Delima Diaries: Struck by a Pen

   Being with 2 Delima is always a challenge. I never know what to expect, no matter how carefully I have planned a lesson.

   Last week something rather funny and more truthfully painful (for me, anyway) happened. The bell signalling the end of my two periods with 2D had rung, and I was sitting by Mat Syaf and observing while he finished his work. He was rather quiet that day due to his own actions and I felt rather sorry for him.

   Meanwhile, Haslina and the other three girls were, as usual clamoring around me and fighting over who was going to take teacher's things up to the staff room. Haslina had taken possession of my stationery box and was going over the things in it and tidying them up (a habit she had taken up recently). She was standing (or sitting, I can't quite remember) right beside me and was engaged in trying to get the lid of a red pen off the bottom end. It was rather tight and she struggled with it for a few seconds when suddenly it came off and wham! struck into one corner of my left eyebrow. I was quite shocked by the sudden unplanned 'attack' and the sharp pain led me to give out a cry of pain.

   I immediately pressed my palm over the wound and put my head on the desk. My head was reeling a bit from the shock and it was honestly quite painful. The girls were crowding around me and trying to get a look at my face. When my head had stopped spinning I lifted my face and gingerly touched the area where I'd been hit. Horrors! There was blood! I had no tissue on me so I made do with the inside part of my headscarf.

   The news spread like wildfire among the children. Quite a while later, when I'd had a chance to sit down and relax, I discovered the wild stories that the children had spread, like how I had got into a fight with Haslina which ended in me being viciously attacked by Haslina with a pen. It turned out to be a rather funny incident and I couldn't help but laugh about it.

   Haslina herself was quite unaffected by it. I suppose she is still too small(?) to know how to feel guilty, because while I was washing the blood off my face (okay, don't worry, I didn't lose that much blood, haha), she innocently spoke one of her favourite sentences, "Teacher, I only brought RM 1 to school today..."

   Who knew teaching eight-year-olds could be such a dangerous occupation?

   p.s. I made sure to tell everybody that it was an accident, because it certainly was. Haslina may be problematic sometimes but an accident is an accident.