Beyond the Certificate

Chapter 2 Eight Chairs

The community room smelled of old paint and rain.

One window would not close. A faded banner hung from a nail, announcing an event that had ended three years earlier. There were seven chairs in a row and a man carrying the eighth through the door.

“You're the teacher?” he asked.

“You're the chair man?”

He lowered the chair. “Daniel. I repair furniture next door. Chair man is also accurate.”

Amina shook his hand.

Mrs Yusuf, Zainab's aunt, arrived with keys, a broom and a handbag large enough to contain a second handbag. She ran a food stall in the market. The children belonged to traders who wanted somewhere useful for them to spend Saturday mornings.

“We tried a class last year,” she said. “The tutor stopped coming.”

“Was he paid?” Amina asked.

Mrs Yusuf studied her. “Yes.”

“I'm sorry. I needed to ask.”

“Good. Ask things now. It saves trouble later.”

They agreed on three Saturdays to begin with. Mrs Yusuf would collect the children, handle permission from their parents and pay Amina after each class. The amount was small. Amina wrote it down anyway.

“The room is free for three weeks,” Mrs Yusuf added. “After that we must speak to the committee.”

Daniel pushed a table towards the wall. One leg dragged.

“Don't lean on this side,” he said.

“Is that advice for me or the table?”

“Both of you.”

On Saturday, nine children arrived.

Mrs Yusuf counted them twice. “A sister came along.”

The sister, a small girl called Bisi, held the hem of her brother's shirt and refused to leave.

“She can stay today,” Amina said. “But we'll need permission if she comes again.”

Her prepared lesson lasted eleven minutes.

Then Musa knocked a bottle over. Two boys argued about a pencil. Bisi began to cry. Sadiq, who had come to help, whispered that one child could not read the first sentence on the board.

Amina looked at the neat pages in her notebook. She had planned for children who sat still, understood the same words and learned at the same speed.

These children had arrived without reading her plan.

She shut the notebook.

“Who has helped sell something?”

Every hand went up except Bisi's.

“Who has been sent to buy something?”

Bisi raised both hands.

They made a market out of bottle tops, empty packets and pieces of paper. Musa became a tomato seller. Ada sold imaginary rice at prices that caused an argument. Sadiq was a customer with a very limited budget.

The room grew louder. This time, Amina could hear learning inside the noise.

When Ada gave the wrong change, Musa explained it before Amina could speak. When Bisi could not read a label, her brother drew a picture beside it.

At the end, Amina asked each child one question alone. Two still needed help with subtraction. Three could calculate change but struggled to explain what they had done. She wrote their first names in her private notebook and kept it in her bag.

Daniel watched from the doorway.

“That looked expensive,” he said.

“Ada's rice?”

“Especially Ada's rice.”

Mrs Yusuf paid Amina in an envelope.

“Next week?”

“Next week.”

Walking home, Amina stopped outside a food shop. She bought bread, eggs and a small packet of tea. Then she transferred the rest of the money to her mother.

The reply came before she reached the next junction.

I have seen it. Thank you, my daughter.

Amina stood beneath a shop awning and read the message twice.

It was not enough to pay the rent. It was not even enough to make a sensible dent in it.

But she had earned it doing something she knew how to do.

At home, she opened her lesson notebook and crossed out the heading she had written earlier: Remedial Class.

Under it she wrote: Market Maths.

Then she began again.

The name was easier to write than a second lesson was to plan. On Sunday she tried to turn every mistake from the first morning into a rule. Keep water away from books. Give every child a pencil. Ask how they would like to work. By midday her page looked like instructions for controlling a room rather than teaching anyone in it.

She made tea and started again. The children had not all failed in the same way. Musa could count money quickly but lost his place when reading instructions. Ada could explain an answer until somebody challenged her, then she stopped listening. Bisi had watched other people before attempting anything herself. Calling all of them weak would tell the next teacher almost nothing.

Amina drew three small stalls on a sheet of paper. She gave each stall a different set of prices. She planned an easy question, a question requiring two purchases and a question with more than one possible answer. A child could begin where they understood instead of first being shown how far behind they were.

Sadiq appeared beside her holding an empty carton.

“For the shop.”

“Wash it.”

“It contained dry biscuits.”

“Then wipe it.”

He returned with the carton and a cloth. He wanted to write the prices. She asked him to calculate the change for every price card first. His enthusiasm dropped a little.

“This is supposed to be your work.”

“And this is supposed to be your help.”

