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The staff room
I couldn’t believe my eyes and then frantically searched the room for something that might be the entrance to the secret passageway but I knew that was hopeless. There was nothing mysterious about it at all
The staff room is a room full of mystery. Every child wonders at least once during his school life, “What happens there? What could they be doing in there?” Some think it is a place where teachers meet to discuss plans to make the lives of the students more miserable while others think more creatively and consider a wider range of possibilities (mostly involving the teachers interrogating, torturing or physically punishing the so-called “bad eggs”).
I, myself, spent many hours during primary school, trying to imagine what lay behind the closed doors separating the students from the staff. But every time I tried to approach it, one of the teachers caught me and I had to come up with a lame excuse to explain myself. But after some time I gave up completely and didn’t even listen to the descriptions given by the children who claimed to have actually been inside. They were probably lying — I mean, how could a place that held so much mystery, be as dull as they described it?
Anyway, one day when I was in the fifth grade and built up a good reputation for skills in maths and English, I was called there. A senior student knocked on the door of the classroom and told me that the Urdu teacher, also our class teacher, had asked me to report to ‘the staff room’. I was paralyzed with shock, fear and anticipation. And it took a few seconds for my brain to register what I had just heard and a multitude of questions flooded my head, “What have I done?” “Is this because I didn’t do my homework?” And even though I was confused and fearful as to why I had been called there, I was shivering with anticipation of what I would find there. I was … Bang! “Ouch!”
Suddenly, I heard a loud bang which was immediately followed by a wave of pain that hit my nose. I realised I collided with the door to the room. Lost in my thoughts, I hadn’t realised that I had been walking and hadn’t seen the door, walking right into it.
“Come in,” said the Urdu teacher who apparently took my collision with the door as simply a strange way of knocking. Bracing myself for what I was about to witness next, I grabbed the door with sweaty palms and gave it a slight push. The door creaked open slowly and I stepped inside the room and what I saw was the biggest let-down of my entire life (up to that point), the staff room was filled with white tables stacked with copies, chairs and comfortable looking sofas. The whole room was empty except for my Urdu teacher who was sitting in one of the chairs next to one of the white tables and another teacher who had dozed off on a sofa in the corner of the room.
I couldn’t believe my eyes and then frantically searched the room for something that might be the entrance to the secret passageway but I knew that was hopeless. There was nothing mysterious about it at all. Anyways, I went into a kind of a daze after that and I can’t clearly remember that the teacher scolded me for something I had or had not done which I don’t remember because I wasn’t listening.
For me it was the end of the world. Life, as I knew it, would never be the same again. School no longer appealed to me even though I did eventually get over it. You would probably like to know that no one I told this to believed me. After all, how could the staff room possibly be so dull?
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