Jayeless

Last Friday morning, I had History class. Tiredly I walked into the classroom — it had been a somewhat sleep-deprived week — and seated myself at a table in the front row, as is compulsory for History classes. My History teacher greeted me with the sentence, “Congratulations, Jess! You will have the opportunity to exercise your limited democratic rights today!”

He referred to the elections for next year’s school captains, which were held after recess that day. We had talked before about how the elections were being run, and had (as usual…) been unable to agree. My History teacher thought they were being marvellously. Pseudo-democratic, just as it should be. No rights to privacy or secret ballots, as it should be. No possibility of electing an “inappropriate” candidate to represent the people, as it should be. Read on…

This week is Mental Health Week, so my Psychology class has been divided into groups to run various activities over the course of the week. Today was my group’s turn — we had organised “Childhood Games Day”. The five of us, with our Psychology teacher, gave up our lunchtimes¹ to run the kinds of games that used to be played at primary school. We got about fifteen people to turn up, half year eleven and half year seven. It’s the year sevens I’m writing about in this entry.

I’m impressed with the year sevens for turning up. The year elevens had to deal with my group members’ constant nagging; the year sevens just came. Of course, they couldn’t come just for the nostalgia they’d get from the childhood games. No, they came for the fabulous prizes. Namely, the chocolate. The chocolate that I was in charge of awarding.

There was one year seven who earned a chocolate in the very first game, which I duly awarded. Thirty seconds after devouring his chocolate, he came up to me — still licking his lips! — and said, “You forgot to give me that chocolate.” Read on…

1. And our coffee *sob* [↩]