The Classroom No One Cleans
The classroom was on the ground floor, at the end of the east corridor, and it had, when I was given it at the start of the second term, a broken window at the back that had been broken for two years and a door that did not close properly and a chalkboard that had been painted over with blackboard paint three times and from which the chalk no longer fully rubbed off, so that the previous year's lessons were always faintly present under the current lesson, like a palimpsest.
I teach form three English. The class is forty-two girls, which is too many, and the desks are in rows of three, which is too few, which means three girls share a desk designed for two, and the two girls on the ends spend the lesson half off the bench, and the girl in the middle cannot write because her elbows are not her own. The classroom is, as our headmaster likes to say at staff meetings, a classroom we are lucky to have, because the school two valleys over, which is larger than ours, is having its form three lessons in the dining hall.
I took over the class from Mrs Wambui, who had been transferred. She had left me a register, a textbook, a broken meter ruler, and a note in a careful hand on the inside of the cupboard door that said: *The cupboard sticks. Lift and pull.*
I noticed, in the third week of term, that the classroom was cleaner than I had left it.
This is the small part of the story I