Repeat after me, A, B, C.

After a restful weekend Monday morning came, and we were to administer a test, but it was disrupted as the girls were off practicing dance routines and songs for the Mother General's visit to the school and orphanage. The Mother General is a super nun. I don't really understand the system, but she is like nun royalty, and she was coming to Auxilum school. There were red carpets, signs and all sorts of sparkles and decorations.

So Monday's teaching was spent revising and reading with the boys while the girls practiced. It was great to give one on one attention to the boys and to practice reading comprehension and pronunciation.

Tuesday was a day off. The Mother General was coming. So Helene, Fawn and Emma (a young American arts student) went to Enakulum. We caught the ferry, and made our way to the temple of Shiva in search of elephants. And we found them, but they were chained, some with open wounds and all dead in the eyes. It was heartbreaking to see them, standing, unable to sit or lie, chewing mindlessly on leaves, blinking absently.

For those of you who me, you'll know I am full of silly facts about, well, everything useless. Did you know that elephants skin is 2.5 cm thick? Did you know that elephants are basically blind? Did you know an elephants brain weighs 5 kilos?

So to see these gentle giants shackled made me feel pretty uncomfortable. So we left, a little less spring in our step, and the rest of the day was spent pondering and preparing for the weeks lessons.

However, nothing could prepare me for how poorly my kids would do in their test. On Wednesday morning we administered it. We demanded silence, and after a gruelling hour, it was over. For the next class we sat in on an assembly wishing Ross, the GVI coordinator, happy birthday from the school. It was really interesting with the auditorium littered with dozens of little school kids in their house colours. A sea of green, red, yellow and blue. There was dancing and singing, jesting and clapping.

I sat at the back teaching the Manipur orphans how to use my digital SLR. They loved the zoom lens and when they didn't understand they would shake it slightly and look at me with those big confused eyes. And I'd point, push this, hold that, look through here. Be patient. And they rose to the occasion. This is a photo one of the boys took. You should have seen his face when it came up on the screen. Pure delight.

Over lunch I marked the tests. They had essentially failed. I realised my kids can't actually form a sentence and I had this scary realisation that I was failing as a teacher. Sure they memorised the definition of a noun, but could they give me an example? No. They could name certain animals but could they describe what their favourite animal ate? No.

So as I sat there, purple marking pen in hand (I refuse to use red, it's too easily associated with being wrong) my heart sank. What was I to do? How was I to challenge these kids and foster a healthy environment to learn? I turned to Helene, a fellow volunteer and retired career teacher. Tina, you can't go any faster than they can go.

So I put my ego aside and stopped trying to make them the best students they could be. Instead I decided to go back to basics. We would do things they could do, until they could do them so well they demanded to move on. We were going to develop a love for reading. We were going to learn how to take pride in one's work. And we were going to going back to A, B, C.

The following day I introduced a morning routine. We go through the date, day of the week and introduce a verb of the day (today I am thinking, tomorrow I will think, yesterday I thought) and word of the day (ankle, plus a picture!) and then we did a class drawing with words that started with and included A. Just as I was beginning to reproach myself, I'd gone back too far, does anyone know any other words with A in it, ahhh (sounding out a)?

Yeah yeah yeah, chickan!

Maybe not.

Sarita, a lovely Australian volunteer took maths, and as part of the new routine we have reading time after lunch. She read Bambi out loud to the kids, they love the pictures and we quized them on the characters and words. After we worked on the ways letters sound. A is ah, B is beh, C is ck.

Who knows, maybe I have gone back too far, but today was the best I've had with them. They were attentive, alert, interested and kind.

So as I come to the end of another week, I have again been taught humility, and reminded of the reality of these kids situation. They don't speak English when they go back to their orphanages. They have a limited vocabulary, and the best I can do is to nurture a love for learning, develop a yearning to read and reward good habits.

Tomorrow is a new day with new challenges. Who knows, they may have forgotten everything we did today, but I will set aside my frustration and ego and walk into class with a smile, ready to hand out high fives, ready to repeat, A, B, C.

Repeat after me, A, B, C.