Monday Class

Every Monday my classmates and I know we are going to face a very grumpy teacher. She’s actually a nice lady, our teacher. She’s very energetic and she teaches us with gusto. But she’s not patient enough for our silly mistakes or our excuses. And since most of the students are over thirty, and some never use a word processor in their lives, sparks always fly around the room as Ms Wong unleashes her inner tigress. To give you a yardstick, some of us type 10 letters per minute, with mistakes. So you can understand if Ms Wong is sometimes frustrated with us.

The situation got worse when her husband fell sick. She’s a brave lady and she continues teaching, but she got grumpier and grumpier every week. And there is one particular student who kept on being scolded. Her name is Flo. She runs and owns a company so there’s no doubt in my mind that she is a very competent person. She’s just hopeless at typing. She almost cried during one of the sessions. Ms Wong almost cried too because she was so frustrated.

Last week was particularly bad, and everybody got scolded for making the smallest mistakes. It was getting almost unbearable. So we talked to each other about it, and on Saturday we talked to another teacher. And during the weekend I kept thinking, how can we talk to Ms Wong about this? Nobody wanted to or dared to report her. Standing up to her was unthinkable. It’s like standing up to a tigress. I thought, if she’s still grumpy, I’ll just walk out of the class.

On Monday, Ms Wong was surprisingly nice. And some time during the lesson she apologised to us. She said, “I was under a lot of pressure to finish the book, and my husband is dying.” It’s pancreatic cancer, stadium four. I felt so sorry for her I had to look away. So we all tried to be nice to her that evening.

But as my friend said, a leopard cannot shed her spots. Ms Wong really tried. We could see it. You know, like when you are just starting to say nasty things then you remember that you have to be nice and you swallow your anger. That was her. Still, it was much better than last week. Unfortunately for poor Flo, her mistakes were beyond Ms Wong’s tolerance. In the beginning Ms Wong tried to be patient with her, but after a while it’s business as usual and sparks flew, unfortunately, at Flo, and almost exclusively at Flo. She left the class early.