At Selaqui, it was the first week back to school. I didn’t have as much filming to do, so I went to school when my little boys had to go to school and I helped out in the second grade for the first three days. It was exhausting even just assisting. I was highly amused walking into the classroom the first day and the teacher said, “You have something you want to teach?” I looked at her kind of confused. “Do you have something you want me to teach or are there books? I am happy to help.” She said, “How about you teach moral science.” I am thinking, okay, what is moral science? So I had five minutes to prepare something with a moral. She asked that there be a drama for them to perform. So in five minutes I wrote a script about not cheating, because in a class with 40 second graders and most of them don’t speak English, they all copy each other just to survive. Once I had written the script, that was the law. The children were given their dialogue and they had to say it word for word and take it home to memorize it for the next day. I felt so bad. Then she said we would perform it in front of the school at the assembly the next week. What!
The next day I walked into her class and she asked if I had a song to teach them to go with the moral. I had been trying to remember the words to a song because she had mentioned this the day before. I was hoping she would forget. But first thing in the morning, I had to command the attention of 40 students and teach them a song I could barely remember. I taught them “Choose the Right,” a song I learned in church when I was in primary. But I think I made up one of the lines to make it fit the rhyme scheme and I left off a good chunk of the song and just taught the first six or seven lines. I was actually surprised at how well they did. Especially since I had to sing the song solo to teach them the tune. They had to write the words in their planners so they wouldn’t lose it and memorize it for the performance.
However, the next day, typical to the school systems here, everything changed. The teacher was moved to a different class and the students had a new teacher. She told me I would have to teach it all over again to the new class. But on the way, I was told there was no first grade teacher. So, I had to teach 40 first graders for an entire day without any lesson plans or preparation. I won’t go into all of the details, but discipline was a constant problem. I searched through a bag of one of the students and found two textbooks. So I taught English first. Then we moved onto math, which was “special.” Science, uh, what to do for science? I searched the classroom and found a book that had leaves in it. So we learned about plants and leaves and went outside to collect leaves for an art project. Getting leaves for 40 students has its own problems. Part way through their art project, their Hindi instructor showed up. So I had to quickly get the students to put their crayons and supplies away. By break time we had already finished their four main subjects. I didn’t know what to do for the second half of the day. I found an environmental science book that had pictures of the human body, so we labeled a picture on the chalkboard of eyes, nose, etc. I tried to make this last as long as possible, including a game of charades and singing “head shoulders knees and toes.” All out of subjects and with one hour to go, I taught them “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam” since it is a Christian school. Then we had story time and colored pictures. I was so exhausted by the end of the day and I won’t go into all of the discipline issues you face when there is a class of 40 first graders who don’t speak my language. But I refused to use some of the Indian methods for disciplining, which I had witnessed the previous day and was completely stunned.
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