Teaching turmoil

Teaching used to be so much fun.  It was easily my favorite part of graduate school. I loved looking through the labs and finding the best way to explain the topics.  Even grading the labs was enjoyable, because sometimes students would solve things in unexpected ways, or make funny comments.   I loved the feeling of office hours, when a student would come in, completely lost, and by the end, truly understand the concept I had taught them.   I genuinely enjoyed it.  You had to understand the material in every possible way, so you could explain it clearly.  It felt good, too, knowing that I was helping people.

I know I sound nostalgic.  There were plenty of times where I was frustrated, usually when my students didn’t understand basic concepts like squaring their units when finding area.  But overall, if they didn’t understand, they were willing to learn.  And so I was happy teaching them.  

Of course, those are college-aged students.  They are from mostly well-to-do backgrounds. They sat and listened to me when I was speaking.  They turned in their homework.  If they did choose not to pay attention, they would do so unobtrusively, and not interrupt the flow of class.  

I have little experience teaching younger students.  On occasions, I have done volunteer work, but that work was always in small groups- 4 or 5 kids per volunteer.  I’ve spoken at my mom’s school a few times, in front of many, many students.  But there were plenty of teachers to control the students, and I wasn’t teaching, just telling about my Antarctic adventures.  

Working with the younger kids is exhausting.  They have you running around, and are constantly asking questions that throw you off (a friend told me she was once asked whether or not penguins could walk backwards).  But still, in the States, I enjoyed it.  It was different.  Less organized. But the kids were excited and still did their best to pay attention.

I thought that it would be at least remotely similar in India.  Boy was I wrong.

I grew up with a mom who was a teacher, but is now a principal.  She has written a book on respect in the classroom.  I know the rules.  No smiling on the first day.   Don’t worry if they like you, they have to respect you first.  Create positive, not negative, classroom rules, etc, etc.

You are their teacher, not their friend.  You know how hard it is to be just their teacher when all of their family members and friends hit and yell at the students on a constant basis?  I don’t hit my students.  I never yell at an individual (thought I have been known to yell at them as a whole class).   I think just by those two actions alone, I have unintentionally befriended the students.  I still did my best not to smile that first day.  Or week. But what if these kids never see a smile from an adult for the rest of the day?  Shouldn’t they know that some adults don’t see them as objects to just be swatted at?  Daughters who are smart, not just the family laundress and chef?

The majority of my students are Muslims who live in an apartment building a short walk away from the school.  They live with their entire family in a room about the size of a college dorm room.  But unlike the college dorm room, the space has to also include a kitchen and toilet.  I have written extensively about one home in the blog entry A typical day, if you want to re-read it.   They have no green grass hills to play upon.  Their playground consists of a rubble road with trash sprinkled more thickly than salt upon French fries at McDonald's.  Apparently (all things I’ve been told second-hand) they are often beaten while at home.  Many parents don’t care whether they even go to school or not.  It is known that some children are being sexually abused by their relatives.

It is so hard to not pity these kids. To want to be a friendly face.  To help them.  To wish they had a yard to play in, friends who didn’t think it was normal to hit them.  

And so I started the school year doing my best to be serious. Not smile.  But it is so hard when these kids, who have nothing compared to American standards, smile at you and look happy.  When they finally figure out the math problem and ask for a high-five. 

They immediately latched onto my vulnerability and have driven my classroom into madness.  It is clearly my own fault.  I need to be stern.  I tried SO hard to be stern. But I sound weak when I raise my voice.  Unbelievable.  If I can hear doubt behind my voice, I am sure they can, too.   My stern glances will send a student back to their seat momentarily, but the second the eye contact is lost, they are back to my desk, even if in the middle of class, during my lecture. 

Some days they are amazingly good.  Last week, Monday-Wednesday, they were amazing. They sat quietly.  They listened. They did their work.  They didn’t interrupt me when I was speaking.  But Thursday?  They were monsters.   They were constantly moving about the classroom while I was instructing.  Interrupting my words.  Whispering.  If I could understand what I was doing differently between the days, then I could fix it. But I just don’t see how I was behaving differently. 

I think part of my problem is that I compare my students to the orderliness of the college-aged students that I taught.   Maybe young kids (they are about 9-12 in age, for the most part) just can’t sit still and quietly for that long.  Maybe I am judging what I think is bad behavior as just normal behavior.     

But I have seen these kid sit deathly still.  They will sit quietly for the other teachers in the program.  Especially for the single male teacher that I have met, a social worker who comes in occasionally on Thursdays.  He speaks to them in Hindi, so I never know what he is saying.  But, like Minerva McGonagall, he has the class spellbound.  

