The ride was okay at first. Peggy and I shared a bench, we could bare the heat, and we had ample room to adjust our bodies in our feeble quest for comfort. But things went downhill when a young man emitting a rich sour stench sat next to me. Boy, was he radiant with heat and malodors! He spread out and got comfortable with his body and limbs close. He sat closer to me than my girlfriend! I was relieved when he reached his destination, but haplessly I reluctantly received yet another stinky person, this time an old man emitting a different olfactory killing concoction. He used me as a back rest. I looked at Peggy who comfortably napped by the window, with the fresh air caught in the breeze acting as a protective field, and smiled.
Another week volunteering. Working with the slum children in the morning with Memta was different from our previous work with the Raj’s. The supplementary schooling is less structured and formal. We don’t use a curriculum but rather a lot of the time we improvise, making up simple arithmetic or English exercises that are tailored for the individual student. Our students range in age from toddlers to teenagers. There are two adult female students whom I don’t teach as their strict Muslim father doesn’t allow men in the house. Peggy works with them sometimes.
Volunteers Mike and Peggy at the morning project, the girl in yellow is Rubina, a sweet but naughty young girl with a lot of charisma. She captured all our hearts. Under the devilish grins, buried in her mocking remarks, lay one of the biggest hearts I've seen in a kid.
We also work in an afternoon project. It is also a supplementary education program designed particularly to provide the opportunity for poor children to get formal education. The teachers use English and math books, which give structure. But, the session only is an hour or two a day and school is off on rainy days because we work outside. If it were up to me, I’d keep the children longer and focus more on English than math. In India, I heard that if there’s one way out of the slums, out of abject poverty, it’s English fluency and knowledge of how to use computers, in descending order of importance. Without computers in the classroom, my objective was teaching English.
However, my lack of skill in Hindi proved to be a major hindrance. It is so difficult to explain a concept such as a pronoun or adjective or verb without spoken or written language. I could try acting out a lesson, for example, by pointing to a kid and saying, “you”, then pointing at myself and saying, “me”, but imagine being the Indian kid – would you even have an inkling that I’m trying to explain that those words can substitute for your name and my name? Of course, some words are simple to teach, such as “red”, for which pointing at a red shirt would do, or “clap”, for which clapping would do. But, obviously, one would still be severely limited. Perhaps there are better strategies for teaching English without knowledge of the student’s native language – if so, I should have done my research before volunteering. Once again, hindsight is 20/20.
Teaching arithmetic, I encountered problems I didn’t expect. For example, at the Morning Star School, I tried to teach the 3rd and 4th graders negative numbers. So, I drew a number line with zero in the center like this:
_____________________________
-3 -2 -1 0 +1 +2 +3
They started copying my drawing. I tried to tell them, “listen, don’t copy”, but needless to say, it was difficult without Hindi. So I tried another strategy. I drew mangoes on the board on the number line, with the “negative fruits” crossed out, but maybe I confused them more. Then, I thought of a few ways to use money to demonstrate the concept, but guessed that idea wouldn’t work well in practice. I gave up. Anyway, Soba told me later that I wasn’t supposed to teach them negative numbers. Why? I don’t know. Maybe she expected that they wouldn’t need to understand the concept in their future work.
No comments:
Post a Comment