Q

Cranium

Once, in primary school, a relief teacher stood in for a math class.

She had the kind of hairstyle you’ll usually find sprouting from the crown poodle’s caricature, an expression of perpetual shock, and underarm flabs the consistency of Jell-O.

She was like a play up of any relief teacher stereotype, and the most distinctive feature of this character would be her method of keeping (?) silence in the class: Whenever we made too much noise, she would stand at the front of the class with one finger pressed on her lips, and the other poised in the air, as if she’s waiting to be struck by a runaway lightning.

And then she would wait. Wait for us to notice her ridiculous stance and shut our yap. Of course, that never happened. We spent the entire one hour bringing down the classroom, and she spent the entire hour standing there with a finger in the air.

Stoic, lithic, she practically transformed into a immobile slab of marble no one gave a flying flick about.

At the end of the lesson, I wondered if she was really stupid, or just really smart – and didn’t particularly felt the teaching us how to multiply x and y that day.