In 10th, we have school right after the 9th grade examinations, which means school in the summer. As if that isn't bad enough, we even have exams as soon as school reopens in June. And these exams, being the first of 10th, were a learning experience for all of us because the correction was pretty strict.

And stupid. I can't complain about most subjects because, well, I didn't really write much in the exam, but I was pissed off when I got my English marks.

For English, we have a few comprehension exercises which cover Grammar as well and then an entire section for writing exercises. In this particular examination, we had been given the topic of "Teacher's role in shaping the future of a student" for an 'expansion of ideas' exercise.

For those of you who don't know, in expansion of ideas, you are given a proverb, saying etc and you have to explain it with examples. 

And I did the exercise because I knew a solid example, Leonardo da Vinci, and I knew a lot about him because of 'Da Vinci's demons'. And while describing his father, Pierro da Vinci, I wrote "Seeing his bastard son decorate his shield so well, he sold him to an artist Andreea Verocchio."

And I got a remark saying "Don't use bad words". Now, our English teacher likes to discuss our mistakes in front of the entire class, which I think is a good way of letting everyone know what mistakes not to make. And she brought this topic up.

The entire class started either laughing or gasping because I wrote 'bastard' in an exam. Of course, most of my classmates don't know the real meaning of that word. Naturally, I defended myself by saying "It means 'illegitimate child' and that's how I used it, not as a swear."

After some discussion, the teacher concluded with "Don't use slang in your writing exercises again." If any of you know how bastard (illegitimate child) is slang, please let me know. As far as I know, the meaning of bastard that we all know is considered slang. 

What's worse is, I was expecting a good remark for using that word in the way it was meant to, and not as a curse.

So, again I defended myself, to which she replied, "See, I know the actual meaning of that word, but some English teachers from small villages might not know the meaning and they'll just cut your marks for it. So don't use that word again."

What. The. Fuck.

Am I not supposed to use colourful words in my writing exercises? And to be honest, bastard is hardly a colourful word. Illegitimate would've been tougher to understand. And if these teachers don't know the meanings of such words, why are our papers even going to them for correction? Let them correct the papers of students that they teach.

It's not fair to call villagers bad writers but, I go to a good English medium school, why should I dumb down my vocabulary so that some under qualified teacher can understand it? 

Is there really such a shortage of teachers in the country that we look towards such people to correct the papers? Like I said before, if the country can't host an exam this important properly, it should stop trying. It's not the country that suffers, it's us students that suffer. 

To this day, I'm scared of using words that are longer than 5 letters while writing an essay.