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Teaching
in India Somewhere in the blurry past I must have made the decision to teach in India, but thinking back I can't quite remember how it came about. I think it must have been one of my eight year olds who persuaded me, with the enthusiasm of small people completely devoid of any actual idea about what ‘Going to India’ really means. I threatened them with the heat, humidity, monsoon season, nasty intestinal episodes, biting insects, over-enthusiastic stallholders and the strong aroma of elephant dung, but somehow they remained resolutely undeterred. The school in which I taught is called BLD Public School. It serves children from nursery age to 15 years old. The outside was very orange. Everyone was friendly, from the gate guard to the Principal and her son, who also worked there. There were three storeys. The recently refurbished ground floor was well decorated, with bright murals on the walls. The nursery rooms themselves were full of new toys and there seemed to be enough teachers to go around. The first floor had younger children - up to Year 4 (age 8) - and the second floor had kids up to Year 10. These floors, I was told, were due to be refurbished soon. They looked very shabby, with damaged paintwork and ageing infrastructure. Each classroom had a set of metal framed desks and a blackboard (or piece of black-painted wall). There was nothing else except a ceiling fan. The rooms did not have lighting. Chalk was fetched, if needed. Each ‘year’ consisted of about 25 children who remained in the same classroom all day. The teachers went from place to place. Year 10 drew the short straw in this arrangement, as their ‘classroom’ was a partitioned area at the head of the stairs. It was so cramped that the desks touched the front wall and the teacher unavoidably blocked the view of the board by standing in the only available spot between the two desks at the front. Teaching
in India seems very different from the UK. I am used to teaching practically,
being a science teacher. I like my lessons to be hands on, practical lessons,
with the children actively participating in their learning - drawing,
writing and making things. The Indian method, by contrast, is much more
bookish. They read the textbook, then they might do some questions from
it, if they have something to write on and something to write with. Not
all the students do, though. Some students share a notebook, others just
come to listen. Additionally,
for historical reasons, English is seen as ‘better’ than Hindi
or Tagalog or Gujurati, despite the fact that this is what the children
speak primarily. All this bookish learning is done in English. How much
is understood, and how much memorised and regurgitated when asked, is
debatable. The first day I went there, the monsoon had been the night before. The roads were flooded and we had to wade (knee deep) the last few hundred yards. ‘You can teach Class VII,’ said the co-ordinator as she showed me to their room. ‘What should I teach today?’ I asked, thinking it was a reasonable question. ‘Anything you like,’ came the answer as she left. I was now alone with a world of possibilities, a sea of curious faces and a jabbering of questions from the children. Maybe that approach works if all you do is open the textbook and read, but my Ofsted conditioning wouldn’t let me do it. I wonder how the just-out-of-college backpacker, clutching a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificate, would cope. Even as a seasoned teacher, that baptism of fire was daunting. Fortunately
I had some photos of my school and the kids to break the ice. By the time
I taught them the following day, I had some ideas for lessons, so it was
easier. I suspect half the TEFL backpackers would be heading for the hills
after the first day, but we hung in there. The kids were lovely, and I
quite enjoyed it. They were eager and well-mannered, which makes a pleasant
change from some of the children I teach at home! At various points the music would start up and the teenagers would all start dancing in the pool by the arena. It was nice to see them unselfconsciously dancing to Indian pop, knee-deep in water, being sprayed with jets from a plastic palm tree, as if they were in Malibu or somewhere. At home I swim all the time and both Donny and Mel can swim too. Some of the girls noted this and asked if we could teach them to swim as well. Our outing turned into an impromptu swimming lesson. Another child said she was getting the hang of swimming, as she had now been to this place twice in her life. There was more dancing, singing, compering and a round of musical chairs. It was won by one of the teachers, because the students were too polite to boot her out of the way to get the vacant seats. Then it was time to leave. We all received a gift of a pen from the Fun and Food Village. All the adults also received a plastic plate with the logo on. The bus ride home was picnic time. All the kids got out their rice, chapattis, spiced dahl and so on. The teachers handed out crisps and cups of Coke (disastrously messy on a jolting bus). When we got back I discovered that we were all sunburnt again, adding to the area of skin that I'd previously damaged. Next day I read in the paper that it had been ‘unseasonably cold’ at a mere 30C, a whopping four degrees below average. It is no wonder we burnt, yet not surprising that I thought we wouldn't. It is amazing how fast you acclimatise. I was now peeling as if I had a dodgy skin disease, except for my blistered shoulder which looked like it had the skin of a shiny red rhino. On another
day, our host and volunteer co-ordinator, Vishy, suggested we spent some
time at the all-girls orphanage over in Sector 15. This is mostly a well
off neighbourhood so the orphanage is surrounded by large houses and spacious
parks. There are 85 girls there, some with extended family in the city,
others with sponsors and some with no-one but the other girls. Contact
with the outside world is kept to a minimum, so life revolves around the
orphanage. I also wonder if the kids really know how to play. Even outside the orphanage, kids start school before they are two. They are taught to hold a pen in hands that have hardly learnt to grasp. The academic cramming doesn't let up until after university, but it is all rote learning. After school classes the orphanage kids have nothing to play with, but they seem unwilling to use their imaginations instead. My kids would happily create a whole castle out of a set of stairs or a spaceship out of a bed. The orphanage girls just milled about, bored, listless and unable to alter their situation. It was heartbreaking and disturbing. It was a much deeper malaise that just having nothing to play with. They had had no-one to show them how to play. They lacked that adult attention that stimulates curiosity and wonder. They were not intellectually challenged. Do you remember the state of the Romanian orphanages after the fall of Ceaucescu? Neglected children had been tied to their cots, some for years. There was a huge rush to adopt, but this sort of abuse takes its toll on the mind. Younger children (less than two years old) readjusted and grew up mostly unaffected. Older children, however, couldn't shake off the effects of abuse and exhibited what looked like autistic spectrum disorders (though it probably has a posh name). I'm not suggesting this all-girls orphanage abuses the kids in any way. They do their best for them, but there is still a social and emotional deficit, which is leaving the children hollow, and you could feel it when you walk around. The older girls go out to a girls' high school, but are not allowed to have friends back or to visit friends' houses. They are kept away from the opposite sex and modern influences. They know nothing of drugs or politics or even how to use money. They are
lacking in life skills. From an early age they are taught that an arranged
marriage leads to happiness and a ‘love’ marriage leads to divorce.
