I am not alone.

It could have been one of those days.

My class this morning was so bad that I had to call in the disciplinarian. The preferred method of group punishment here is manual labor. The minimum is two hours. I left school this morning with several students cursing my name. 

I finished calculating the grades for my classes this afternoon with the class I was dreading the most because I knew the grades were not going to be good. I was left with 21 students out of 53 who passed my class this semester.

But it wasn’t one of those days.

After giving my class their punishment, Attissi gave them a lecture about respecting my authority, gave me a pep talk that convinced me to finish my class and then, in a endearing change of behavior for a man that spends most of his time yelling at students, played Penguin Catapult on my iPod for the 40 minutes it took me to fill out grade cards in his office after my class.

After contemplating my abilities as a teacher, I headed out into my village to try to find one of my colleagues to ask him about the situation. (One thing about life here, if you wander around village long enough, you will find someone who will help you even if you don’t quite know where you’re headed when you leave your house.) I stumbled across Pierre, a history teacher, grading papers in front of his house. 

I explained what I was worried about. He just laughed. “It’s like that here,” he reassured me. “It’s not all you. The students have to work as well.” I then took a seat across from him, and we spent the next twenty minuted chatting about life in Benin.

It wasn’t one of those days.