Nobody planned it for her

A private tutor in Kuwait City teaches maths to secondary students in their homes. Her year has always followed the school calendar, and the busiest weeks are the ones before final exams.

This year the schools moved the exams forward. The rush that usually filled her evenings for six weeks lasted three. Two families stopped lessons early, and she spent the spare evenings wondering who had decided to make her life harder.

It is easy, in a stretch like that, to feel singled out. The ministry, the schools, the parents who were keen in the autumn and suddenly were not: it starts to look like a plan with her at the centre of it.

It is almost never a plan. The timetable changed for reasons that had nothing to do with her, across thousands of students, and nobody involved in the decision knew she existed.

That is not entirely comforting, but it is useful. There are real injustices, and some people do hold grudges. Most of what lands on one person, though, is a system doing what systems do, unaware of anybody in particular.

Systems also tend to show themselves early, to anyone paying attention. The new exam dates were published months before they arrived.

Once the villain is gone, two better questions are left. The first is how the system actually works: when it moves, what it rewards, what it ignores. The second is how to use the hand it has dealt her. Start revision courses in January. Tell families in September how the year will run. Teach the younger years, whose calendar did not change.

None of that is possible while she is still looking for whoever did this to her.

Nobody did.