Thinking Anne had a sore throat, or perhaps had been caught off guard by me calling her name, I looked up to see a girl with her hand raised - to signal that she was Anne and had answered the register as Anne - yet was not Anne. I don't mean this in the way that Brain answers to Brian because he thinks he's called Brian but knows he's not actually that Brian, just a different Brian.
This girl, not Anne, was actually trying to tell me that she was Anne. Not just called Anne, but my student Anne. The same Anne that I've been teaching for eight weeks, that I know what she looks like and what she normally wears. That Anne. Not just called Anne, but Anne.
"Your name is Anne?" I asked. No response, the question was too confusing. Maybe she was Anne after all.
Then things got really Twilight Zone. I turned to the front row of girls, a group who work quite hard at English and, anyway, are too polite not to understand me.
"Where's Anne?" I asked.
"She, she... this is Anne," they chorused, offering me this substitute for absent Anne, trying to convince me that the new Anne was Anne.
They knew, however, that I wouldn't mind if another student came to class - occasionally extra students do come to see what the fuss is about and give their own, real name, rather than one they've borrowed. Time was getting on, and I had planned exercises that were going to confuse them more than they were confusing me right then, so I let it go, said "okay" and moved onto the next name. "Brian?" Three hands went up.
Ten minutes later, an administrator appeared at the back of the room, poking his head through the door. Silently, he counted the students, marked the number in his notebook and left. Without a word, English or Chinese, substitute Anne packed up her things (phone, MP3 player, diary, compact mirror) got up and left.
Apparently, classes are fined as a whole if any students miss a lesson. Anne, the real Anne, wherever she was, had asked a friend with some spare time to make up the head-count to avoid the fine. Is this the answer to university funding in the UK?
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