Echoes Of Silence

School has a funny way of keeping you on your toes. One moment, you are in the school’s cafeteria or at a friend’s hostel, laughing about something funny that happened in school the previous day, and the next moment, you are sitting in a large lecture hall about to write an impromptu test you never saw coming, with your heart pounding like they had never before and small beads of sweat dripping from your forehead down to your neck, you glance around, hoping to catch the eyes of your friends. The same people who you laughed with just the previous day, but you realize they are scattered far apart. I knew school life wasn’t going to be as easy as I wanted it to be. Although I hoped it would, I realized that we cannot always get what we want. If we had a choice, many of us would have opted out because the things we faced were definitely not what we signed up for, but step by step, we kept surviving.

If there’s one thing that truly messes with a student’s sanity, it is the kind of courses that are difficult to understand and broad. For me, no course fit that description better than Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics; the course that made many shed tears. From the very beginning of the course, we knew it was going to give us issues. To make matters worse, our lecturers were not serious with us and although we had access to files and PDFs, we were left to study them on our own. My study group often came together every weekend to read, but every time we picked up this course, it was always impossible to get past the first topic.

“Guys, this course is a trap,” Tolani would always say whenever we opened the material.

Mary was always there to agree with her with her usual comment; “This whole thing doesn’t even make sense. How do they expect us to understand when the lecturers are not even there to guide us.” She would say, rolling her eyes and hissing repeatedly.

“Calm down, guys. We still have enough time. The exam is still many weeks away,” Drey, our class governor and the leader of the study group, would always say. Drey would come to realize that he shouldn’t have said that, although he was trying to ease our minds.

After about 3 study sessions in which we failed to make any real progress, Felix suggested we moved on to other easier courses since we were getting nowhere with Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics. “We keep wasting our time on this course, wouldn’t it be better if we just moved on to other courses and forget about this one for now?” Felix asked in one of our study sessions.

Everyone, including me, chorused “yes,” but deep down, I knew we were digging our holes. And of course, we did move on with other courses. Unlike Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics, the other courses flowed seamlessly. Our study sessions that used to be boring, came to life. Everyone was always eager to contribute their opinions. There were also jokes and little banters that made the sessions interesting. Behind these jokes, banters and laughter, Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics was calmly waiting for us. I’m sure it was looking at us from the little hole in the classroom ceiling and smirking at us knowing that one day we would come back begging on our knees for neglecting it.

Week after week, we totally avoided this course. No one wanted anything to do with it. It was like a black sheep. Everything was going well or at least that was what we thought until a night before the exam when we realized we had dug the holes so deep that it was impossible for us to climb back up. Our avoidance came back to haunt us. Our faces and hearts were painted with fear and panic.

“Please, guys, let’s come to school very early so we can explore the course well.” Drey said. Drey, the same person who once told us that we had enough time.

The plan was to come to school very early and cover the whole course in one night. Our usual session was from 4pm to 6pm. But that night, we planned to study from 8 Pm until 8 am the next morning when it was time for us to write exams. Who were we kidding? We had months to prepare for this exam, but we kept postponing and eventually we gave up on it until the night before the exam. Now, we wanted to cover the whole syllabus within one night. Big clowns!

“Who understands Appraisal Theory, please explain,” someone from the back who I had never seen in our previous study sessions yelled.”

“We cannot possibly cover everything, so let’s just focus on the past questions,” Tola suggested.

Everyone wanted answers. We wished we could magically open our heads and put the answers inside or better still, we wished we could take a peek into the future and see the questions. Not only were those things impossible, but it was too late to make wishes

We stayed up all night, trying to read anything and everything. “Honestly, I’ll be lucky to get an E in this course,” Felix said with his head on the desk.

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Soon enough, it was morning and we were in the exam hall. I thought I was dreaming. I hoped someone could pinch me back to reality. I didn’t need a pinch, the invigilator’s voice brought me back to reality. “You may begin!” The voice echoed. Almost at the same time, we all turned over our question papers and at that moment, time froze. The questions did not look like anything we read. Some of my coursemates started crying; I could hear little whimpers from left and right, and when I turned to check, I saw tears dropping down their cheeks.

Beside me, Felix muttered “where on earth did they get these questions from? Heavens! I’m in trouble. I wrote what I could. Most of the things I read were cooked from my head. The truth was clear. We dug the huge hole with our own hands and it was time to face the music. We faced it the hard way.

“Pens up! Submit your scripts.

Nobody said a word as we left the hall. The silence said everything. We had learnt our lesson.

Images in this post are mine.

Thanks for reading.

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