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?

All for the lack of tuppence, patiently, cautiously, trustingly invested

On Saturday, we had an English tutorial for Grade 1-3 teachers. We planned carefully for a very long time, creating a flowline that included not just the actual lesson that would be taught to children but also several opportunities for reflection. The last hour of the workshop was intended to take the form of a planning session, so teachers could practice what they had just been exposed to. It turns out, after a year and a half of training, the teachers were unable to define objectives for a lesson, much less connect objectives with activities and opportunities for practice which might then be assessed. Furthermore, today when I walked into a school to co-plan with some teachers, they kept asking me if their plans were "correct" so that they could copy their "rough work" into their "fair copies". They seemed shocked when I told them that they were the authorities on their own classrooms and I could merely suggest options but that they had to determine what would work based on their unique classroom dynamics.

Is this obsession with the "right" answer so ingrained that we forget that there is so much to be gained from arriving at a relevant if unconventional answer? We are so scared to construct conclusions from available facts if it is not sanctioned by a higher authority that we prefer to try to apply a prepackaged solution, even if it does not fit! When does this happen to us?

Contrast this "right answer" attitude with that of a six-year old, the son of one of the teachers' attending the Saturday tutorial, who entertained himself with nothing but some shoes and scraps of plywood while waiting for his mother. He spent two full hours tessellating pairs of shoes trying to recreate the pattern on his pants. He then proceeded to build a two dimensional house using scraps of plywood. He was fully engaged in his play, exploring some very important concepts while all creating his very own learning environment. This same child will have spent the last two days in a stuffy classroom with more children than can comfortably breathe. He will have been given heinous textbooks with the most boring lessons. He will be docked points for answers not reflected in his books, never mind if he arrived at them logically and methodically. Notes, that he will have to memorize and reproduce, will be dictated and he will never once be allowed to question any part of the process. Is his environment slowly stifling his creativity? I'd say so! In two years time, this innovative young man might be one of any number of squibs, stuck in a classroom struggling with the concept of place value.

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

What do you do when you call out the number three hundred and five and a child in the third grade writes 3005? Of course, the first time one sees it, one prays that it is a simple mechanical error so one tries again and again. Eventually it becomes clear that this is a conceptual error and the child has no understanding whatsoever of place value.

Observing a class on place value in some schools is a dreary prospect and I don't blame the children for not getting very much out of it. Essentially, in the very first class of the unit, the teacher walks in, writes U, T, H on the blackboard from right to left and begins to call out numbers. In most situations, she will probably call out the number very slowly three or four times, hoping that a child who is unable to properly arrange the number the first three times will somehow be able to do it the fourth time. Explanations are inadequate and the use of probing questions to elicit logical reasoning is an unheard of technique. Concept building does not occur at all early on which makes for a pretty unsteady foundation on which to explore more complex topics.

But, from a teacher's perspective, what do you do when you are made to teach mathematics when you are most comfortable teaching English? What do you do when you are overwhelmed with the inordinate pressure of getting first and second grade students to score high marks on tests when you barely understand the material yourself, never mind understanding how best to assess students. How do you prepare a lesson plan or teaching aids when you barely have the equivalent of one class period a day to plan for your seven classes the next day? And, given all of these other constraints, how can you teach when you do not understand that problems involving arithmetic operations are not the concept, they are merely a tool to exemplify and reinforce a concept?

I wish I could say that this situation is rare and is rectified as soon as it is noticed but it is not. I struggle with this everyday because instinctively, my first thought is for the children. It is heartbreaking to walk into a classroom and watch these kids who are so desperately hungry to learn being numbed into silent boredom. However, it is equally if not more painful to watch a grown woman fumbling while teaching place value to a class of six year olds, despite having a detailed lesson plan and elaborate, albeit misused, teaching aids which took all night to prepare.

Ours not to reason why..

We, as a nation, are slowly but surely forgetting how to think. We are so bothered about finding the right answers and remembering the magic formulae, that we have forgotten how to reason and apply what we know to new situations. Schools and classrooms should be intellectually challenging spaces where students feel empowered to try things, even *shudder* if their answers are wrong. The unfortunate reality is that the intellectual environment of the classroom can only reflect the subject matter expertise and attitude of the teacher. Unfortunate because most children in India are not privileged enough to attend schools where the teachers have any training let alone subject expertise. Teachers are then only able to create environments and assessments which are products of their own limited knowledge and experience.

Take, for instance, a class on plant life taught to forty first-graders. The teacher decided to begin the lesson by asking the children to name some living things. Her intention in doing this was, no doubt, to elicit the concept that plants are living things from the children. For the most part, children volunteered conventional answers that the teacher had anticipated; one child volunteered animals, another said plants and a third said humans. All of these conventional answers were met with nods of approval. Eventually, a brave little soul with the twinkliest (yes, I am aware that that's not a word but it perfectly expresses the point) eyes in the world said, "policeman is a living thing." To which the teacher responded in the most sarcastic tone she could muster, "Policeman is a living thing for you? Who has a correct answer." She completely glossed over the, "policeman" statement, heard one or two more answers and, satisfied that the children had read her mind and given her the answers she wanted to hear, she moved on. Later, I was told that she was so surprised that a child would say that a policeman is a living thing that she did not know how to react.

