Teaching

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I've started to really enjoy the teaching side of this experience. It is still hard and I always feel like they are not really learning anything from me, but I do quite like it. I'm teaching 3 hours a day and I'm finding the preparation for that alone is tiring, let alone all those proper teachers who teach five or more lessons a day and properly prepare and mark the work....hats off to you I'm definitely impressed.
I have 3 classes, two of which are the same level, they have enough English for you to hold some kind of a conversation with them but it isn't what you'd call correct Queens English and the sentences they use have some very interesting structures! My other class, D, is the complete beginners, who are a delight but dear lord they progress slowly...and in some cases not at all. When we first arrived Ashleigh did a lesson with the top class on why they became a nun... I don't feel a need to do that with Class D because, even if they could understand, it fairly obvious many of them are there as it is one of the few ways they can get an education; and ,harsh as it seems, I do think some have been sent by their parents to the nunnery in part because they would be unlikely to be able to find them a husband (something that is seen as really awful here...yes yes I totally disagree and it makes me angry) because they genuinely don't have many brain cells to rub together. One of the 18 year olds in Class D is a classic example. We were drawing people the other day and because I was on the opposite side of the table from her my person was upside down, so she drew a person standing on their head...she's a lovely girl, very beautiful, but there are certainly not an abundance of brain cells in her head. I started teaching them colours about 6 weeks ago and we periodically return to the topic to find they've all forgotten all of them. I'll be happy when I leave if they just know those, it'll be a little victory if nothing else.

My other group are equally lovely. One of the funniest things to do with them is to try to get then to play pictionary,as they hate doing any kind of drawing but are also really competitive, so you end up with a situation where the drawer is arkwardly drawing and rubbing everything they've drawn out whilst the others try to cheat and look at the card. I've lost pretty much all my self consciousness around them as I think learning is best done through humour, something I certainly showed when we did the topic of going to the doctors and I had to explain what diarrhoea was through actions. Their personalities are really starting to shine through now and I feel a little guilty that I ever interpreted their behaviour as unfriendly or hostile.

We went swimming with some of the nuns in the river last weekend which was really good fun. There were some monks from a nearby monastry visit becuase there are some holy caves at Tilokpur. The nuns were really shy around the monks, even though they swim in full clothing, so it took quite a while of splashing them and pulling them into the water before they would get properly involved. I never did my life saving badges so didn't have an appreciation of how hard it is to swim in clothing...thats my excuse for why I was swept down stream on several occasions much to the delight of the nuns. We visited the caves whilst we were there which involved climbing up a rickety, slippery bamboo ladder, one of those ones where the gaps between the rungs is a little to large for you to feel comforatble or safe. The caves themselves are small sheilded from view by a wall of hanging vines and inside there are loads of unearthly looking stalactites. They were where a saint (it's unclear whether he was Buddhist or a Hindu...these distinctions don't seems to matter in India) spent time meditating. There was a monk sat chanting and burning incense who was left up there when everyone came down and the ladder was taken away. No one seemed to know how long he was staying up there so I hope someone has gone to retreive him by now as it wouldn't by my idea of a comfortable bed for the night!

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