Spot Checks at School

A while back, they found several kids were bringing alcohol to a particular school in Bangalore. A kid from that school joined my 15 yo daughter’s school this year. Like so many kids, this new kid started with a cocky attitude extolling all the virtues of his old school and mocking things in the new one. After a point, the teacher got irritated and snapped at him, “This isn’t your old school. If you bring alcohol here, you’ll get rusticated”.

 

When I narrated this to a colleague (with no kids) at work, he was shocked. “And to think”, he said, “We took pride in thinking that we were the worst batch ever!”.

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Inevitably, alcohol at one school puts pressure on other schools to check if they had this problem too. In parallel, the teachers tried to instil some fear by threatening to issue TC’s (Transfer Certificate) to the kids. It might have had some effect had they used the threat occasionally and also based on the severity of the offense. Instead, they used the threat indiscriminately. No wonder the kids soon dismissed the threat with a shrug, “At this rate, they’ll issue TC’s to all of us, and nobody will be left in the school”.

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Soon bag checks of all students began to happen on random days. So far, thankfully, no alcohol (or worse) has been found. But one time, smartphones were found, confiscated and the parents were called to school.

 

Given the endless variety of things being sold and with the ever-changing tastes of teenagers, teachers sometimes struggle to even identify what certain items are! An example will help. Coke, Fanta, Maaza etc, the teachers could identify. But not all of them knew what, for example, Monster is (it’s an energy drink). So they adopted the if-in-doubt-confiscate-it approach. The students were furious to find the teachers drinking and sharing Monster in the staff room! “This is just theft”, they complained…

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In one kid’s bag, they found a packet of Tic Tac (mints). The reason to take it away was it falls in the unhealthy category, but the teacher decided to have some fun. “It has drugs in it,” she said, “Dangerous and deadly. I know a kid who had too many of those and died. He didn’t have a future after that”. What can I say? Humour is the best medicine.