With summer in the air and vacation on your timetable, here’s a good time to indulge in some reading. Apart from all the page-turners and classics piled on your table, do dip into the work of some of the world’s most respected educational practitioners, thinkers, activists, and philosophers. Your reading list will appear soon as you begin to look for and circle the names of the authors hidden in this word box.

But the question, “what am I doing here?” is one that resonates particularly loudly at final exam time. I remember exchanging at furious pace a series of text messages with a colleague as we both tried to keep our attention (and optimism) alive through a large stack of papers. “These papers make me wonder what I was doing in class,” he wrote. And I responded, “Well, we know what we meant to do, but it’s not clear if the students quite got it!” To which he responded, “Yet we keep doing this year in and year out.” It continued in this vein for a while, until we decided the decrying of our situation wasn’t going to make the pile of papers grow any smaller, and we turned off our mobile phones.

Correcting papers always brings on mixed feelings. The questions mentioned above are certainly there, but there is also a sense of achievement and completion. There is a bit of regret that some of the young people we have come to know during the year will move on yet there is some anticipation of more interesting and challenging times in the coming year. As we come to the bottom of our pile of exam papers, we realize that it hasn’t been that bad after all – the small bursts of creativity and true understanding that we can glimpse in them do make the rest worthwhile. And we have to hope (and believe) that many of the lessons we’ve taught will come home to roost many years later, when these children turn teachers and parents themselves!

And above all, we need to pat ourselves on the back, appreciating that another year has ended and we can put away our markers and dusters for a couple of months and enjoy our summer nimbu paani in peace.

A child is a natural learner, thinker, and explorer. Our job in schools is to provide opportunities to nurture the child’s natural curiosity and materials to enhance learning.

At the pre-school and early school level children are often pre-verbal, without adequate language to express themselves efficiently. From art, children gain in creativity, psychomotor and fine motor skills, manipulative dexterity, perceptual skills and joy of finding and expressing the world around them. Integrated learning helps in building linguistic skills, encourages literary appreciation, life application in math, cultural studies, and understanding of design and technology from a very early stage. Therefore, we should begin to embrace art not as a stand-alone subject but as a way of life.

Integrating art and literature
Stories from around the world lend themselves to the creation of objects like a Japanese fan, a monkey mask, Mexican totems, or a Chinese kite. Furthermore, a design component will allow children to become problem solvers by creating a new kind of kite or fan. Folk tales are a wonderful medium for putting together literature, social studies, and art in appreciation of the linguistic and artistic traditions of a region.

Children can be invited to think of colours, shapes, or textures for a fairy story or a folk tale. Crafts like paper weaving, salt dough pottery, papier mache creations of large installations can aid imagination and build class esteem. In New Zealand, we once made an eight-foot papier-mache dragon with the children and installed it on the ceiling. Another time, a class wall-collage of the sea had children collaboratively producing a host of sea creatures including a three dimensional paper spun octopus.

The author is teacher, educational consultant, teacher trainer, champion of gifted education, and the author of the textbook series Empowering English and of Writing with Ease. She is the Founder CEO of Mindsprings, an organization that was set up to contribute positively to education and to meet the needs of bright and exceptionally intelligent children. Read more about the work Mindsprings does at www.mindsprings.in.

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Teachers are human. They need periodic nudges to remind them how powerful they are.

The demands of a regular school day often lulls them into thinking an efficient run through has been good enough. But every teaching day gone by without having inspired a child or forced them to think has been a monumental, criminal waste. It is one more day of abandonment; another 24 hours we have left them at the mercy of the Radio FM blaring its Fevicol song, the late night serial eulogizing weeping women, or a facebook update celebrating risky behaviour.

For all the bluster of India’s economic forges, equality is struggling to happen here. There is a swelling unease at the widening chasms: Indo-Pak, VIP-aam aadmi, police-citizen, traditionalist-progressive, dalit-brahmin, penthouse class-basement underclass…all brewing under the dark shadow of corruption, a hazed out bureaucracy and our dyslexic government. Watching this national hotchpotch going bad is the mushrooming middle class, nursing its heartburn and fighting down a reflux.

The regular textbook can hardly justify and limit the knowledge exchange taking place in the classroom under these circumstances. Students need help, more than at any other time in Indian history, to make sense of their environment. The Indian ionosphere is sick with toxin. There are dishonest advertisements, sexually charged songs, irresponsible messages of pornography, pressures of competition, and the constant struggle for acceptance and a dignified existence.

