A few days ago, I was on my way to my brother’s house when I saw a familiar face. I had seen the face from afar before the person even noticed me and so as I got closer to them, I already knew how I would react. I was going to ignore them if there was going to be any form of communication. Who did I see? A teacher from secondary school. He taught me CRS (Christian Religious Studies) in JSS2. One of the things he was known for then was his church. I won't say “his religion” because even though he was a Christian and other people around him were, some weren't Christian enough for him. I won't mention the name of the church because I feel like it would be wrong and his personality doesn't speak for the rest of the people that attend that same church. This man would turn the assemblies into a crusade. This wasn't an issue for me at the time anyway. It was the way he went about it. He would basically take over the praise and worship part of the assembly from students on duty. He made religion feel like a chore but again that isn't the most important part of it.

When it was time for his class, he would walk in looking very rough and angry. I won't attack his dressing because that might sound like I'm tearing him down for not being financially buoyant. But I'll just say that his hygiene was very poor. When he entered the class, he would just go off on us. He could go on and on about how we wouldn't amount to anything in life or how our parents were wasting their money. Now that I'm older and I know better, I just know that he was taking out his anger on us. He was simply just projecting his insecurities onto us. Maybe he wanted to do more and he couldn't. Maybe he hated his job and he wanted out. Maybe seeing such young children laughing made him remember that he would never be young again. Because I don't understand why he would come to class early in the morning and curse children. One of his reasons was because we were noisy. Isn't that one of the “duties” of children? You're a teacher for crying out loud. 

I remember one time during exams, after he had told us about how it was our time to suffer too (cos exams), he started sharing the exam questions. I don't know if you can relate but whenever exam papers were shared, we couldn't open them until the invigilators asked us to. After they told us to start, somebody found out that one of the pages of her exam paper was blank. She tried to reach out to the man and he wasn't having it. When he finally heard what she had to say, he told her it wasn't his business. We were in shock. He kept asking her what she wanted him to do. Another teacher had to intervene before the issue was resolved. He did a lot of messed up things like that and this man would talk like he had a cheat code to heaven. Yet, he would have cursing sprees in Yoruba and English often. Tell me why I would see such a human coming and think of greeting him. I mean, I hate running into my teachers but this one was different. He kept looking at me like he knew but I didn't even act like anyone was walking past me. I guess he's never seen the part of the Bible that says “The tongue has the power of life and death.”