Lesson with Imari, the substitute

[As the following is part III from an already started story, please find parts I and II here:]
[https://steemit.com/contest/@hive-136968/new-contest-steem-fiction-contest-3-my-preference]
[https://steemit.com/hive-136968/@ty-ty/steem-fiction-contest-3-my-preference]

The next day, the teacher was sick and his substitute had to fill in. It was a lady close to retirement age. When she entered the classroom with her long silver-white hair, silence fell immediately. It was not the tense silence of fear, but the attentive silence of respect and expectation.

The teacher looked at the faces and said kindly: "I can still remember some of you when you had just started school. How are you? What have you been working on with Mr Forday? - For those who don't know me: My name is Imari. Please call me by that first name."

The eyes of the re-recognised students lit up and Naidoo raised his hand to be allowed to say something: "We were talking about part of the story of Terence and Veenu, and Mr Forday asked us how we thought the story should go."

Imari seemed to wince a little at these names, but it could have been for another reason. "So-so," she said, "Mr Forday is still telling the story of Terence and Veenu. - What point have you reached?"

"Terence gets shot in the forest!" one of the boys shouted, just managing to raise his hand to this word. "No, no, that's not true at all! He just believed it!" shouted three others almost exactly at the same time.

"Xaja?" Imari pointed at her, prompting her to summarise the previous day's stand. She then nodded very seriously, stood up from the lectern and wrote on the blackboard with white chalk, "Possibilities." With a large gap she wrote: "Probabilities", and with another gap: "Desirabilities".

"These", she said, "are forms of the future. There are things that can happen and there are things that we expect. But there are also things we desire, even if they seem impossible or improbable. Let's try to categorise your suggestions collected yesterday under these headings."

For the next forty minutes, there was a lot of discussion led by Imari, who kept her own opinions very much in the background. Only when it became increasingly clear that there would be little agreement on the allocation of sequels under the three headings did she summarise:

"It is not easy to finish a story once it has been started, if you want to agree on it with several people and not just write it alone. Now try to imagine how difficult it can be to set up a plan or to take forward a plan that was set up earlier, for example for the water supply of a village or for the welfare of a state. There too, there are always many possibilities and desirabilities that those involved have to agree on. And at the same time they try to keep in mind what is realistic, that is, what corresponds or could correspond to reasonable expectations and what consequences and side effects are likely."

Imari was silent for a moment and then spoke as if to herself, "And your lives, the lives of each of you, are also such a blueprint into the future, co-authored by others than just yourselves."

The class became very quiet. No one paid attention to the sign for the end of the lesson.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

photo: ty-ty