I believe I have mentioned in a previous blog that I once asked the students why they sit quietly and listen to the other teachers, but not me.  Their honest response?  “We are scared of the other teachers.”  

I have no ability to be scary.  When garage sale-ing, I can’t even get people to bargain with me.  They look at my face, and just know I’ll pay the full price.  Only once have I successfully gotten someone to come down on a price.  It was for a plastic worm from the movie Dune (an amazing book series, I highly recommend it).  The owner could see how ecstatic I was over the item, felt bad for me, and let me have it for a lower price.  I was probably the only person in the entire toy show who knew what it was, anyway.  

At airports, the security agents know they can walk all over me. I am nearly always picked as that poor person who has to shove their carry-on bag in the metal ‘does your bag fit here’? display that sits as an ornament to bypass for everyone else.  But me?  They take one look at me, see that I won’t put up a fight, and make me put the bag in there.   Yes, after a lot of shoving and grunting, I can always make my bag fit.  But there is ALWAYS someone else with a much fatter, bigger bag that certainly would not fit.  But I’ve never seen that person asked.  Just me.  

I know that I am not a scary person.  Yes, it has the drawbacks in flea marketing and flying, but for my everyday life, it had not been a problem until now.   I don’t want to be scary the way the other teachers are scary here.  My first day observing the classroom, the teacher took the students, had them stand in front of the class, and would smack them on the arm each time they said something that was grammatically incorrect.   That isn’t who I want to be.  If it means I am not a good teacher in India, so be it. But I know I don’t have to hit the students to be a good teacher.   As far as I know, my co-teacher (in the other classroom at the same center), Teacher R, doesn’t hit her students.  And they seem to listen to her.  Her students are a bit older.  She has been teaching the same kids for six years.  Maybe that makes a difference. Maybe there is still something about me, too. 

I don’t know if I am just making excuses or not at this point.  Perhaps I will never be a good teacher for this age level.  I’m not stern.  At least not with these kids who see nothing but sternness and anger for the rest of their day. .   I was a great TA at the college level, and I can be proud of that, even if I cannot be proud of my current classroom discipline skills. 

The consequence of not having control over my classroom has clearly been a corresponding decrease in my enjoyment of teaching.  But other things have decreased my enjoyment much more so.  First, lesson planning.   When I started, I was given two spiral bound textbooks and told that the students’ curriculum was in it.  I was also given copies of the past exams for their grade levels.  I was told to ignore the curriculum text, and basically teach to the test.  

The curriculum textbooks were terrible, anyway. The English textbook was obviously written by a non-native speaker.  They didn’t even have the correct number of syllables in the example haiku.  The reading level was way beyond what my students could read.   So the entire textbook was thrown out.   That means, each day, for five days a week, I have to create, from scratch, a lesson in English.  Yes, there are a lot of reading comprehension work sheets I can google, but it is also upsetting that there isn’t some book to use.  Plus, they have to learn about their neighboring countries.  So rather than having text for that, I’ve spent a lot of time on google finding stories about Nepal or Pakistan, and then re-writing them to a younger reading level.  And doing my best to catch all the American words and convert them to British spelling.   

The math text is not as bad as the English text. But since I was told to teach to the test, I had to, for the most part, throw out the math text as well.    So in addition to finding or writing English comprehensions, I am writing a math worksheet or two each day.  Now, I absolutely love math.  So I didn’t mind, at first, coming up with worksheet after worksheet of rounding and division, etc.  But it is starting to get boring.  I haven’t found good math worksheets online.   I like math, I am picky about math.   I like writing problems that teach them something, not randomly generated worksheets that might not include the difficult subtopics.    

So there you have it.  I’m doing a volunteer teaching job.   And on many days, I’m spending well over eight hours a day on it.  I don’t care that I’m not getting paid, but I really would prefer to only spend a max of three or four hours per day on it!  

I had goals when I moved to India.  I really wanted to learn Hindi.  We even bought the Hindi Rosetta Stone for me to teach myself. But most of all, I wanted to use this time to try and write a book.  Even before I could actually write, I was telling mythical creature stories that my mom would pen for me.  When I was in third grade, I spent the entire year reading and writing stories (looking back at them, they sure were awful, mostly stories from the 1800s where the mother was correcting the daughter’s grammar).  And these past ten years have been so busy, I had completely stopped writing, with the exception of a Harry Potter fan fiction…  This year was the year to re-discover whether or not I still liked writing.   Whether or not I could actually write anything that was worthwhile. I love writing.   And it is hard to do that as a full-time occupation when I have eight hours of volunteer work to deal with each day.     Yes, I know, only eight hours.  My husband works (including traveling time) 14 hours or more each day.  But I’m not my husband.   I know that I am unhappy in a schedule like that.  

