Welcome Back, Imran

A Story by Abishai100

An ambitious New England teacher decides to venture to troubled Northern Ireland and use education as a tool for 'dated' memory.

A UK-politics fable set in Belfast and inspired by Welcome Back, Kotter. Enjoy (and thanks for reading!),

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Imran traveled from New England to Belfast (Northern Ireland) via JFK and Aer Lingus and by train and arrived in time to prepare for his new exciting if controversial position as a school-teacher in the troubled area in the United Kingdom.

IMRAN: I'm taking this controversial teacher-job to apply lessons in socialized education to students in sectarian pits.

Now, Imran was a professor at Dartmouth College in New England and studied the Eamon de Valera work India and Ireland and hoped to apply his sociological studies of sectarian politics to the education of students in Northern Ireland who endured a daily struggle of survival-endurance and fear that Ivy League students in blessed USA simply didn't have to fear.

IMRAN: I've been collecting images of old Northern Ireland to present to the Belfast students as history-dynamics!

Now, Northern Ireland was partitioned from mainland Catholic Ireland after independence of the 'free state of Ireland' (or republic) in the 20th century from the British Empire rule, with capital-city Dublin, because of the 'technical' demographic population-majority of British-Protestants settled in Belfast (Northern Ireland) as descendants of English/British colonial settlers, which created lots of angst between the 'left-behind' Irish-Catholic minority who'd still have to live under British rule and the British-Protestant majority suddenly extra-unhappy having to 'govern' over a dissatisfied small Catholic group surrounded by mainland Catholic Ireland.

There were all kinds of sectarian challenges and hell after this partition, and the new emerged factions of the British province resistance group of the 'Irish Republican Army' (IRA) such as the New IRA and Foreign IRA rose to prominence with modern and sometimes terrorist-tactics to compel the British-Protestant majority population to either evacuate Northern Ireland and allow mainland Catholic Ireland to unite Dublin-Belfast or to engage in serious socioeconomic reform talks through Parliament and Sinn Fein (the legal/political 'branch' of the negotiation IRA diplomacy) regarding improved affirmative-action employment policies for the struggling/unemployed Irish-Catholic 'under-class' minority 'left-behind' in Northern Ireland after the devastating partition. This led to many decades of stories/reports of Belfast sectarian violence between Catholics-Protestants...and ugly terrorism!

IMRAN: The Catholic-Protestant divide in Northern Ireland remains the sore-spot in Western civilization inter-religious dogma.

Imran arrived at the Belfast school and started to prepare his lessons for education in modern socialization of globalism democracy and the history behind civilization negotiations and inter-religious intelligence/education, a controversial coursework given the modern 'troubles' in the United Kingdom and the potential that he himself would be placed in awkward social dangers for this 'liberal' education approach to modern democratic history.

IMRAN: I won't be discouraged, and I've prepared course outlines for my 3rd-and-10th grade students in folk-art and culture.

He wanted his students at the Belfast school to indulge in ideas about 'self-wrought' imagination catering to a new worldly thinking regarding self-made or independent values-system fostering inter-religious friendliness and also trust and introspection. This was the best method he felt to create a coursework surrounding the approach to sectarian life/history education reflective of a mental curiosity about the 'contouring' of life's private complexity!

For his older students, Imran wanted to present modernism/dystopian folk-art images and news-stories about crime and justice and how media/entertainment contributed to an understanding of the graphic boundaries between political sanity...and gothic fantasies of escape.

STUDENT: We think our new teacher from America is quite good and nice and encourages us to think about Earth.

At a special parent-teacher conference at this very-same Belfast school, Imran told his attending audience that he's proud to be a 'diplomat' from New England and a master of history-sociology studies offering modern students in this troubled sectarian corner of Earth the special value of coordinating academic understandings of inter-religious traffic politics and life's personalized forms of educational dowries.

STUDENT: During this Coronavirus 'masked' tribulation, we're comforted by this new teacher's approach to Belfast dimensions.

Imran left after 4 glorious years of teaching at the Belfast (Northern Ireland) school, and he'd earned the special reputation of serving as a successful introspective education-master of modern/dystopian inter-religious sociopolitical and general life lessons. His students thought he'd become a real Northern Ireland man-of-understanding and he'd return to New England (USA) as a 'detective' of sectarian life in the United Kingdom. Imran promised he'd return 10 years later...just to see what his old/former Belfast students were doing in perhaps 'troubled' Northern Ireland for Christmastime!