Parents are just about able to keep their physical nurture going in a system that will not guarantee them efficiency nor safety and certainly not any facility. That leaves the teachers with classrooms that have become the new ground zero, the only spaces with a semblance of sanctity, authority, and naivety conducive to instilling healthy beliefs. The software wiring of young minds has to happen in schools while the students are young enough to harbour an inherent sense of right and wrong, fair and unjust.

Teachers have to remind themselves often of the huge investments they are making in their students. Their children listen to them. Classes have to be told that the human reality is changing and that we need new recipes for survival. They have to be spoken to of the skewed gender ratio that is threatening peace and democracy in the nation. Explain how we are creating bare branches on family trees by killing baby girls before they are born. What are the surplus men going to do? They will live and roam in loose groups of unattached, unemployable cesspools of anger, with no stake in societal order; all the time blaming successful women for their own failures.

This generation must not grow up thinking that girls are fairy tale characters, and boys prince charmings on horseback. They need to appreciate that the two genders are real people with real problems. They will see that the roles that worked when we were a farming community no longer apply in our modern, industrialized, information driven democracy. Girls deserve permission to be as naughty as boys who in turn ought to feel free to use their tear ducts! Boys should be able to study psychology and girls should be able to join the National Defence Academy. Far more than femininity or masculinity, it is humanity that our survival depends on today.

In time, the young will grow up to realize the challenges ahead; the immutable but bitter truth that whenever a power equation is threatened, balance has to be wrested; it has never been given on a platter. For this, they have to develop an ease with discourse, debate, dissent. The current rigid hierarchical structures employed in most schools heap shame upon them. They need liberation to follow their hearts and listen to their own voices so they can grow up with a strong sense of self-esteem. It will be the modern young’s duty to contest and protest. Every word, every thought, every gesture counts. Fundamental rights for all, irrespective of caste, colour, creed, gender, status, religion are not just western values; they are universal, human values.

The human race is in a process of evolution, of evening out power. The rich have fortressed themselves, much like the proverbial ostrich. While the rest of us wait for speedy justice, accountable leaders, and a protective police force, we can embrace gender sensitization. We can change our behaviour, beginning with an empathy with our own and the other gender. It is time to examine long held beliefs and question the realities we have taken for granted.

We are creating a very close, inter- dependent and transparent world. No one can survive in this spacecraft-like claustrophobic closeness unless they are good human beings. Gender sensitization is a step in that direction. There is a call for systemic change. If we do not alter our ways, we are going to leave behind a terrifying world for our children. We owe our young the space and freedom to achieve their highest potential.

Teachers are not merely uniquely placed or wholly equipped to prevent gender becoming their students’ destinies; they in fact are the only ones in any position to do so.

The author is the Resource Centre-in-charge in the Junior Wing of Air Force BalBharati School, Delhi. She can be reached at neersing02@hotmail.com. She blogs at confessionsofanambitiousmother.blogspot.in.

I was recently at a conference in India where I heard a story about a monkey who was given the task of watering some plants while the gardener was away. To check how much water to give each plant the monkey decided to pull each one out and measure the roots. It would then give each plant an amount of water based on the length of its roots.

Over the past 18 months I’ve run courses on CCE in a number of states throughout India, from West Bengal in the East to Tamil Nadu in the South and Maharashtra in the West. In each state I’ve seen this same monkey lurking in the background. The potential danger of measuring pupils by actually disrupting their growth – but why might this be the case and can we stop it from happening?

CCE has a huge potential in India and can really be a positive way of assessing pupils. Rather than measuring just what they can produce at set times of the year, CCE can measure progress and process as well as the product. But to do this it needs to be implemented effectively.

First of all, it’s important to realize that the framework developed by the CBSE is just that – a framework. It isn’t meant to be prescriptive, it’s meant to be something that each state can adapt to suit its textbooks and perceived needs. Unfortunately, this is not always the case – and this is the first instance where I can see the monkey getting in on the act here if we aren’t careful.

The second thing to note is that the main premise behind CCE is that assessment is an integral part of the lesson and the same activities that were used for teaching/learning can be used for assessment. In fact, for the children there is no noticeable difference between the two things. And, for teachers it is possible to actually assess while the teaching is taking place. CCE does NOT mean having more tests spread throughout the year.

Developing systems that match the textbooks and the learning outcomes of these textbooks is paramount. So far, the courses I’ve been running have been closely tied to the textbooks for each of the states. I’ve worked with teacher educators (often DIET lecturers) and state primary teachers on designing a practical system for CCE. One of the key issues we’ve tried to address is how to implement CCE in large classes of over 60.