The point of that little side note is that I am thinking about quitting my teaching job.  It has clearly been established in these past six weeks that I am not as good at controlling my students as the other teachers.  I am not enjoying it very much.   So I feel as though I should step back, and actually try to accomplish my goals that I had set forth for myself.  But I am confused, too.  Am I saying that just because I feel like I am not a good teacher?   Should I be working to improve that skill?  Or am I not a good teacher (for this age group) because it isn’t want I wanted to do this year, anyway?

The desire to quit has been growing on me, but Friday was really the last straw.  Before, I’d been feeling frustrated with my workload and students, but not with the other teachers with whom I had been interacting.  In fact, I get along quite well with my co-teacher, Teacher R.   But Friday.  Friday really opened my eyes to another cultural difference between India and America.   Our standards of respect are just completely different.  

After Friday, I feel like I just don’t respect the other teachers in the program.  I feel like they have lackadaisical attitudes.  Friday was the big, year-end math assessment test.  There are two classrooms in our center, fifty-six students. Teacher R and I each teach one of the classrooms.  On Friday, Teacher R went to another center in a different suburb to administer the exam, so I, and a couple of other teachers were left to administer the exam to the kids.  

Things started off innocently and normally enough.  We got them seated, passed out the exams and paper to write on.  I wasn’t allowed to administer the exam to my own class, so I went to the other classroom to proctor.  Now, the other classroom was Teacher R’s class.  Her students actually listen to her, unlike mine, so I was expecting a nice and quiet, well-behaved classroom.  It was anything but. 

In the first two minutes of my monitoring of Teacher R’s classroom, I moved three kids for very extreme and blatant copying.   I then ran out of space to move them, and I also noticed that the other teacher proctoring didn’t seem at all to care that they were copying.  My respect for her started to decrease.   It was SO obvious.  These are just kids. They aren’t quite slick at their copying skills yet.  They would very clearly be staring, or even taking, their desk mate’s paper.  It wasn’t a gray line.  They were clearly crossing over the line.  And she was doing nothing.   The students were also talking.  Continuously.  Some were laughing.  Many were doing their math out loud, even saying their answers out loud.  Yes, this is the big, formal, year-end examination.  So formal I can’t be in the classroom with my own students.  Yet the kids can talk to each other. The other teacher was ignoring it!  She was looking around at the classroom, looking at the shoebox diagrams other students had made.  Never once did she tell the kids to be quiet.  It was just me, over and over, asking the students to be silent. Strike one of anger against the teachers.

Honestly, at that point, I’m ashamed to say, I was a bit smug.  I know that I had my students better behaving than THAT.  I started to think that maybe my standards of good classroom behavior were much higher than the other teachers.  Maybe my kids aren’t so bad, relative to the other students, after all.   It was just that I held them to a higher standard than the other teachers.    

Eventually, I was called to the classroom that contained my students, to answer any questions the students may have with the test.    That was strike two of the Friday anger.  I looked at the question. It was simple- conversions between percentages and decimals.   Material I knew well.  Material my students didn’t know at all, because it was included on the list (that I had been informally e-mailed) of material exempt from the exam.   There was also a section on conversions that appeared nowhere on the previous exam (again, I had been told to teach to the exam).  So I was incredibly upset.  My students aren’t going to be able to pass this exam, not because my teaching skills, but because of inadequate communications skills.  

Strike 2.1 of the Friday anger was learning that my way of teaching division (by writing the remainder at the top, next to the whole number, rather than just leaving the remainder at the bottom of the math problem) would be marked wrong, because people in India aren’t used to seeing the remaindered as part of the circled answer.   That really upset me.   It is, in fact, incredibly stupid.  If you are grading, you try to streamline the process.  Having the students put the entire answer in two places, rather than one place makes absolutely no sense.  It takes twice as long to grade! Sure, it is just a different method. But at that point, I was so frustrated that my kids would get marked down for correct answers, simply because it wasn’t written in the Indian format.

Since I have arrived here, I tell myself, over and over, each day, that we are in a different country.  A different culture.  Adjust.  At that point on Friday, I reminded myself again. 

But then came strike number three.  With all my heart, I believe those teachers are just plain wrong and lack the proper respect for their students.  I no longer have any respect for the teachers. 

Strike three occurred with the teacher proctoring my students answered her ringing cell phone in the middle of the exam.  

