Crime In The St. Thomas School, 65 min

The school to which girl students were hurrying was one of the sample achievement of socialism - a one-storey prefab box within a neglected garden, which defied, with all of its appearance, a blue and white board announcing to the coming students that St. Thomas School was founded as early as in .... . The appearance of the school expressively showed the decline which affected the Czech lands under the socialism regime: Once a proud and prestige girls' school, whose former graduates came with a suggestion that it should be reopened immediately after the "velvet revolution", finally gained, thanks to numerous personal interventions, its base on the outskirts of the capital city. The staff could consider this success - other traditional schools ended up even worse and all that remained was a record in chronicles and nostalgia of their former graduates. The subject of envy of those few private schools that, despite the resistance of former "comrades" firmly seated in the state administration chairs, were restored, was a few pieces of the original school equipment found in the depository of the Pedagogy Museum which created at least a hint of a feeling of historical continuity. Generally, the continuity of traditions was a problem. It was obvious that formerly the staff only consisted of women, but the senseless laws of the European Union, to which the Czech Republic has submitted with an unwise hope for early joining, did not make it possible to reject a job applicant only for the reason of unsuitable sex. Although the headmistress tried to persuade the trade unions and the ministry several times with arguments about the tradition of the school, including a simple logic of the completely girls' school, the officials educated by the ideas of perverted equality were rejecting her arguments with a mischievous joy. So she had to agree to admit several men as members of the staff - at least she tried to choose such men in whom the risk of close contacts with girl students was as little as possible. The men teachers were therefore, to great displeasure of the girl students, fanatics of their science, which they taught with eagerness and holy enthusiasm regarding the other disciplines as entirely nonessential for practical life. However, this selection of teachers caused other inconveniences personified by the chemistry teacher who, despite his relatively young age, had behind him several international patents, two disasters of a medium extent, and an effaced suspended sentence for a criminal offence of general threat arising from the production of a plastic explosive in the home conditions of a single-room flat in a prefab housing estate. Whereas the schoolmistresses, enthusiastically, and the schoolmasters, at least orderly, accepted the obligation of a dignified representation of the school, the chemistry teacher silently ignored all reproofs regarding his appearance.. What was excused to the chemistry teacher, at least temporarily, was not excused to the girl students who were ordered to wear uniforms in accordance with the school regulations that included details such as underwear. Here, of course, the main role was played by the hygiene reasons, but along with them also social aspects were considered when the decision on the parts of the uniform was being made: The uniform, equal in all details, efficiently blurred the difference between those girls who were driven to school in parents' luxury saloon cars and those who got to school using the public transport. There was a continuous fight raging between the girls and the teachers about the neatness and completeness of the uniforms. "Good manners", at least of the class troublemakers, included putting on and adjusting uniforms in the last possible moment just before the class teacher came to make a record of the absent students and to inspect the classroom before classes started. Particularly the compulsory cotton underwear was an appreciative subject of scorn, not for the material used but for the design, which was called "knickers from head to tail"; however, only those students saw it in this way whose underwear, with its almost total absence of fabric, gave the reason to explore whether it was still clothing or only cleverly made makeup. The moral duty of the girl students worthy of their names was also to profess "fashion stripes": In the spirit of its best traditions, St. Thomas School introduced corporal punishments and only the headmistress herself could say how much of her time, nerves, and arguments with ministerial officials this measure took. The legal problems were finally solved by transferring some of the parents' legal authorities to the school; since that time school offences, including offences against the regulation on the school uniform, had their "fixed rates" and, by contrast, the honour-minded students had a "moral duty" to continually have "fashion stripes" on their bottoms so as to prove how deeply they despise the observance of the school regulations. In practice it meant breaking the school regulations at least twice, so that the traces on the bottom were regularly restored by three obligatory slaps with a cane. Both sides were reconciled with this state. However, there was a fundamental dispute in the opinion on the system of education. The school followed an easy idea: The more students will be admitted to university, the more successful the school is. University admission tests were based on testing the volume of applicants' knowledge, and so from the pragmatic view of the school, hard drill and continuous memorizing were the basic teaching methods though it was clear to the younger members of the staff that this was not the most efficient method of teaching a young man to think and to use information. The students had the same opinion. Not because they would particularly long for quality education - they had more natural interests at their age - but because the volume of learning took successfully almost all of their leisure time. Mr. Neruda, the teacher of the Czech language, did not rank among the young teachers, with neither his age, nor opinions. He hold an opinion that an unemployed student represented a potential trouble and he tried to protect his students against troubles. The Czech teacher ranked therefore among the least favourite, but at the same time the most dreaded teachers. From the students' view he had quite a considerable collection of negative qualities starting with early arrivals in the classroom, through examining by which he decimated the absolute majority of the class every day, to a terrible speed at which he dictated notes to the subject being taught. His popularity was not particularly increased by his stress laid on the silence in his classes and his habit to send naughty students to a corner - though for the class "stars" this was an opportunity for various small provocations, however, dearly paid by a duty to copy notes in exercise books, which sometimes exceeded a lot more than twenty pages if Neruda was in a good condition. The students were really frustrated as it was the Czech lesson with which the school week always began. A substantive opposite to the Czech teacher was the hard-of-hearing biology teacher Kotatko (meaning a kitty in Czech). His name predetermined him to be liked by the students and he was gently indulged by them. He almost never examined, and if he did, then he only examined those who asked him for it. In his class there was a quiet activity hardly ever exceeding the limits of his defective hearing. However, even if he could have heard perfectly, he could be satisfied: Indeed, the adolescent students' subject of talks was biology, though strictly specialized in the details of male genitalia or in some of the less known details of the act of reproduction. So it is understandable that the students did not like the class schoolmistress's announcement that the biology teacher had fallen ill and