Nearly all marriages are arranged here, and the orphanage provides this
one last service before letting the girls go. Local boys’ families
are attracted to the girls because of their assured purity and submissive
conditioning. After our visit to the orphanage, I formed a cunning plan. The school’s dining room was in a shabby state. An estate agent would have described it as ‘in need of modernisation’. Basically it hadn't been decorated in 30 years by the look of it. The paintwork and even the plaster had been eroded away by the passage of time and hundreds of small people brushing against it. I reckoned a couple of days work and a lick of paint would sort out the majority of the mess. The other
volunteers were up for it and Vishy cleared it with the woman who ran
the orphanage. We got hold of sand paper, and putty for the cracks, and
set to work, whilst a hundred brown eyes peering at us through the windows.
In the end only Alexis (a volunteer from America) was able to help me,
Mel and Donny with the work. We raised a hell of a dust sanding the flakey
bits off the walls. A painter and decorator here would develop respiratory
problems in no time if they worked in that dust and grit every day. Donny
and Mel looked like ghosts, their faces and hair coated. We left the painting until the next day for a number of reasons - the biggest of which was that we had no paint. Instead we set up an art class in the big hall. Earlier in the day we'd been down to the stationer's shop (a backstreet cavern where we could only peer at the wares across the counter which blocked the way in). For the cost of about a fiver, we got enough colouring pads and sketch books for 85 girls to be well entertained. Well, the first few kids were a bit tentative but after they got settled in and started colouring more and more joined in and the class took on a life of its own. I take back my earlier statement about the kids not being able to play. They need things to play with and someone to organise and encourage them, then they are quite capable of playing. What I'm unsure of is whether they will play with the resources they squirrelled away if there is no-one there to motivate them. I wonder if they will just hoard the pens and colours and stampers in their lockers instead of using them. We went on
a hunt for paint in the Sector 15 market. We finally ended up at Pooja
Paints, run by a pair of Sikh brothers. For five amazing minutes it was
like being in a modern hardware store. We could choose colour from a catalogue
and the paint machine mixed it for us. Donny and Mel chose "Peach
Passion" for the walls, which went nicely with the brown and orange
tiles already there. Some of the girls came in. Manju, who was 15 years old, said : ‘Can you help me?’ I said: ‘Do you mean “Can you help me?”’ She looked understandably confused and I could feel the conversation slipping into the surreal, so I handed her a roller and showed her how to put paint on it. She got the hang of it really quickly and only hit the ceiling the first couple of times; she was really careful. After that I had so many girls slapping paint, on with more enthusiasm than accuracy, that I had to employ the ones without brushes as splatter-removers. I gave them a bit of rag each to rub off the excess paint around door frames, tiles and off the floor. It was a hive of industry. I think it is hugely important for the girls to have contributed to their own environment - to 'own' the process of improvement. We went back
the next day to finish off the last bits. Alexis started painting the
door a deep orange with gloss as thin as water. It got everywhere. I drew
round all the kids’ hands with markers to make a snake across the
back wall. I wrote their names in each one. It looked really good. I finally
feel I have achieved something here - maybe, just maybe, for a brief snapshot
in time we have made a small difference to these girls' lives. After we returned from India, we decided to raise funds for the orphanage. I had spoken with Vishy and he listed other items needed, such as air conditioning units, clothing and sheets. Even then, this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what they really need. The list of essentials Vishy gave me would cost around £1200. Subsequently, my kids' school had an auction of the harvest festival produce and this has raised £368. By February 2009, Alexis raised over £2000 with a fund-raising evening, which kitted the orphanage out well for the moment. My kids' school raised another £50 and the school I work for raised £50. The £100 has gone to buy a computer for a group which treats people with leprosy. First published in VISA 87 (Oct 2009) |