I am a terrible teacher

Today I spent my time sweating and yelling at small children. Why? because I was in Nallasopara and its exam time.

It was ridiculously hot today, so hot my sweat stains grew so big they merged into one giant seat stain that decided to consume my whole body. It looked like someone had dunked me in water. I think I was dripping on the children's work. By a complete miracle the electricity worked all day, unfortunately I was in the one room that doesn't have a fan. Whenever one of the other teachers walked through they gave me an odd little stare and hurried on. Thankfully Vikki was just as sweaty, so we can blame it on foreignness and not my overactive sweat glads.

But the yelling. Today I have mostly been shouting Chub! and Bhat Jow! which means Shut Up! and Sit Down! respectively in Hindi. I occasionally shouted Cheating! but they didn't understand that and carried on. One child got so used to me yelling at him (I briefly silenced an entire classroom on one occasion) all I had to do was glare and he scurried away from me. I am pleased and upset by this behaviour. I really want the children to like me... but they can be so annoying. I try and make up for the yelling by giving in to their requests for handshakes and high fives. I think this is working.

Anyway, I am a terrible teacher. Some of the children are failing miserably. In one of my classes only one child passed. I think its because I forgot to teach them the alphabet properly. I mean, no one has bothered, so not all the blame is on me, but when you're staring at exam pages you wrote where the alphabet tails off around J you start to wonder.

The frustrating thing is I feel like I've learnt so much about teaching and what to do and how to help and be patient... but none of it will be used again as I'm leaving before the new term starts. Not that I would want to stay and carry on, I'm missing flushing toilets and toasters too much. But still. I was watching them today (inbetween the shouting and yelling) and some of them I could see trying so hard and I just wished I'd tried a little harder and getting things through to them. One of the girls is a bit of a lost cause and last lesson we started working really hard at getting her to write her name and in her exam today... she didn't do it, but she got the first 3 letters right! Which is a start! Between all the depressing exam results we did have one happy moment. All our step 3 spontaneously started singing row row row your boat complete with actions (which we taught them!) so at least one thing stuck!