A Jump Over the Four-Foot Wall (standard:humor, 1549 words)
Author: Juggernaut	Added: Nov 22 2010	Views/Reads: 2752/1857	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A funny/sad story about a teacher.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

back of the classroom. He picked on those students who disrupted his 
class with mimicry and other make-believe noises. One day during the 
class, Sankaram unexpectedly hurled a question at Juggernaut “can you 
jump over the four-foot wall?” 

Juggernaut shook his head and murmured “no, sir, I couldn't jump over a
one-foot wall, let alone a four-foot wall.” 

Sankaram satisfied with the response, waived his hand at Juggernaut to
sit down. 

Students routinely made animals sounds from back of the classroom. “Why
don't you jump over the four-foot wall and prove that you were a real 
jackass,” Sankaram snapped at a student who growled like a donkey from 
the back of the classroom. 

When students made sounds of mating frogs using metallic toy frogs,
“yeah, I heard a sound of a frog kicking its hind legs to jump over the 
four-foot wall,” blasted Sankaram. 

The students would provoke Sankaram into a verbal duel knowingly he
would jump into an animated show of mock jumping over the four-foot 
wall in the classroom. 

There were stories abound on Sankarm's past history. As a student at the
same college years ago, he went into severe depression for some time 
when he couldn't get into the adjacent medical school. In confused 
state of mind, apparently he walked back and forth along the four-foot 
wall talking to himself and sometimes cried over his failure. According 
to another story, he would jump up and down from the wall (on college 
side) ridiculing the entire medical profession. These stories whether 
true or fabricated, were circulated on the campus and passed on from 
year to year. Later on, he ended up as a physics teacher in the same 
college and with haunting memories of his failure to get into medical 
school he began challenging the students' ability to jump over the 
four-foot wall to get into medical school. 

The students instantly found an appropriate nickname “four-foot” for
Sankaram, ever since; he was stuck with the nickname. His antics in the 
classroom to make physics more interesting earned him respect among the 
students and his collogues but his own failure to get into medical 
school constantly reminded him of the four-foot wall that separated the 
college from the medical school. 

Over the years, the four-foot wall deteriorated exposing the weathered
red-clay bricks from the daily impact of students urinating on it. 
During recess, the students lined up against the wall to urinate while 
others waited for their turn to relieve themselves. The entire length 
of the wall, several hundred yards, turned into a cesspool during 
recess since the college does not have adequate sanitary facilities to 
accommodate hundreds of students. The four-foot wall therefore served a 
purpose though not exactly what Sankaram made it appears to be in his 
daily reference as a wall that separates success from failure. 

In 1964, the teaching staff at the college, for some unknown reasons
have abandoned their responsibilities and allowed the students to cheat 
during the final exams. Several academically poor students scored good 
grades by cheating and got admission to the medical school. As a 
student and teacher of physics, Sankaram understood how the laws of 
physics operate in nature and yet he couldn't comprehend the large 
scale cheating incident in which the entire student body and a large 
number of his own fellow teachers were participated. The cheating 
incident was an insult to the injury Sankaram suffered years ago when 
he couldn't get into medical school. Since then, the disillusioned 
Sankaram kept asking “where was the outrage?” 

There were several conspiracy theories abound on how and why such a wide
spread cheating was allowed in 1964. However, it was clear that most 
students who benefited from the cheating were the children of the 
teaching staff at the college. 

Let down by his fellow teachers' irresponsible actions, Sankaram toned
down his anger in the classroom and stopped challenging the students to 
jump over the four-foot wall. Once in a while, he reverted to his old 
phrase “can you jump over the four-foot wall,” but quickly added, “you 
could by cheating.” 

As a student Juggernaut failed at several attempts to get admission into
medical school and years later ended up as a chemistry teacher at the 
same college. Within weeks after taking up the appointment, Juggernaut 
was slapped with the nickname chicken feet for his hand writing on the 
chalk board that resembled more like scratch marks left on the dirt by 
chicken using its' feet while searching for food. Juggernaut knew then 
fully well that he would be referred to as chicken feet for the rest of 
my life both inside and outside the college campus. 

When Sankaram passed away years later, his obituary was published in the
evening edition of a local newspaper under the heading “Four-Foot 
Kicked the Bucket.” He was praised for his uncanny teaching techniques 
such as dancing like a ballerina and other fancy footwork. 
Conspicuously missing was the reason that earned him the nickname 
Four-foot. 


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