He did the sums. When she checked them, he had got most right. The two errors involved borrowing across a zero. They worked through one together and left the second for him to try after lunch. Amina resisted the wish to correct it at once. Waiting while somebody thought was harder than she remembered from her teaching course.

On Monday she visited Mrs Yusuf's stall to ask about Bisi. The girl had not been on the list, and Amina wanted to understand why she had arrived without making the family feel they had done something wrong.

“Her mother works at the far end,” Mrs Yusuf said. “Her brother brings her when she cannot find somebody to watch her.”

“Is that the main reason he attends?”

“You will have to ask him carefully.”

Bisi's mother came during a quiet part of the afternoon. She was younger than Amina had expected and spoke as though every minute she spent away from her table cost something.

“She will not disturb you again.”

“She didn't disturb me,” Amina said. “We didn't plan a place for her. Those are different things.”

The woman studied her face. “She cries.”

“She cried because the room was new and noisy.”

“At home too.”

Amina did not know the cause of that. She would not pretend that a Saturday lesson would solve it. She explained the time of the class, asked who would collect Bisi and wrote down a contact number. They agreed that the mother would stay nearby the next week and could take Bisi home if the morning became too much.

“No fees?” the woman asked.

“Mrs Yusuf is supporting these first sessions. We will explain any change before another arrangement starts.”

It was a clumsy answer. It was also the only true one.

When the woman had gone, Mrs Yusuf shook her head at the paper.

“You write everything.”

“I forget things.”

“So do I. Perhaps I should write more.”

They put the new permission beside the original eight. The ninth chair became a problem again. Daniel said he could lend a low bench, but Amina asked to see it before agreeing. One end wobbled when she sat down. He took it back without argument.

“You could have told me to stop being difficult,” she said.

“I could also fix the bench.”

He turned it over on the workshop floor. Inside the open doorway, two men were sanding a wardrobe while a third customer described a table she had seen in a photograph. Daniel listened to the description, asked for measurements and told her what he could finish by Friday. The customer wanted Thursday. He said Friday again, without making his voice louder.

Amina waited until she left.

“How do you know when to say no?”

“Usually because I have already said yes to something else.”

He showed her a ledger. Four jobs, four deposits, four promised dates. A Saturday chair might look like a spare hour to Amina, but it sat among other hours already sold.

“If helping us costs you a job, tell me,” she said.

“It hasn't.”

“If it does.”

He nodded, and she wished there were a simple way to put the promise in her notebook without making friendship sound like a bill.

The second Saturday began more quietly. Amina had put the price cards on the tables before anyone arrived. Each child could choose a stall to visit while she spoke to a parent. Sadiq checked names at the door with Mrs Yusuf rather than standing at the front as if he were another teacher.

Musa chose the stall with the longest list. He covered the words with his fingers and looked at the numbers.

“Tell me what you think the card asks,” Amina said.

“Buy these.”

“All of them?”

He looked again. The word two had been written before items. He had missed it.

She gave him a shorter card and asked him to point to the important words. He was offended for a moment. Then he noticed that the shorter task still required a difficult sum, and began to work.

Across the room, Ada was charging everyone different prices because she said some customers looked richer. The other children protested. Amina let them argue for a minute, then asked what information a customer needed before deciding to buy.

“The price,” Ada said.

“A price you can change after they hand you their money?”

Ada looked at her cards and turned one face down. “No.”

They made a visible price list. When Sadiq tried to bargain, Ada pointed to it with a firmness that made Mrs Yusuf laugh from the door.

Bisi did not speak in front of the group. She arranged bottle tops in rows, moved one row apart and whispered an answer to her brother. Amina knelt beside her and asked if she could whisper it to her instead. After a long pause, Bisi did. It was wrong by one. Amina asked her to touch each top as she counted. The second answer was right.

At the end, Amina gave each child a short question on a separate slip. Some finished while others were still choosing pencils. She had an extra task ready, so the quick ones did not spend the remaining time telling the slower ones what to write.

The lesson had not become neat. Somebody still spilled water. The difference was that Amina no longer treated every interruption as evidence that she was losing the room.

Mrs Yusuf waited while she put the slips away.

“One mother wants to see a mark.”

“I can show what her child attempted.”

“She wants a number.”

“A number would not explain the reading difficulty.”

“Tell her that kindly.”

Amina did. The mother listened, asked three more questions and said she would send a school exercise book next time. On the walk home, Amina thought about how much of the work happened outside the hour anyone called teaching. She had been paid for a morning. Planning it had occupied the week.

At the kitchen table she wrote the hours down, though she did not yet know who would pay for them. Beside them she wrote the things she still needed to learn. That list was longer.