Now, I know, in India, everyone answers his or her phone, regardless of the situation.  In America, we’d consider pretty much every person in this country incredibly rude.  When we were apartment hunting with the realtor- she’d take personal calls.  At our dinner party, in the middle of conversations, people would take personal calls.   As far as I can tell, there is never an inappropriate time to take a phone call (I hope that I am wrong!).   I got used to it.  In fact, there is no such thing as leaving a voice message here.  You have to text if you want to leave a message.

 But taking a phone call, and speaking in your incredibly loud, booming voice, for five to ten minutes, in the middle of the student’s exam?  She wasn’t whispering.  She didn’t move to the hall.  She sat, her voice projecting, and calmly took a phone call.   It was ridiculous.  How are my students supposed to concentrate while she is doing that?   Even worse, once it was over, she proceeded to tell me about the conversation! In a voice every student could clearly hear.  I’m sure, had I been a cartoon, that my mouth would have dropped to the floor. 

I’m sorry.  Cultural differences or not, I just don’t respect that or her anymore.   Three strikes.  It is just wrong to let the kids blatantly copy.  It is wrong to misinform their teacher what material to cover on the exam.  It is certainly wrong to talk loudly on the phone while the students are in the class trying to pass an exam.  

I feel like I am in my philosophy class from college, discussing moral relativism.  It has been a good eight years or so, but I remember the point I personally took was that there is no such thing.  Yes, some cultures are just wrong.  Otherwise, you have to start believing that Hitler was right at the time, for his culture, etc.  You have to believe that America’s slavery was right and correct at some point.  And yes, I think that we should be able to say that culture was just plain wrong at those times.  Never should it acceptable to kill someone for his or her religion/dark hair.  Or imprison people as slaves. Some people (from a philosophical standpoint) disagree, and say that it was morally right, at that given time.  “When in Rome” might work well on a general basis, but at some point, you have to just stand up and say, “I may be in the minority, but I still think you are wrong and I won’t stand for it.”  And I just can no longer stand the attitudes of these teachers.    Of course…. I just imagined I said that.  I didn’t actually say it on Friday. 

And I know, I KNOW that people come to America, and can pick and point to things and have the exact same argument. I’m sure, if I had been born in another country, I would do the same.  But it still doesn’t change how I feel.   I just can’t stand the teaching culture here. 

There may be organization that I am unaware of, but, as a volunteer, despite having taught everyday for nearly six weeks, I am still not on any e-mail lists.  My students were the people who have to tell me that we have an upcoming holiday and no school.  There is absolutely no communication flow to me.  

Assuming strike three was a actually a foul ball, and my teaching career at this school is still up to bat, my kids managed to strike out spectacularly after the exam.  The previous week, Teacher R and I decided to take the students who had been good outside to play on the small lawn.  They love a game called kho-kho, which is a complicated version of tag.   With Teacher R, they are well behaved. She divided them up into teams, and they played, rather peacefully.

On Friday, I took the kids out by myself.  The first thing they did, after I asked them NOT to do it, was to run directly to the playground equipment and start climbing up the slides.   It isn’t ‘our’ school, and the security guards had already asked me to not let them play on it, for safety issues.  Now, I was a kid once.  I know how much fun it is to run across the drawbridge and play on the monkey bars.  Even more fun for them because they have to walk by this playground equipment each day, but not use it.  Even so, we were there to play kho-kho, not break the swing set, and so I had to get my students off the set and onto the grass.  I usually employee two of my students who are well respected by the others to do this.  They got them off the equipment, and I told them to divide up into teams.

I picked the two captains, and told them to select the rest of their team themselves.  They couldn’t even divide into teams on their own.   I have never seen such an inability to think for themselves.   They honestly couldn’t do it.  They wasted at least five minutes dividing themselves before starting again.  I see now why the teacher last week divided them herself.  They eventually started to play.  Last week, the game was SO important to the kids.  They were organized.   They were into it.  This week?  They were a disaster.  They were breaking the rules of the game.  Fighting.  Pulling on each other.  Random kids would abandon the game and run back to the playground equipment.   My driver, who was watching them play, told me it was madness.

Finally, incredibly angry at their insistence on running up the slide rather than going down it, I told them we were all leaving and never doing this again.  The kids begged me and begged for a second chance.  I swear, if I could make flames shoot out of my eyes, that would have been the day.  But two of the kids, despite my raised voice and dagger glare, still had the gall to grab my arm, pull, and beg.  I couldn’t believe it.  What will it take to make them behave? I had NEVER been as angry with them as I was that day.   But they were still completely immune to it.  

I realized at that moment I would never have full control of the class.  I was completely enraged, and they still had no fear of me, like they fear the other teachers.   They may come up to me in class and tell me I am their favorite teacher (one on Friday even told me he loved me), but no matter what I do, I don’t think I can get them to respect me.