Every Monday morning, after singing the national anthem and the school song, it is time for inspection. This means that the teacher on duty, the discipline master, or sometimes the secondmaster, inspects students along with other prefects. The inspection focuses on a number of things, but every week, depending on who is doing the inspecting, the focus changes. Sometimes it is fingernail length, sometimes it is uniform cleanliness, sometimes it is uniform patches, sometimes it is trouser size, sometimes it is sock color, sometimes it is shoe type, and sometimes it is whether the students who have ties have tied them correctly.
Every week students fail inspection. When fingernails are too long, those students are taken out of line, where they immediately establish a nail-biting brigade, furiously attempting to reduce the length of their fingernails, so they can avoid getting beat. When uniforms are unclean (and it takes a lot for a uniform to be considered unclean), students frantically try to rub out the offending spots, so they can avoid getting beat. When students don’t have the required uniform patch, they are required to remove their white shirts so a patch can be applied (ok, this only happened once, and was quickly countermanded by the discipline master, but there were girls walking around in their hole-filled sweaters with no shirt on underneath). When they guys are wearing trousers that are too tight they are harassed and made fun of, and told to get them made more loose. When students are not wearing the appropriate socks (for girls, white, for boys, white with two black stripes), they are yelled at and beat. When students are not wearing black shoes they are beat. And, when the students who wear ties – a select few – have not tied them, or tied them incorrectly, they are told “Tie your tie, or your tie will tie will tie you!”
Now, it is something of a mystery what exactly this means. It is a favorite expression of one teacher in particular, but the other teachers seem to find it hilarious as well. I guess the implication is that if you fail to tie your tie, you will get tied up in the consequences of not tying your tie. Indeed, one day many of the prefects did not have their ties tied, and as a result they spent the first two periods of the day cutting grass. They hated this, because the prefects typically do not have to do physical labor, as they are prefects.
However, since there are about 700 students, every week only one area is the central focus of the inspection, and most of the students manage to escape without being inspected. And, for the rest of the week, unless you are particularly unlucky and manage to catch the eye of an annoyed teacher, you can get away with many of these infractions. For instance, sandals are not allowed (boys must wear a closed toe shoe, and girls must wear that or a black slipper), but as Monday turns into Tuesday and Tuesday into Wednesday it is not uncommon to see shoes turn into sandals, for ties to get looser around the neck, and uniforms to begin getting very dirty. Indeed, most students only wash their uniform once a week, if that. But, come next Monday there is a chance to, yet again, fail the inspection, get beat, or be warned “tie your tie, or your tie will tie you!”