The Tamil Teacher's Punishment

The boys were 10 year olds and studying in 5th class. It was compulsory to take Tamil as one of the languages besides Hindi and English in school.

The Tamil teacher was not popular in that school. She had her young son studying in the same school and she would be concerned about him all the time. Like looking out for him during class hours. Her concentration was mainly on her son.

In this scenario, she would pay scant attention to her students in class.
Once she took the workbooks of all students to correct them. She did not return back the workbook of 3 students. Her son must have torn it and here she would be covering with some story of the boys not submitting their workbook at all for correction or she would reply that she had given it to them after correcting the same. Since the school was strict, the students were made to rewrite the entire workbook and re-submit to pass.

This was done by the students' parents pitching in to write the workbook for their wards.

The next time too the same thing happened. She lost a few workbooks of some students. One among them was my son. The school was quite strict about submitting books on time for corrections so we rushed through rewriting all the lessons and questions and answers. But there was an inspection at school and our boy got caught without his workbook. His teacher instead of telling the truth, pinched my son's ears so sharply with her big nails, that he bled from the nail injury behind the ear.
He had fever the next day. The doctor gave him injections as it turned into a full blown infection. It healed later, though.

We din't have the nerve to complain at that time. We were afraid of complaining. We wanted safety for our son during that year of schooling. The next academic year, our son could opt for another language. He was interested in taking up French over other regional Indian languages. We wanted peace to prevail at any cost. Accusations, fights, questionings and counter-questioning will harm the student more than help him get justice. The trauma of going through all this while having to face the teacher in his class everyday made us just accept all this as bad karma for all of us and get on with finishing mid-school successfully.

The teacher never knew we were monitoring her every move towards our son. We took special care in Tamil until he was declared pass in the subject. He opted for French and shone through scoring top marks in that language. He was so relieved and happy from that time onwards.

We consoled that we had to go through the trauma but had the wisdom not to make a public issue and spoil the atmosphere for our son, his Tamil teacher, for us and for the school management. We have spared two parties from going through what we ourselves went through. This is a peaceful way of dealing with a problem. Many may disagree with this method, yet the problem ended with us.
We did not agitate it into something big and land our son and ourselves into bigger worries to take on. Finally it died a peaceful death. But these memories, one among the many which are a mix of good or bad, remains with us.

Mahalakshmi.