School life is a journey with its ups and downs. For many students, it is hard to bear the punishments, the low budgets, the lack of ‘freedom’, the daily homework and the tight schedule. But what does one do when they are put in a corner? Like everyone else, most students find a hole to squeeze themselves out of the ‘prison’ their parents and teachers put them. It is a little surprise that students are top on the list of the world’s best cooks of lies
We have all been there. There is no need telling, therefore, why without periodically throwing a punch of lies and dirty tricks at your teacher and parents, school can be one boring place. Apparently, today’s students have become sharper at it. They have refined their skills, and their dirty tricks now borders on the extreme.Here are just a few of the many dirty tricks and lies students cook to get what they want or escape punishment ‘by any means necessary’ from their teachers and parents:
Bringing fake parents to school
If you are a parent, and judging your high school child’s errant behaviour at home you cannot believe that you have not been called by any headteacher over a discipline matter, there is high probability that you are a victim of your child’s dirty tricks. You might want to pay the school a visit and check if you are the parent the headteacher knows. Chances are you will discover that your child has another parent, officially known by school authorities!
Cases of students bringing fake parents or guardians to school are not very new. We have all heard about how, especially students in boarding schools, pay some elders in communities surrounding their schools to pose as their parents during disciplinary hearing.
Mobile phones
Esther, a Form Four student at a secondary school in Sinza was recently told to bring her parents to school after she was caught several times with an expensive mobile phone. Phones are not allowed at her school, and to make it worse, it’s not her parents, who had bought the gadget. So, her only way out was to lie.
“I told them that it belonged to my aunt, and when they ordered me to bring her to school on the following day, I asked my friend’s elder sister to pose as the aunt,” she confessed. The “fake aunt” corroborated the lies, and begged the authorities not to punish Esther. It was her, not Esther’s mistake, she told the school head.
A discipline teacher at Mugabe Secondary School, Moses Kimbawala, says such cases are many. “In most cases, it is difficult to catch the student or fake parent in their lie, but sometimes you can easily detect it because if you ask them about details of previous meetings at school they start to stammer,” he says.
However, he quickly adds that some foxy students brief their phony parents and aunts about all the details before bringing them to school. He advises ‘genuine parents’ to make sure they are known at school, attend meetings and always be in touch with school authorities.“It is not enough to pay school fees and thereafter monitor the performance of your child from home, hoping that everything is alright.”
Cooked up cash contributions
Many parents just dish out a lot more money than what is accounted for by school authorities. Their children come home with all sorts of demands for cash contributions for school projects that exist only in the figment of their own imaginations.
A parent in Mbezi Beach, Moses Rogers is a victim of such little fraudsters. His daughter, a Standard Seven pupil at a private school in Dar es Salaam, came home one day to say she had been told to bring Sh10,000 as extra fees for the term.
He fell for his usually innocent child’s trick, but he asked her first for the school’s bank account number. “I gave her the money but told her that I wanted it to be deposited into the bank account,” he says.
“That is when she started to beat about the bushes, until she confessed it was not school fees exactly. She wanted it for something else but was afraid I would say no.”Bernadetha Elia, a primary school teacher at Tabata Bima, has experience dealing with such lies from students but admits that her brother with whom she stays has proved to be smarter.
“He takes evening classes, and so he would come home with a new demand for fees when he is broke, today he will tell you they need weekend test fees, next day it is something else,” she says.
The means justifies the end
Faridi Makame, a Form Two student at Azania Secondary in Dar es Salaam, says the white lies students tell their parents and teachers are sometimes a desperate means to a justified end. “They (parents and teachers) sometimes do not understand our needs, and so do not take us serious when we ask for something,” he says.
“Students know that if you make a demand putting school in front, any normal parent listens and acts promptly. That is why students resort to telling lies as long as they will achieve their objectives.”
Character assessment
A social worker, counsellor and school head at Kenton Secondary School, Kiddu Emmanuel suggests that character assessments are necessary to tell when students are being honest or not. Besides, he adds, teachers study psychology, which makes them better placed to corner lying students.
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