FRACTURE

The only reason I went to college today was to take a look at the ICT lab—not because I had any intention of understanding what the teacher was saying, but because I wanted to see the computers and get a chance to use them.

I didn’t know we had five classes in our routine today before the sixth one—the ICT lab class I was talking about. By the time we reached the fifth class, we were already exhausted. So, along with three of my friends, I went to the library just to bunk the class and spend some time there, with absolutely no intention of reading a single book, and to wait for the ICT lab class.

The time went by as we looked through books one after another, cracked jokes, and spent almost half an hour there laughing. Then, we found a nice stage-like area where there were paintings and books about the Liberation War of 1971. The stage was beautifully covered with a red mat. It looked like a place where walking with shoes on wasn’t allowed, but we went there anyway with our dirty shoes.

Seeing us, one of the teachers came over and asked, “Don’t you have a class going on? Why aren’t you all in your classroom? And why did you stand on the platform with your shoes on? Write down your roll numbers on a piece of paper, or I’ll take all of your ID cards. Go to the office and write your roll numbers there, quick.”

We walked out of the library without writing down our roll numbers. Who cares!

Then we went to the ICT lab just in time. They told us to enter without our shoes on, so we took them off. There were many computers there, which I had imagined would be broken or unusable. But to my surprise, almost all of them were perfectly fine. Although they were running old versions of Windows with outdated softwares, considering that they were free to use and had survived years of corruption, it was still better than I had ever expected.

I couldn’t see anything on the big board at the front—I mean, literally nothing. I’ve been dealing with this vision problem for years now, but I never got the chance to see a doctor and get my glasses changed.

So I told one of the teachers about my problem, and she let me sit in the front. But even then, I still couldn’t see anything!

One teacher, Miss Shimki Akter, was at the front giving the lecture, while another teacher, whose name I don’t know, was helping the students whenever they needed assistance. She was the one I had told about my vision problem.

She told us to copy everything written on the board into a coding file on our computers. She was teaching us C programming, covering some basic for loops and if statements. But I still couldn’t see anything, even when she had pasted everything into a document file with a larger font for me.

So I was just sitting there exploring that old software—Code::Blocks—until she gave us another exercise for those who had already completed the first one. The task was simple: make a C program that checks whether the input is an odd or even number and gives the appropriate output.

This was nothing difficult for me. I coded it, called my teacher over, and she came to check the program—everything was spot on. She probably liked how quickly I completed it, so she told me to help my classmates who were struggling with the code. And I was just struggling to run the program on outdated software that I had never even seen before.

Although, the class was great. From now on, I’m going to college every Thursday just to attend the ICT lab class.