It was my third last day (L-2), and I couldn’t have been more excited about it. I slept late after watching the world cup semis in all my over-confidence and woke up in grogginess and daze after 5 hours of sleep to learn that my TFI Fellow had urgent work to get to outside school and that she would be taking permission for half the day. I returned to sleep.
I woke up an hour later, almost exactly with the time necessary to get to school before the gates shut me out with a bunch of late-comers (mostly wailing kindergarten kids whose parents- relieved in seeing a teacher, promptly drop them off with us outside and leave us surrounded by bawling red-faced babies). Luckily today- a phrase you will not come across again in this article, I got to school on time.
1) Cold, a sore throat and walking in a rained over Chennai neighborhood is never a great idea. I got to school with my sandals drenched, but hey! I got there in time.
2) I’d hardly had the time or the mental composure to think of a solid work plan for the class, so I had to wing most of the day out.
3) My usually quiet class decides today to take full advantage of my growing softness (attributed to my emotions of leaving school that I’d mentioned in an earlier post) and the absence of their Fellow. Let’s take a moment to give them due credit for their smartness here.
4) My Fellow couldn’t make it to school at all today, a news I received in bits and pieces and had had no contingency plans made for.
5) Two kids I’d chided for misbehavior in class gave me a late reaction during lunch. One refused to eat his food, moped in class in front of me and ignored my stream of pleas, threats, shouts and jokes.
6) The other sat outside with her friends and cried her way through lunch.
7) Smart and starving me decided to blackmail the first kid in a way that in hindsight makes no sense. I declared to skip my lunch unless he ate his. He didn’t.
8) After ten minutes of apologizing to the crying kid about telling her off for her misbehaviour, I came to learn that she was in fact not crying about my actions at all. She had a headache, which she coughed up between her long weeps and moans that had misled me in the first place.
9) The first kid often tries to eavesdrop on conversations, which I had to chide him for doing right now. He returned to his state of sulking.
10) The class-teacher for 3rd grade (the class next to mine) was on leave and their substitute teacher had left her class of 40 happy kids alone to eat. Every five minutes, I checked in on that class to more often than not find a cluster of tiny creatures rolling on the floor in their fights.
11) Any attempts at screaming at the 3rd standard kids were severely hampered by the little large eyed, black-ribboned girl (that I mentioned in my previous article) staring at me with her eyes wide and curious. I didn’t want to become her devil…
12) My fasting kid finally decided to give up on his threats and left to eat- 5 minutes before lunch was to end. I opened my box in a sigh of relief.
13) I’d always tried to play the nice teacher while my Fellow handles all the cruelties demanded of this job. Shifting roles is incredibly difficult. A kid of mine who usually keeps his head down at work began making complaints at every 5 minute interval, and strangely denied any complaints against him. Even the ones made by me.
Student 1: Miss! This boy is kicking me miss.
Kid in question: No miss…I didn’t do anything. Ask X if you have doubts on me.
Student 2: Miss! This boy is singing.
Kid in question: No miss…I didn’t do anything. Ask X if you have doubts on me.
Me: Santhosh! Why is your leg on the table?!
Kid in question: No miss…I didn’t do anything. Ask X if you have doubts on me.
Me: But I just saw your legs on the table Santhosh…
Kid in question: No miss…I didn’t do anything. Ask X if you have doubts on me.
This looped around for the entire day.
The day ended with a highly fatigued me giving over 200 tired high 5s to half the school, dragging kids by their bags to get them to leave after dispersal, answering irate permanent staff questions on administration work I had no clue about and in a general cloud of confusion, noise and turbulent emotions ranging from a despair of leaving to the relief of finding the outside world bereft of high pitched screams of ‘Misssss’.
– Swathi Chandrasekaran
Once again, here’s a real tiny clue on how you can help!
It was a twenty rupees chocolate, from a kid who doesn’t get chocolates often at home. From a kid whose classmate searched in agony for her missing slipper for over an hour after school, knowing that without it she’d not have shoes for a month. From a kid who walks home everyday with a slight limp in her leg that hasn’t been checked by a doctor yet. She held out the chocolate with her eyes wide open, melting my heart in one moment of acute agony, gut wrenching ache and immense pride all at once. I had to ask her to treat herself with tears in my eyes, watch as she advanced to join her father at the portico of school and point me out to him with a beam on her face. She left me so easily with an incident I will hauntingly remember with an ache each time I look back at this month.
Perplexed Potatoes 