There are several problems with this situation. First, factually, the child was right. A policeman, against all evidence to the contrary provided by some in the force in this country, is a living thing. Second, it is profoundly problematic that the teacher who had planned to discuss, "plants are living things" found it such a stretch to include, "policemen are living things" in her discussion. Third, those children received a short but unmistakable lesson about the value of preferred "right" answers over logically and factually correct answers. And finally, as a teacher, she is missing out on the best part of teaching young children: kids really do say the darndest things.

Please do not get the impression that I blame the teachers or that I think that all teachers are similar. I don't! I do, however, realize that teachers who teach in this manenr are products of the same problem that they are perpetuating and I am intimately familiar with the constraints that they face. I even realize that many of them are doing the very best they can. I do blame the system, though. Teachers are so underpaid that teaching is not seen as a viable career choice by many who have an appropriate amount of education or training. So we end up putting our least prepared in the most crucial and challenging positions of all, not realizing that the ramifications of their work will be visible long after the last computer program crashes. It is criminal maldistribution of our already draining human resources.

Guess you, guess me!

This morning I traveled 22km from M.G. Road to visit a school in Laggere (near Peenya) by autorickshaw. Now, those of you who know Bangalore know that this in itself is no mean feat. One generally cannot get autorickshaw drivers to go from one desirable area of town to another, let alone to a part of the Greater Bangalore Metropolitan Area of such disrepute. We lucked out, however, because someone in the office has a regular auto-man, Ramesh, who was willing to pick us up at 7:40am this morning, drive us to Peenya, arrange his day so he only drove people around Peenya and then pick us up six hours later. Twenty two km in an auto is no joke though, and Ramesh, the auto-man, was 20 mins late to start with, so by the time I reached said school I was not in a particularly live and let slide mood.

Usually, the schools I visit have no classroom space, corridors that can barely fit my hips and a central courtyard the size of an average bedroom. This particular school was rich in space but beyond that, the students were as badly off as any of my "low-end" private schools in the city. The explanation of multiplication made it sound like division, first grade children were taught enough in a 40 minute lesson to make my head spin, never mind theirs and fifth grade children were made to go into The Fly by Walta aka Walter de la Mare in excruciating detail.

However, the unkindest cut, after my ridiculous auto-ride, was the misuse of the English language. Literal translation from one language to any other generally results in some entertaining turns of speech. However, when the people doing the literal translation are English teachers at a reasonably reputable (or indeed, any) English medium school, it is no longer funny in the least. In the past few weeks I have already been told to, "Say me," "Explain me," and, "Tell to me." While these still strike me as odd, I am beginning to expect to hear them in classrooms. Today, however, I heard a brand new oddity in this already weird family. Are you ready for it? It was, "GUESS ME!" And I heard it not once, but twice, in two classes taught by two different teachers in two different classrooms to two different grades. As the teachers used this expression, I waited for the telltale sniggers and nudges from the students, proving to me that all was not lost; that they'd heard the misguided combination of words and were going to demand retribution (as we certainly would have in any of my classes at school), but no such luck. The students remained passive and docile, absorbing and reusing these and many other choice phrases.

To be honest, the actual phrase "guess me" is probably the least of our worries. What worries me more is that in the quest for upward social mobility, people choose to send their children to these schools where neither they nor the teachers can truly monitor the process because none of the adults have an adequate grasp of the medium of instruction. Worse still, the children are sometimes so busy decoding this new and garbled language that the time spent on real instruction is far less than time spent on the mechanics of the lesson.

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go."

Years ago, someone pointed out to me that young people who work in NGOs(Non-Governmental Organizations for the uninitated), particularly those who have recently returned from a stint in an institution of higher learning abroad, have a predictable and uniform look generally involving khadhi, kohl and idealistic stars in their eyes. The other day I looked in the mirror and realized that my reflection bore an eerie resemblance to the word picture formed by that scathing observation but I refuse to apologise for it. And while I may be responsible for the idealistic feelings I'm harboring, the khadhi and kohl are more a result of where in the city I need to go.

My work currently involves working intensively in five, low-end, unaided private schools in the greater Bangalore metropolitan area. Although a few of these schools are quite literally in my backyard, the majority are far removed from my regular beat in the Cantonment area of Bangalore (the term is one of the last remaining vestiges of the British military presence in Bangalore). This, in itself, has led to some interesting adventures from a purely logistical perspective. Armed with a shaky (at best) grasp of Kannada and the tag of being a "localite," I have, in the recent past, found myself navigating narrow lanes in Shivaji nagar, incredibly crowded market places in Yeshwantpur, and have recently been told to find my way around Peenya. The official mode of transport is obviously the ubiquitous auto rickshaw, and I unfortunately find myself constantly haggling with auto drivers who, as a group, have conspired to never go where I need them to at any given time. Not that any of these things are especially odd or problematic on their own, but my chauffeur-driven, denim-clad, English-as-a-first-language self is definitely out of place to say the least.

Apparently only in personal discomfort can there be true growth, and I am sure that I will feel uncomfortable and generally out of place many times in the next few months, but I am equally sure that I will learn a lot in this position. Some of it will be work-related, no doubt. However, I am also learning a lot about my city and myself. Everyday there are people, things and places that challenge my assumptions about what I think I know to be true, generally (and thankfully) amidst much hilarity. It is like cultural anthropology in my own backyard.