New Classmates: October 19

Sure enough, when class began today, the makeup of the class had changed dramatically.

The Dutch student, the Hungarian student, the two Korean students, and the Turkish student had all moved on to more advanced classes.

In their place came four men and two women: three Bangladeshis, one German, one Taiwanese, and one person whose country I am not sure of. Bangladesh as well, perhaps?

The newly arrived German compatriot looks older than I am. Can I finally hand over the title of oldest person in the class?

I had been with the previous classmates for almost two weeks. With newcomers suddenly joining us, the class felt different once again.

Even the teacher we had today was different from the teachers we had before.

Some of the classmates who remained whispered among themselves, unsure what changes this new combination might bring.

Still, the new classmates all seem so good at spoken conversation.

Could that help pull up the average level of our class?

In a language class, I feel that a good atmosphere for learning is what matters most.

We shall wait and see.

Because there were new classmates, textbooks still had to be reissued, and the review of our homework also had to accommodate them. The pace therefore felt slower today, and there was even time left in class for writing.

The trouble was that the focus of today's lesson was the transitive and intransitive verbs I most wanted to avoid.

Sigh. What I need to escape still refuses to let me escape.

What has to be memorised must, in the end, be memorised.

Listening to the other Bangladeshi classmates answer everything with such ease, I honestly felt that they ought to be able to keep moving up another level as well...

The Bangladeshi classmate who used to sit beside me moved over to sit next to one of the new Bangladeshi students. He seemed happier that way.

By a strange coincidence, on Sunday I had also followed the trend and tried a new game called “One in Eight Billion.” The result of my virtual reincarnation was that I became Bangladeshi.

Is heaven trying to hint that I share some sort of bond with Bangladesh?

With the change in classmates, I naturally gave the membership of the WhatsApp group I had created a reshuffle as well.

I removed the people who were no longer in the class and added the new classmates.

Then the Russian classmate popped up and said, “Nooo—why remove them? They only changed classes; they did not change friends!”

I did not answer.

Was that not precisely because they had not stopped being friends, and could all still keep in touch privately anyway...?

Besides, when I posted before to get people involved, no one paid any attention to me. When I created this WhatsApp group, all I wanted was a place to exchange information about homework and after-class activities we might do together as classmates.

If that makes me cold-blooded, then cold-blooded it is. Shrug.

Managing people is a kind of leadership. Being a person is hard; leading people is hard too.