When in doubt, ignore the operation symbol, add all the numbers in the equation and pray!

I have been convinced for a long time now that the children in the schools I visit are having a hard time with the three most basic Rs (Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic). When asked by the schools to help them conduct remedial lessons, the basics were definitely high on my list of priorities. Imagine my surprise when I was informed that remedial lessons had to act merely as supplements to their existing class-work. Schools were disinterested in creating opportunities for students to develop these basic skills and were far more interested in having children pass their exams.

To help schools understand the gravity of the situation and also to collect some pre-remedial, base-line data, we created short tests for both Math and English to check students' understanding of basic concepts. Despite our lack of faith in students' grasp of basic concepts, we thought the tests were designed to take no more than ten minutes apiece. Imagine our surprise when students in fifth grade took three times as long to write 4 simple sentences and underline some parts of speech. They took even longer to solve problems which involved simple operations.

The question they puzzled over for the longest time was an equation that looked like this: 4 + 5 - 2 + 5 = ___ + 5. Answers ranged from 4 + 5 - 2 + 5 = 16 + 5 (totaling up all the numbers on the left, ignoring the signs) to 4 + 5 - 2 + 5 = 4 + 5 (copy the first number and hope that it is a pattern). This question should not have been the source of so much consternation to ten year olds. If children understood what it meant for two sides of an equation to be equal, these sums would be as simple as pie. Alarming as these solutions are, at least it is possible to isolate the problem and misconceptions and find strategies to address them.

It is much more difficult when a ten year old, who is asked to make a sentence with the past tense of run, writes, "I run the very fastle." When asked if he wanted to correct the sentence, the child confidently shook his head and handed in the paper. These English medium schools are not equipped for ESL (English as a Second Language) learners, nor are the teachers fluent enough to detect these errors when they are made in written or spoken language. It is impossible to know where to begin to sort this problem out but we are trying to create plans that address the needs of the teachers and the students in the quickest possible way.

It is difficult knowing that we only have a few more months to put these interventions in place, partly because we know that it will take more than a few months for the results to be tangible, but mostly our worry is that if teachers are not yet able to identify these problems, it is unclear how they will be able to tackle them on their own when they are no longer supported.

From sterile, nut-free environments to sensory overload.

It has been six months since I began working in Bangalore and started writing this blog. If these last few months have taught me nothing else, they have shown me how adaptable and resilient the human spirit can be.

Sometimes, I think back to the day when I first walked into one of "my" schools. I remember getting out of the auto, walking across the road and looking around to find the school. I peered at the names of the stores, most of which had badly peeling store fronts and poorly lettered signs, and none of them proclaimed the existence of the singularly unfortunately named school that we were trying to visit. P1, my now boss, was trying to give me a dose of reality before I signed my contract and I looked at her questioningly, wondering how the elusive school was so well concealed. She smiled in answer to my questioning look, and led the way down a narrow alley.

The alley took us between two dingy buildings, past a one-room house carved out of the back of a building. The house had barely enough room for a single cot and a chair and there were people spilling out of it. In front of the house some chickens and a rooster ran loose. There was a dead rat lying in a puddle of water and garbage just piling up against the wall of the building next door. I looked beyond the rat and the garbage to a door set unassumingly into the side of a narrow, multi-storey building. That was the school? I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry.

I had, ostensibly, come back home to work and try and use my fine Harvard (and Mount Holyoke) education to set things right! I realize now that I had not a clue and was completely unprepared! My previous teaching experiences involved model pre-schools associated with great research departments in prestigious colleges and universities on the East (privileged) Coast of the United States. The adult-child ratios were dream-worthy, the funds available to create teaching-aids seemingly never ran out, and the parents had any amount of disposable time and income to spend on their three-year old prodigies (or so it seemed!). To go from saying, "Now it is time for you to put away this wonderful, 6 ft square, block structure that you have been working on for two hours and go to circle" to having teachers "afraid children with their eyes" and say, "YAH, put yer books away and go for nature's call!" was a huge change to say the least.

Compare my previous reality to that first school visit and you will understand why the approach to the building nearly had me running for the hills. I was not sure what to expect, but I was quite certain that given the external conditions, there would not be much teaching and learning occurring within the building. Imagine my surprise when I walked into the school and met a firm, kind head-mistress who had once been a teacher, leaving her classroom only to open this school. Her school functioned like clock-work and since that very first day, some of my favorite observed classes occurred in that school. The children are bright, eager and motivated, and despite all odds, are succeeding in a school system designed to make them fail.

