The ‘D’ Sign

My article is on what most of us (engineering students) keep worrying about- the nasty ‘D’ word, DETENTION and its origin and things that follow after it.

Nobody would have thought the canteen could be so much fun. Relationships have bloomed, blood has flown – with guys ofcourse (bahar dhekh lunga!) and entire batches have fought for the pretty girls sitting there. It is about time somebody wrote about it.

It’s always fun to bunk the lectures and sit in the canteen with blooming stories and friends, but the real pain lies when the attendance is called short :(

When we first heard about attendance criteria (75%) and detention, it seemed like something everyone is too scared to play with. But within the initial few months, the glorious detention days were thrust upon our own friends.

Soon detention became the modern version of threaten, given at the drop of a hat by our teachers. There is just one punishment that the teachers in engineering colleges give… they don’t send you out of the class or give you a 100page assignment or make you stand the whole lecture… they simply hit you where it hurts the most- ATTENDANCE, they make you attend the whole class and still don’t give you an attendance. Only after realizing this, the pain of detention lasts longer, sometimes even up to the semester exams.

In an Engineering College everyone seems to be banished to the detention territory at least once in 4 years but sometimes, the student feels he/she is the one being punished to detention by the teacher on some personal grounds. Students add, “Some of the teachers irritate us. The just don’t like us! They are damn partial; they favor their personal favorites by not detaining them and even by sending good internals.”

But at the end of the day just before the mid semester exams many gifted students in a college full of books and boring teachers just keep buzzing around the department notice board for just one thing- detention list.

For us it’s always a ‘die either way condition’ as, If your name is not on the list then it’s time to worry as you got to appear for the exams which means the teacher is going to humiliate you in front of the whole class by reading out your marks aloud. At the mean time, if you get you name on the notice board with a ‘D’ sign, it means you are detained and then the practices and internal marks would suffer. So in such a case, the project “detention cancellation” comes under play.

The detained students keep buzzing all around the teachers in order to get there detention cancelled. The most interesting part of the project “detention cancellation” got to be the reasons why the attendance of the detained student fails to qualify the minimum attendance criteria (75%). The ’detained’ students… oopss… the ‘gifted’ students give all kind of excuses and I must say that sometimes the reasons given are really stupid.

It seems that the management does not want to understand the fact that ‘If we’re not going to have fun in college, then when will we?’ It is a very tyrannical system. We get detentions which affect our marks which in turn affects our futures. May be the faculties think that it’s a good way to make the students attend the classes but its ruining the lives of some of the extra talented students (like me ;) ) and the students who don’t deserve detention.