Fuss

“Good morning, class. How are you all today?” greeted Ms. H, the reverted lecturer, to the scholars in N305. (This was a simple yet enlightening question. Almost every lecturer begins their lectures with the same question, and gets the same feedback, a long “fine…” from the students yet still reiterates it all the times. But how many actually ponder over the question “How are you?” before riposting “Fine”? Everyone seems perfunctory and practical in Fargo because of the 10% participation marks. Anyway, this thought is subjective, simply my point of view, because the real and civil me won’t even bother things which are insignificant and irrelevant to me.)

“Fine…” replied everyone, I wasn’t exempt. But, were I real fine? The freaking Pre-calculus Test 2 was going on two hours later; if I can’t score I’m going to ruin my spring semester next year by repeating it! Furthermore, my group was half way through yesterday’s “Reading” homework and hadn’t accomplished it. Contradictory, today was the last day before the one-week Raya Break where everyone was singing “Oohoho..Balik Kampung... Oohoho Balik Kampung…”, overwhelming by the New Year spirit. Supposedly, I was to anticipate the ascent of Raya Break in this wonderful Friday morning, but Ms. H’s inscrutable attitude demolished my holiday mood.

“Please take out your group homework and put it on the desk. I’m going to check it group by group, and stop writing anything,” warned Ms. H. Did anyone care? Her warning was as light as air, or maybe lighter, because what I saw was last-minute paragraph writing and compiling in every group. As for my group, fortunately we managed to create four "last-minute" sentences and numbered them nicely on a piece of foolscap paper; as for other groups, I presumed they should had squeezed some time for RSSCT rather than focused wholly in Pre-Cal.

“Show me your paragraph.”
“Is this a paragraph?!”
“Where is your group’s paragraph?”
“XXX, stop writing.”

After a round of inspection over the 6 groups, she, conspicuously overladen with dissatisfaction and wrath, as quiet as mouse, returned to the front. The best answer to anger is silence. We all knew her temper was triggered but we didn’t expect any further from the muteness because she was so affable to us in the past lectures and never reprimanded anyone in Fargo. While we were in our wits' end, drifting in the sea of hush, Ms. H broke the silence.

“Turn to Page X and do Exercise X later whenever you, or maybe we, have the time. Was that the only homework I gave out? If yes, then I shall call off for our lesson today and “Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri” to you all. I shall see you... in the next class, after the break,” said Ms. H and left.

Huh? What did this imply? Had the lecture finished? I mean, less than ten minutes? Were she jesting or what? Today wasn’t April fool though. It was the last day before Raya Break where all Fargo Malay kids were excitedly looking forward to reunion with family after class! I knew we were guilty of neglecting her assignment and not worth of pardons, but must she reacted so aggressively in such a harsh and unsparing way and left us in disappointment and penitent and guilt? I’d tried to convince myself not to relate her mood swing to the rumors I heard from the other classes which underwent the same consequence as us because of her personal affair, especially after her return; but beside PMS (Pre-Menstrual Symptom), I can’t think of any other logical answers compatible to her strange behavior of ignoring us when the 24 of us went purposely to her office to apologize. Although her colleague said she had class, one of us claimed that she was actually “in” because that pretext was obvious enough in resisting us outside.

Undoubtedly, my holiday mood had totally altered after all. The biggest doubt in my mind was: Did our homework incompletion oblige such a grave lesson?