And, here again I see the shadow of the monkey lurking. Many of the state curriculum documents talk about classes being learner-centred and activity based, yet the reality is that many classes are still very teacher-centred – the rhetoric simply does not match the reality. To be honest, this is hardly the fault of the teachers as they lack both the training and the support to make the switch. CCE will work in large classes where group work and pair work are typical. It will work in a learner-centred class, but not in one where the teacher still does most of the work.

Many people involved in education in India have realized that the current exam oriented system, while good for some, is actually harming the majority. A move towards a system that is more equitable and gives every pupil a chance to show what they can do, rather than what they can’t, has got to be good. CCE certainly has this potential but teachers need support to help them implement what at first glance appears to be a complex system.

Developing tools, frameworks that actually fit the textbooks of each state and training is the only way to make sure those teachers don’t become the monkey and start pulling up the pupils to check their roots.

The author is a freelance trainer, writer and consultant based in the UK. Over the years he has worked extensively in the region on projects including assessment, materials development, teacher training and trainer training. He can be reached at adrian.tennant@ntlworld.com.

My child will be getting into regular school this year. I know the strengths and weaknesses of my child and I am also well aware that he can be demanding at times. As parents, many of us are disposed to having the teacher shoulder the entire responsibility of taking care of his/her child. We make our appearance in school primarily when we have complaints about the teacher or the school or when there are complaints about our own children. It seems to me then that we visit school only when things are going against us. How do I, as a parent, collaborate with the school and the teachers to attain the common goal that we all have in mind – of helping children learn, and guiding them toward success and a feeling of well-being? How do we make schooling a win-win situation for all concerned?

Schools, parents, and teachers will undeniably do better if they became partners in education. However, it requires time, a lot of thought, maturity, and patience to allow parents to get involved in the education of the child without giving them room to interfere in the school’s policies and administration. Most schools assume that once the parents are let into the (wrestling) ring, they will usurp the throne and misuse the power granted to them. What schools should understand is that getting parents involved in the school will help foster in the students a positive attitude towards learning, the teachers, and the school itself. Parents too will appreciate better the struggles of the institution in educating their children.

Schools can start the year by inviting parents to meet the teachers of their wards and also the parents of the other students. After all, if parents are to partner with the school, they do need to get acquainted with the teacher in an environment that is not as taxing as the PTA meeting or the report card sessions. It gives room for the teachers and the parents to appreciate one another as individuals; the parent and the teacher meet well before they have been labelled ‘strict’ or ‘boring’ (by the student) and ‘the parent of the lethargic child’ or ‘the unruly child’ by the teacher. When the meeting takes place under these positive circumstances, each is more open to understanding and listening to the other.

Once school starts functioning, parents can be posted updates about school programs or schedules via e-mail. Conversely, the school can update all this information on their website and allow parents to access it. There are many tech-savvy parents in the school who would be willing to help out on this kind of a website. Once information is passed on to them, it would be their responsibility to upload it. In schools where computers are still only heard of but not seen, students could be asked to note the necessary information in their journals. Parents should be told at the initial informal meeting that it is mandatory on their part to read their ward’s journals every day so that there are no gaps in communication. Many schools already have such a system in place but it proves to be ineffective because parents shrug their shoulders and attribute the negligence to forgetfulness!

Schools could allow for parents to participate in some of their activities. There may be parents who have expertise in a particular field. They could be invited to give presentations both to the teachers and the students. Parents who specialize in arts and crafts could help with the posters and artwork for the school. Again, this kind of ‘volunteering’ should be left to the parents and should never be in the guise of even mild arm-twisting because it then works against the cause of collaboration and partnership! If one of the parents owns a small store, the pre-primary children could have a trip to the store and learn about what goes on in a store and how much work the person in the store has to do so that the customers can buy their chocolates! Such real-life situations are more stimulating than reading about ‘Our helpers’ in the social studies book.

When parents are genuinely involved in the school and are passionate about the educational institution, it becomes a little awkward for them to allow their child to ‘bunk’ school because it happens to be his/her birthday or because a grandparent has come to visit. The school then becomes as much a home to the parent as their own home. When all communication channels between the teachers and the parents are more transparent and open, then students too cannot claim that they do not like a subject because of the teacher, for here the parent is acquainted with the teacher and will have the opportunity to talk to the teacher about the reasons for the child shying away from the subject. Communication barriers need to be broken down both by the parents and the teachers so that teachers can do their jobs better and parents can continue to support their children at home in order to achieve better academic standards and life skills. Staying in touch with the teacher helps motivate the students, and by opening up to one another, the two teams also get different perspectives about the same problem or situation and are therefore able to handle or solve it in a better fashion.

