Teaching is fun

As I work for EFF, I get to interact with people from different fields: teachers, policy makers, social workers, educators and many others. Recently we had a meeting with Sheel Parekh of Spark-India. She writes, among other things, story books for children with the intention of making them interesting. Now, EFF is also working with the same intention, to make education interesting. We want children to get up each morning eager to go to school. But I had never yet understood how one actually does that.

I asked Sheel, “how do you know what you write will be interesting for children? Do child psychology books help?” In her soft, yet assertive voice, she said “you have to touch to feel the pulse”. That morning I decided to become a teacher.

It’s been a week now since I started teaching English to the 7^th graders of the Red Cross Girls High School. It is an English medium school, with classes from I to X

Teaching children is indeed a challenging task. I’m burdened with a sense of responsibility. Every night just before I go to bed, I prepare my teaching plan. I visualize the girls, just so eager to learn. To make things a little different and interesting for them, I have divided the girls into three different groups. (They had to name their group on their own). So in my class, they sit group wise. For every lesson I teach, we have a quiz just to make sure, they remember what they have learnt.

I keep a “teacher’s journal” and I make a note of my observations and feelings in it. Here are a few things I have noted in my journal so far:

• Most girls can hardly read their textbooks.
  
  
• They do not understand most of the English words.
  
  
• Most of them do not have their English textbook. I found out that the government has not sanctioned textbooks yet. The rest uses old textbooks handed down from their seniors.
  
  
• Students who do not understand English and like to refrain participating in the classroom interaction sit on the last benches.
  
  
• But, they all want to learn. They even wanted me to sing a song and tell them a story about my country. I had to remind them that I belong to this country and was one of them.

I want them to learn to read, write and understand, and speak English, in that order. I was talking to my colleague Sridhar, the other day on how I could encourage and motivate them to read. He suggested that I do something unconventional, like buying them a copy of tinkle each or any other comic that might interest them. My take was, even if they read, they won’t understand. He said, “There are illustrations along with words, which would make it easier for them to understand. And since the illustrations look interesting they will make an effort to read and understand.”

I decided that this was worth a try. After all, as a child it was my favorite comic too. So in my next class, I asked if anyone read tinkle comics. One of the girls had 4 copies right there!

When I asked the rest of the class if anyone else was interested in reading the comics, all 40 of them raised their hands, including the owner.

Over the weekend, I plan to buy them some comics and the English reader textbook for the students.

I've started liking Monday mornings :)