It just goes to show, doesn't it? One really cannot ever judge a book by the cover!

Spare the rod and spoil the child? Yes, please!

My resolution for 2011 was to write more frequently. Given that it is the 6th of January and this is my first post, it does not augur well for frequency but I shall try.

There have been several reasons for my posting less since September (ok! Fine! not posting at all) but the foremost was the fact that I was just overwhelmed. At first, my experiences in schools were just hilarious anecdotes to share. Then I realized that this morass of disorder was going to be my reality, at least for the forseeable future, and I was too exhausted by the thought to write about it. Now, almost six months in, I am finally getting to the point where I can accept the mire, do the work and still analyze the situation (somewhat) objectively. Well, at least most of the time.

Some things still catch me off-guard though. For instance, the other day I walked into a school to see the newly hired co-ordinator (a glorified term for prison warden) shouting indiscriminately at everyone - adult and child - around her, and finally smacking a child sharply on the arm. After the incident, I had a tete-a-tete with her and asked for an explanation of her conduct. She contradicted herself several times during her convoluted explanation which involved a reference to the Headmaster's disapproval of corporal punishment, her own conviction that one must not spare the rod, and her assertion that she never uses a stick and was only seen carrying one when she had taken it off the other teachers. My personal favourite was that in her overzealous effort to prove her innocence, she claimed that she does not hit children simply because it does not work. Also, in answer to one of my questions, she proudly stated that she had never once hit a child. (Rest assured that despite her delusions, the appropriate authorities were informed of the situation and have since taken "positive disciplining" action against said prison warden.)

What was also interesting was that I, a young, relatively inexperienced person was able to make a teacher with 30+ years of teaching experience behave like a cornered rat with a single question.

A few days later I was in the Headmistress' office at a different school when a parent came to talk to her. The parent was distraught because the child was performing poorly at school and tearfully begged the Headmistress to have the child slapped if his poor performance at school continued. Aside from the millions of problems with using corporal punishment as a sanction for academic problems, what struck me was that a parent was pleading with the Headmistress - not for lenience but for harsher punishment.

I was reminded of Freire's theory about the Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Paraphrasing loosely, his theory suggests that when an oppressed person has access to power he becomes more tyrannical than the oppressor because his understanding of power cannot be separated from the oppressor-oppressed paradigm.

While Freire's theory is illuminating in its simplicity, it is incredibly frustrating to watch this paradigm being played out daily in the lives of these children, especially given that they are far more earnest, sincere and motivated to learn than many of their wealthier, more-empowered contemporaries.

You say there's a lesson you want to teach. Well here I am, Baby! Practice what you preach!

It has been a while since my last post. I could make any number of excuses about my silence in blogosphere, but really the cause has been a hefty reality check. When I signed up for this project I don't think I quite realized how deep we would have to dig before we could begin to make the slightest dent (to use people's favorite word to describe the impact we're making).

Over the last few months it became evident that we had no way to measure how much the teachers in our program had changed since the beginning of the project as no substantial pre-data was collected. Furthermore, what pre-data exists was collected to measure teaching-learning behaviors and not actual content knowledge. So, in an attempt to understand the type of differences our trainings make in content knowledge as well as in teacher behavior, we decided to ask teachers to take the same test we gave the children to gather base-line data.

Guess what? The teachers made the same mistakes as the children in papers geared for children in grades 3 and 5.

Word for word. Misunderstanding for misunderstanding!

They did not read the questions, nor did they pay attention to the data provided. They simply grasped one or two phrases, created their own understanding of the question and answered the questions as they chose. Notable among the disasters was a sixth grade math teacher's inability to solve a problem which involved performing two basic mathematical operations (multiplication then addition) -- not because she couldn't but because she didn't read the question.

That teachers are not subject-matter experts is perhaps forgivable, but that they cannot answer a paper set for children in the classes they teach is distressing. The problem is that assuming subject-matter expertise, most people choose to train teachers on classroom management issues. However, one might argue that until content knowledge exists, no behavioral change on the part of the teacher will make any difference in levels of student learning.

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

The amount of time between posts seems to be getting longer and longer. The problem is not that there is any dearth of things to write about. In fact, it is quite the contrary. I have witnessed any number of blog-worthy things, but I am trying to stay upbeat in my outlook and post at least as many positive things as frustrating events. However, one incident just could not go undocumented.

The other day, a teacher was asked how she managed her classroom. The teacher said in a confidential whisper, "Ma'am, before we used to really beat the children but parents started objecting and we were not getting new admissions so the management asked us to stop." The facilitator, trying to keep the shock out of her voice said, "Well, so how do you manage your classrooms now?" The teacher responded brightly, "Now I am just afraiding the childrens with my eyes."

