Write an original short story in which two children and their school teacher are the main characters.

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 335 words)

THE THIRD CHAIR

Miss Fernandes had taught Class Six for twenty-two years and had never once lost her temper, which was why the boys were frightened of her.

Imran and Deepa were not friends. They sat at opposite ends of the third row and had been quietly competing since Class Four, in the way that two clever children in a small school always do. When the mathematics results came out in September and both had ninety-eight, neither spoke to the other for a week.

Then Miss Fernandes did something strange. She moved Deepa to the seat beside Imran.

She gave no reason. She simply read out a new seating list one Monday morning, and the two of them spent the first day as far apart on one bench as the laws of physics allowed.

It took eleven days. On the eleventh, Imran could not get question seven, and after four minutes of increasingly obvious suffering, Deepa turned her book slightly towards him without looking up. He copied the first two lines, saw the method, and finished it himself. Neither of them mentioned it.

By November they were arguing about whether a proof was elegant.

Years later — I know this because Deepa is my mother — they went back to the school on the day Miss Fernandes retired. They asked her, finally, why she had moved the seats.

She said she had watched them both get thinner that September. She said she had taught long enough to know what two clever, lonely children do to each other when they are kept apart and told only that the other is ahead. She said she had not been sure it would work.

Then she said something my mother repeats to me about twice a year, usually when I have quarrelled with someone: "Rivalry is only friendship that has been seated badly."

My mother still cannot do question seven without thinking of him. They have been married thirty-one years.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

THREE main characters are prescribed — two children AND their school teacher — and all three must be MAIN characters, not one protagonist with two walk-on parts. The teacher is the one candidates reduce to scenery; give her a decision that drives the plot.

A prescribed cast is a gift, because it hands you a relationship structure. The strongest stories in this type turn on what the ADULT understands that the children do not — that is the natural shape of a story with a teacher in it.

Avoid the two rehearsed plots: the strict teacher who turns out to be kind, and the poor student helped by a generous teacher. Both are written by hundreds of candidates every year.

Keep the story in the PAST tense and give it a definite ending that shows a change. FORMAT AND MARKS DIVISION: see "Composition — grade bands and marking" in the Writing Formats & Marking (Reference) chapter, along with the worked model for this composition type.

USE THIS AS A MODEL, NOT AS AN ANSWER TO MEMORISE. The question asks for an ORIGINAL composition, and every year examiners identify scripts reproduced from guide books; a memorised answer can be penalised for plagiarism and will in any case read as borrowed. Study this piece for its STRUCTURE — how it opens, how the paragraphs are ordered, where the required tasks are answered, how it ends — and then write your own, about your own school, your own family, your own town. Your own specific detail is worth more marks than anyone else’s polished sentence.