Still Standing at The Board
“Our nation needs good teachers,”
they said.
But nobody warned her
that classrooms had become war zones
where exhausted women
stand before forty children
trying to resurrect language
from the graveyard of neglect.
Nobody warned her
that chalk dust and marker fumes
would eventually taste like grief.
She returned believing
literature could still save children,
that poetry could soften rage,
that education was sacred.
Poor fool.
Now teachers are statistics.
Data.
Targets.
Deadlines.
Uploads.
And somewhere beneath mountains of paperwork
a woman’s humanity suffocates quietly.
They do not see her
marking scripts after midnight
while chest pains bloom beneath her blouse.
They do not see her
crying quietly in staffroom bathrooms
before returning to classrooms
with powdered faces
and professional smiles.
The children are angry now.
Not evil—
just abandoned.
Some carry trauma so heavy
it leaks from their mouths as violence.
And still
the teacher must perform miracles
with broken resources
and an empty stomach.
The Ministry keeps demanding:
Upload this.
Track that.
Improve scores.
Produce results.
Produce.
Produce.
Produce.
As if teachers are machines
instead of human beings.
Still she stands at the board.
Still she teaches beauty
to children drowning in survival.
Still she corrects essays
while her own life
falls apart sentence by sentence.
And tomorrow morning
the bell will ring again
expecting her to enter smiling.
Because this country loves
the sacrifice of teachers
more than the survival of teachers.
One day, the classrooms will become emptier.
The good teachers will leave.
The tired ones will resign.
The broken ones will bury themselves quietly.
And when the nation finally asks,
“What happened to education?”
May somebody have the courage to answer:
We destroyed the teachers
and then blamed them for dying.
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