Miss-understanding

The teacher had been in front of her laptop for hours. The tiresomeness of preparing the year end reports for 25 children affected her concentration. The various aspects of her students started merging and she found it difficult to differentiate one child from the other. Twenty five is a not a big number but writing page long reports in a short interval was not easy. It is said that human beings only have the ability to recall five qualities of a person at a time. Five qualities were not enough to fill a page. It has also been found by researchers at Tasmania Psychos Institute that the number of qualities recalled goes down by one for every three persons unless the recaller gives a break of 12.32 minutes between each person. This meant that if the teacher does not give the said time as break between the writing of reports, she would only recall one quality of the thirteenth student (no wonder thirteen is considered unlucky) and she would not recall anything of the sixteenth student (since you don't remember anything about sixteen, it is neither lucky or unlucky). The teacher was writing her twelfth report and she had filled the report with near generic notes that would have fit any child on this planet. 

Of course the teacher under discussion was meticulous and had her notes on each student next to her. But as she was running through them she realized, to her utter shock, that the notes for many students looked the same. She did not know findings of a research done by another premier institute that conducted researches on human qualities, The Road Runner Institute of Human Qualities (the institute is quite appropriately situated in a Coyote Street). The findings revealed that all human beings on the planet shared the same set of qualities; only the degree of each quality varied. For example, let us consider the quality honesty. Every child born has this quality available in some corner of his/her brain but as he/she grows it value changes. So while on person could end up with a value of 533 on 864 another could have 345.3 on 864. I can't help but mention that in the case the honesty greater the number the less honest the person is. Some historical goof up has ensured that the honesty attribute was not exactly honest.

The teacher's notes had detailed about the qualities but unfortunately it did not have a number and so by the time she reached the fifth report she realized that most of her points were just descriptions of different qualities. As had been said in the previous paragraph every student has all the qualities. Thus it seemed to her that though the words were different for each child, they meant the same for all the students. As she and her colleagues did not believe in assigning numbers to each child, there was no way to differentiate one from the other.  She had never been a fan of the formal review process and year after year her disregard for the process increased. She wished she could just sit across and talk to each student instead of sitting in front of her laptop screen night after night writing convoluted sentences that said a lot less than intended. 

At the end of the report twelve, she moved the laptop away and rested her head on the table. She was annoyed that the headache she felt was not actually aching her head. She was also annoyed that her eyes did not spew out tears of pity. On the whole, she was annoyed that she did not feel enough for her own plight. She brought her head up and pounded the table lightly. She looked at the next person's name and her face brightened. She remembered something important about the girl. During one of the school assembly, she had talked about the effects of the recent cyclone that had affected the state. She starting typing out her thoughts on the child furiously. The tip of her tongue was visible at the left edge of her mouth. Though she did not realize it, this meant that she was deeply involved in the activity she was involved in. If someone had recorded the sound emanating from the keyboard, they would have realized that it sounded like Beethoven's ninth.

Two weeks later, she sat in her class distributing the reports. She shook her head in approval and smiled at each student as she handed the report to the child. The smile and shaking reached a pinnacle when the she handed the report to the student who had talked at the assembly. The class was quiet as the students went through their reports. From time to time, one student or other looked up and said "Thank you miss. It is not as bad as thought it will be". She forced a smile on to her face to hide the rising annoyance. Soon a set of students crowded her with their doubts and queries. She saw the girl standing in the crowd. She called out and asked her if she had a query. The girl responded "Miss, you have written that I spoke about the Vardah cyclone during one of the assembly." The teacher interrupted by saying "You did! Don't you remember?" The girl responded "I remember Miss. But I spoke about the Gaja cyclone and not the Vardah cyclone!"