We may not arrive at the picture-perfect situation, but when we strive towards attaining more for our children by doing that extra bit, we are all richer… the school because of the satisfaction it gets in having a more involved set of parents and therefore a more involved set of students; the teachers because their job is easier since it is also carried on at home, and the parents because they find that they are able to contribute towards their child’s education not just by paying for it but by staying linked in with the providers of that education. And of course the children also learn to appreciate how different forces come together with a common goal… their own personal growth.

The author is a teacher educator and language trainer based in Chennai. She can be reached at manaswinisridhar@gmail.com.

The department of English in Seethalakshmi Ramaswami College, Trichy, Tamil Nadu, is running a major research project sponsored by the University Grants Commission, Delhi. The objective of this project is to educate teachers to identify cognitive and linguistic learning difficulties in high school classes and train these children in the mainstream without isolating them and labelling them as deficient learners. This perception of ours matches with a general, non diagnostic term in the learning disability literature which analyzes difficulties experienced by children in developing skills in listening, speaking, reading, writing, reasoning, and mathematics. We identified some schools with limited learning-teaching resources. We then broke down our goal into manageable objectives.

Objectives of the project

1. Addressing the teachers to improve their involvement and motivation.
2. Meeting the students to find the reasons for their non performance.
3. Writing instructional modules for teachers to increase their awareness of learners’ problems.
4. Including learner training tasks in the same modules.
5. Field testing these tasks.
6. Providing the teachers and learners with more instructional materials as the situation demands.

Our project team is a real fire fighting team with six senior teachers, four junior teachers and five post graduate students. Apart from these permanent members, we have some learning exercise writers from among the undergraduate students who write interesting materials for the edification of high school students. This project can be looked at as a four-tier activity in which we train ourselves and our students who in turn train the teachers and students in the high school.

The teachers in high schools with limited resources at their disposal often look forward to having a team from a college provide their children with adequate reading and writing experience. The teachers in such schools are too few in number and they have limited facilities. One such government approved school very near our college welcomed us when we wanted to conduct a survey of reading and writing difficulties of the learners. The school is called a middle school and a little space divides the classes. We were really disturbed by the packed hall where children from class 1 to class 8 live a kind of community life with only some placards to show that they belong to different grades. Apart from the head teacher there were five other teachers whose main responsibility was to prevent the children from fighting with one another.

The school exists because of the all out efforts of the head teacher who brings her wards to school from the villages around river Cauvery near Trichy. She goes to these villages, counsels parents and arranges for the children’s commute. Several autos ply between the school and the children’s homes. The head teacher will rest in peace only after she packs them off in hired autos after the school is over. The head teacher somehow manages the expenses with the special grants given by the government.

Another reason why parents send their wards to this school is the midday meal scheme. With inadequate facilities, the teachers and head teacher supervise the preparation of food near a big gutter under unhygienic conditions. There is only one reluctant cook who refuses to follow instructions. When the cook absents herself the team of teachers does the cooking! Apart from supervision, the teachers have to serve food and maintain discipline while the children eat.

Anyone can imagine the drain of energy that all these activities would entail. No wonder that the teachers become work shy when it comes to teaching and learning. The project team discovered soon that the majority of the children could not read any written script, neither English nor the vernacular language, Tamil.

The textbooks used by the school are good and the college team was wondering why the experience provided by the textbooks did not help the students read and write with ease. There were other schools we visited as part of the project work, where we came across better facilities and teachers who were in control of the situation. Therefore, we decided to lend our increased support to this particular school in improving the children’s capacity to read and write.

Our business was then to motivate the reading teacher.

Motivating the teachers
Teachers must be reading something non-stop. The qualities of a reading teacher were discussed in our first informal meeting.

1. The reading teacher who teaches languages under difficult conditions should always be ready to toil with learners who come from primary schools without an ability to discriminate between sounds and letters both in the vernacular language (Tamil) and English.
2. They must be ready to work around the spelling system of the two languages.
3. It is not enough if we talk about the phonic method or look and say method. We must see that the children are able to identify letters and match them with the sounds.
4. The teachers must take to class interesting reading materials even if they are slightly above their present difficulty level.
5. The reading teacher must be aware of the fact that though she can only train a group of learners it is only the individual learners who can be trained according to her present ability level.
6. The teacher must convince herself that it is not an easy task to train individuals. Each child requires a different strategy.
7. The teacher must accept that in any chorus reading session children depend on their rote memory and repeat what the teacher says with out really identifying the letters.
8. Knowledge of the individual student’s family background will help in shaping the teacher’s approach to the learner’s reading and writing ability. When the teacher knows that there is no one to help the child at home she will become more empathetic to the learner.
9. The college team identified some instructions in English which matched the teachers’ job of monitoring the eating routine. The teachers were instructed to use these routine expressions.

