asking about the motive of the question. He repeated the question and again there was silence. Then from the back of the room, a small voice from the smallest kid in the class, said," three."   

None of us were surprised from the answer. We had already dismissed him as a dumb boy not acknowledging that he had no full control with his mental faculties.

To our surprise, the teacher said it was a correct count. He walked to the back of the class and rewarded the boy with money. He then walked back, picked up the paper roll and asked another question," who would like to catch it?"

He threw it up in the air and none of us made a move to get it. It landed on the head of a girl in the middle and dropped on the floor. He then turned to the writing board and re-started the lesson. I don’t remember anybody else in that class throwing things at each other from that point onward. 

I guess there are more than the core lessons to be learned in any classroom environment. Since, we spend nearly half of our growing up life in a classroom, teachers do provide the backbone of that experience. When he stuck up his fingers, he was asking us for the obvious, really telling us, there is no hidden agenda in knowledge.

The irony was that, while we were busy playing pranks, the mentally challenged kid was the only one who was paying attention to the teacher. For many years, I wondered if the teacher was trying to prove a point when he accepted the wrong answer from the count of his fingers. Now, I am convinced that he was. Unlike throwing paper rolls, not everything can be seen with a naked eye. We all saw four fingers but the backroom kid saw more than that. 

Since he never participated in any classroom discussion before that, for him it was an opportunity to break his own tradition. The teacher sensed that and he had to encourage it. None of that was planned but from a bad situation, came up a useful one. Not only our paper throwing days came to an end, but the boy moved to the front row and made a reasonable improvement from a kid of his condition.           
It has been a lesson that I never forgot above all the math or science that have been taught in the class in my entire school days.