And that, ladies and gentlemen, sums up the last few weeks in a single sentence. How do you help teachers unlearn so many years of considering discipline to be pindrop-silence in the classroom and learning to be notes written without any mistakes? How do you show teachers the difference between children who are authentically constructing knowledge and those who are "blindly" copying notes down from their peers?

Our answer to this has been setting, "ground rules" or a set of expectations that children and teachers negotiate and agree upon. Usually these include, "No mass answers" and "When others talk I will listen." However, ground rules can only be implemented by a teacher who believes that children are not, in fact, malevolent little imps who are out to destroy the tone of the classroom.

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.

Sometimes I wonder about professional development for teachers. We gear professional development toward people who have a shared understanding of many things. We assume some amount of prior knowledge and exposure and a certain command over the English language. Our assumptions fall by the wayside, however, when we realize that English itself is indecipherable to these teachers and their struggle is compounded by the fact that the concepts they must teach are uncertain in their own mind.

The simplest act of listing objectives for a lesson suggests enough command over the subject matter to get to the crux of the material. Furthermore, it assumes sufficient fluency in English to articulate ideas in simple, grammatically correct sentences. Finally, ensuring that the flow of a class is smooth implies that the teacher herself must be able to see the connection between several parts of a unit. I found this entire skill-set missing in the majority of the teachers with whom I have dealt.

But, what is worse is the fact that when inputs are given in these or any other area, they tend to pick up parts without understanding the connection to the whole. For instance, the use of manipulatives in mathematics is seen as a motivational/fun exercise but not as an actual method to teach concepts. They don’t think about the inputs that we’re giving them critically, so nothing we’ve told them or have done has ever been questioned. And, since they don’t know how to learn except to memorize and reproduce what they understand, how can we expect them to teach their students any differently. Thus, despite exposure to new teaching methodology and any amount of information on teacher demeanor, nothing will really change until the way teachers engage with the material changes.

My constant struggle is how we can use professional development as a medium to bridge the gaps that we see while simultaneously working on teachers' own attitude towards learning. Nobody has ever given them permission to question material and construct their own understanding of it, so even when we are giving them bite-sized pieces of professional development, their teaching will not change until they themselves learn authentically. But how does one help them unlearn what they have practiced for 30 years?

While I realize that teachers face many constraints and are working as hard as they can despite them, it seems terribly unfair that people who are so ineffective are trusted with such important work. Part of me realizes that within the range of their limited resources and abilities, these teachers are doing the very best that they can. But mostly I'm just angry that we, as a society, have directly or indirectly decided that this is all our children deserve.

Those who can, teach while those who can't do something less vital.

I took a little blog-hiatus – partly because things have been somewhat exhausting lately but also because I was having trouble finding something positive to write about and I realized that I was starting to sound a little negative and frustrated. Honestly, it is frustrating to watch teachers struggle with fourth grade math while simultaneously butchering the English language. However, there are some golden moments that make up for any amount of frustration and I have consciously decided to write more about those.

Last Friday I walked into a first grade classroom and neither the teacher nor her students noticed I was there; the first sign of a wonderful class. I sat on a bench with the students and slowly became mesmerized as a young teacher navigated a vocabulary heavy lesson with a twinkle in her eye and laughter in her voice. It was a perfect give and take born out of a deep and abiding understanding between the teacher and her students. She trusted them enough to teach them authentically and they trusted her enough to let her see their vulnerable little selves. It struck me that this was teaching in its best and most elemental form, where the relationship between the teacher and the student creates a medium through which information can be exchanged.

I realize I am waxing lyrical but these moments do not occur very often in the overcrowded, stuffy classrooms in which I spend the majority of my time. So, I ws fully conscious of the rarity of the situation. Despite the constraints of time, linguistic ability and space, this young woman found a way to make every single one of her charges feel seen, heard and respected. And, because they felt so deeply valued, the children were willing to take chances, make mistakes and reach new heights of understanding. More important than that the information in that single class is the fact that she is nurturing a fearless and ferocious intellectual engagement with new information which is invaluable and is something only the best among us can rouse in young children.

Why is this not our expectation of schools and teachers and why does this not factor into how we compensate them? Why have we reduced school to a place where time is wasted reading poorly written text and marking it up, writing dictated notes and testing unimportant and uninteresting material when the bulk of the school day can and should be spent creating such magic in the classroom? Why are we settling and allowing our children to settle for anything less?