The teachers have been taught to get rid of negative statements from their discussions (Nothing can be taught in the school.) (Teachers have time only to address problems associated with the midday meal.) (The school requires adequate number of teachers.) (The children are not motivated.) Gradually, the project team pulled the teachers through their everyday difficulties and turned their attention towards the non-performance of the students. The teachers were assigned reading tasks and they in turn culled out materials for their children to learn. The teachers were given the following tasks.

Teacher task
Take a pen, paper, and a watch. Copy down the following text using the opposite hand to which you usually write with. You should complete the task within two minutes.

Hair fall is normal but there has to be sufficient growth of new hair too. What causes thinning hair and receding hairline is the lack of balance between hair fall and hair growth. The major reason for this imbalance is the poor health of the hair follicles.

Rationale: Did you find the exercise difficult? Our ideas on teaching are socially and culturally conditioned. We cherish negative attitudes because of insufficient knowledge. The difficulty that you experienced while doing the above exercise is exactly what a dyslexic child experiences while reading and writing.

The teachers were made to understand that dyslexic children have the following difficulties

• organizing work related to reading and writing
• comprehending meaning
• experiencing left – right confusion
• making kinetic reversals of letters b-d or as in flim for film
• writing shabbily with jerky irregular strokes
• forming letters in a poor, uneven fashion
• finding it difficult to recall the sequence of letters in a word

These dyslexic children were found in all the classes in the random survey we conducted in the school. Because of the complex etiology of the teaching-learning situation we found it difficult to isolate dyslexic children from others who were experiencing difficulties in learning owing to their background and teacher neglect.

Attitudinal change
In the school under discussion right now, there is a change in the teachers’ attitude towards their children’s proficiency in reading. They look forward to the project team’s arrival. Some of the sessions are with the students and they welcome teaching sessions given by our young teachers and post graduate students in the project team. The head teacher vouches that the project team is responsible for the attitudinal change in the teachers’ approach towards reading and writing instruction. The students in our team are particularly happy that they could get around the difficulties in the school to mount a useful program. This again is a training opportunity for them. This is an opportunity for them to get hands-on experience about learning and teaching in a real world situation.

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References

1. Children with Mental Retardation and Associated disabilities, DSE Manual, Rehabilitation Council of India.
2. Onita Nakra, Children and Learning difficulties, Allied publishers, New Delhi.

The author teaches English at Seethalakshmi Ramaswami College, Tirchy. She can be reached at ushaaims@gmail.com.

Last month, we saw spectacular examples of different kinds of reactions. Not all reactions are so colourful or exciting, but many are easy to do and helpful for students when writing out equations.

Chemistry textbooks give examples of reactions and also use the examples to explain the differences between physical and chemical changes, and mixtures and compounds.

The usual example uses iron powder and sulfur. Just mixed together, they can easily be separated and the books go on to state – ‘on heating the mixture, there is a glow and the compound iron sulfide is formed, the properties of which are very different from those of the mixture.’ This process appears very simple and most books have good illustrations. But, it is very difficult to get iron powder and sulfur to react. Iron powder gets rusted very easily and so nothing much happens and what is meant to be a very illustrative example just flops! What are the other examples that can be used?

The author works with Centre for Learning, Bengaluru. She can be reached at yasmin.cfl@gmail.com.

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There was a long queue at the gates – one was marked Heaven, the other Hell. St. Peter, at the gates, asked each entrant the same question – “How are you feeling?”
Based on their answer people were being sent either to Hell or to Heaven.
John was confused. What should he say? Maybe if he says he is happy he will be sent to Heaven. Or will it be the other way round? Should he say he feels sad?
When his turn came, John finally blurted out, “I am confused.”
St Peter immediately replied, “Come, please join me. I too am confused.”

The above story, to me, is a whimsical take on the universality of emotions. When I was a child I was told that I was not supposed to feel or express some emotions. Every time I cried, as a child, I was asked to stop crying and smile instead.

Is that how it should be? Shouldn’t it be alright for me to cry if I am hurt or feeling sad?

Asked not to cry, I began hiding my tears. I still cried but I wouldn’t let others know. It got to a point where I even became ashamed of crying. Finally, I stopped crying altogether, even when I felt really sad. Now, after years of stifling my emotions, when I want to vent my feelings I find that I cannot – I have forgotten how to cry. Unfortunately, I have not learnt any other ways of expressing my feelings either.

The authors are part of a Bengaluru based child development and parent/teacher training center: www.amable.in.

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