Cruel Life?

The more and more I get into the details of my kids' lives, I realise how protected and pampered a life I am living. Remember my roll no. 12, whose house was a perfectly serene environment and I was still having trouble with his behaviour in class. Even behind that there are stories, which make me wonder whether his behavioural issues are connected to that. When I finished filling in his application for the scholarship exam and was handing it over to my school administrator, she asked what has he told me his father's name is. I read it out from the paper and she passed me the white ink to correct it to the one in the records. Of course I should have noticed that the name he gave me and his second name are different. She not being the gossipy type, just informed me matter of fact that his actual parents are divorced and his mom lives with the father I have met. Now this is not an extremely bad thing to happen, but I just hope that his issues are not springing from his mom's issues with his father which resulted in the divorce and what ever has happened later. He was sent back home this week for not paying the fees till now. I was happy to see the fees receipt in his hand and him back in my class. He is the one only one kid in my class who will sit and finish the math problem he was struggling with, sometimes taking additional help from me, before he opens his tiffin box during recess.

When visiting another student, I was pretty disturbed by what I saw on her foot. The left foot was disfigured with bones climbing on each other and the skin discoloured. Later while her mother was talking to me, she showed me the students snap when she was 4years old. Then the mother told me that the kid has gone under a truck a few days after that snap was taken, The leg was badly mutilated. She is still undergoing, at the age of 9, corrective surgeries and skin grafting. Her mother requested me to stop the school supervisor from harassing the kid for not wearing white shoes on PT day. She cannot wear the slim white shoes as her left foot doesn't fit in into it, or she will have to buy 2 pairs with one size bigger for the left foot.

The mother also showed me her son in the snap who was one year younger to my student, who fell from the staircase and died. I remembered thinking that the stairs were really steep while climbing them. Now she has a younger brother who is 1.5years old.

She attributed my student being behind in her studies to all these tragedies in her life. Then I told her that she should never think that her daughter is behind in her studies in anyway. She is the game master in my class and I have this poster on my wall, in which her name is permanently there. Though at the beginning of the year she could read only 7 words per minute, she is making 4 letter and 5 letter words out of bigger words like a pro in our games. She is one of those who have shown major improvement after getting individual attention. She has a black board painted on the wall of her one room house and 'mederma' written on it. She has told me that she has seen it on TV and that's what she will be using.

After one week in class I realised that a student who is repeating 4th standard is an above average student. During the parent-teacher meeting, I mentioned this to his mother. She told me that her husband passed away last year and she has a lot of trouble with her in-laws and they were shifting around a lot of places last year. This has actually affected the kids' studies. After a few seconds of silence she added that her husband has committed suicide and he has burnt himself in front of the kids.