As the end of school year approached, the maneuvering to gain a passing mark increased. Some actually sat and learned, no mistake there, and they weren't the problem. The problem were the others, who got used to be just passed into the next grade for nothing. Someone artificially raised the success rate of the elementary schools by simply revoking the posibility of repetition (of year), and for the weak performance the punishment landed on teachers - they had to organize additional courses, and generally invest more effort - and of course it was so much easier to just distribute passing marks and hand the problem to the next guy down the line. We were that, the worst of them enrolled in MPSŠC.
Those who didn't lift a finger and waiting for a two (the passing mark, see school levels), plus those who missed at so much of the curriculum that there was not a theoretical chance that they could make up for enough of it in a single year, including the de facto semiliterates, constituted about a quarter of them. Some colleagues would put their hands into the fire on claim that there were more than half.
One of those was some Sredljev guy, dumb and dim and barely semiliterate. His level of achievement was to copy the work from the guy in the next desk. Now I wasn't too blind either, so he couldn't have a good look at it, the guy in front couldn't just hand him the whole paper, could only sit awry and let him peek. And he did copy everything from a to zhnj, introducing a bunch of his original errors on top of original ones. This corruption of information is normal, when the copier has no clue about the matter, copies letters blindly. This guy screwed up even the title - he copied "IV written task" as "IX written task", because the source guy's handwriting wasn't flowing, he had drawn the capital leters line by line, and didn't quite end at the bottom of V, went a millimeter below with both legs of it. So this guy didn't even understand the title.
There was a professor of some machine engineering persuasion, Veselin Polovina, nobody quite knew how he ever graduated. Actually, he was just teaching some such subject, mechanics I think, but now that I think of it, he probably didn't finish mechanical engneering, but rather that silly Fakultet za industrijsku pedagogiju in Rijeka, the precursor of petefi, and we know how that went. He did his lectures from his own sheets (the so-called "lecture preparation"), and the kids would sometimes nick one of the sheets, or shuffle them, and he'd stop in his tracks, unable to continue. Which is probably an exaggeration, but then maybe not.
The kids, of course, saw through him and mocked him in all possible ways. When my electricians graduated two years ago, someone lifted his bicycle to a tree, at least four meters high. This year they welded the pedal to a fence. I saw them do it, I worked the classroom above the workshop at the time. I missed the scene when he tried to move the bike and couldn't, but I can imagine it. And then, at one of the sessions near the end of the school year, he starts ranting about "...we have no authority*, the students don't respect us, like there's a rumor circulating the school that they welded my bicycle to a fence, and nobody's even trying to issue an official denial". Wow, you fool, there are fifty windows looking at the place, count on two hundred witnesses at least, and so what, we need to be the idiots to try to claim it never happened?
And then that guy, as such, comes to urge about this Sredljev kid, who doesn't even understand the numbering of written tasks (nor Roman numerals, for that matter). Because he's a kind of a cousin of his. Well gotodick, if he gets a two, how do I face the others who put an honest amount of work and had sweat the chair to get one? And in the end, as an obvious afterthought, he asked when should my wife give birth and how is she. Well fuck off you cretin.
Next year he was retiring, and as the tradition has it, contribution were collected among the staff to buy him a gift. A sizable number flatly refused to give, „for him, not“.
----
* „autoritet“ has nothing to do with any authorizations or powers, it denotes a reputation, influence, superiority of mind or moral, and only after that also the legal stuff. So it's a person to defer to.