Time will tell

Time will tell but time will not tell itself now or would it?
Anytime people ask me my most embarrassing experience I always forget to tell them this story.
Today, I will be sharing this experience with you all.

I was about eight years old in form 5, popularly called Basic 4 in the Nigerian Educational system .
On that faithful day, I woke up to a beautiful morning excited to go to school. Unknown to me, that day was going to be one of the worst days of my life.

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My mum dropped me off at school and rushed off to work. After our daily assembly, we matched into our class rooms one after the other. While seated in the classroom waiting for our class teacher to come in and start the lesson of the day, when the the class teacher of form 5 walked in and noticed how noisy the class was, she was very upset and claimed we were disturbing the whole school with our noise and she could hear us from the teachers staff room, as if that was not enough she said our class was the most badly behaved of all classes and then she decided to punish us.

After serving the punishment for almost 30 minutes in which she asked us al to remain standing with our hands up and our eyes closed, our class teacher was yet to come in, we were in soup. While we were still being punished for noise making, the teacher decided to release us of the punishment by asking us questions individually, whoever gets the correct answer to her question gets to sit and regains freedom from the punishment she had given.

We were 12 students in our classroom, she had released about 6 of us already who had gotten their answers correctly , it then got to my turn and she asked me a quest about clock and time, unfortunately, I got my answer wrong.

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She was furious at that moment because she expected me to have gotten the answer to her question correctly considering how simple she thought the question was - She asked me to look at the clock and tell her the exact time, ahh, me that didn’t know how to tell the time, I couldn’t even differentiate a.m from p.m at that time, it was that terrible.

After getting the answer wrong, she looked at me and decided to give me another try. She drew a clock on our board and asked me to tell the time, again, I got it wrong, she almost knocked off my teeth with a slap but changed her mind while one of her hands was still raised. She turned to the other classmates of mine and asked the same question, 2 of them got it right and the remaining 3 failed to tell the time correctly. Shocked, surprised and angry , she decided to even add to the punishment she had already given, this time it was different and even more embarrassing, she couldn’t believe at form 4, we couldn’t tell the time correctly.

She asked the remaining 5 of us with myself included who got our answers wrong to form a single file and match out of our classroom.
She took us into every other classroom in the school and asked us the time on each wall clock as we entered.

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How embarrassing, because of how difficult it was for us to get the time correctly, it was already obvious that we struggled with it and had to be properly taught and not just getting punished.
While the teacher took us into each classrooms, we got to the classroom, a junior classroom of a boy that had a huge crush on me. When he saw me, he was angry that the teacher had to punish his crush that much, so he decided to do something about it. That was a bad ideal because he only made things worse for me.

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When we were in his classroom and the teacher asked me what the time of the clock on their wall says, he whispered the answer to me not knowing the teacher noticed but pretended not to. Things escalated quickly and she asked the boy to stand up, while he was standing, I gave my answer correctly this time because It was whispered to me already.
Knowingly fully well the answer was whispered to me, the teacher was not satisfied with my answer, she threw another question at me, a more difficult question for me at that time, sigh. She told me to tell her how many minutes passed it was, what kind of question is this again? I thought to myself.
The time on the clock showed hun ‘9:45am’, I replied ‘to 10’ which was also correct but she wanted me to tell her exactly how many minutes passed 9 it was. I was clueless, there was no one to whisper the correct answer to me this time, no one else wanted to fall in the teachers trap. I attempted to answer the question but I got it wrong over and over again, getting the first question correctly was a miracle not to talk of this one that is much more complicated.

But because I got the first answer correctly even if it was an expo, she pardoned me.
She asked us to go back to our classroom to join in on our lesson because our class teacher was already in and had started the day’s lesson. The teacher spoke with my class teacher, told her all that had happened and they both concluded that the rest of us would have to wait after school for extra lesson to teach us how to properly tell the time.

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This is not just a story of one of my most embarrassing moments, I did not only get embarrassed in front of my classmates, the whole school and even the boy that liked me but I also discovered one of my many challenges and this experience has helped me to be able to tell the time correctly till date. I can even tell the exact time it is even with my eyes closed. Sometimes, every disappointments is a blessing.