Monday, December 24, 2012

December 24, 2012: Education in a Foreign Land

Merry Christmas!  It's about 8:00am here and we're preparing to head back to the school/community center.  I’ll share a few photos and notes from yesterday, Dec. 24, while Naveen showers.

(Ladies, please contain yourselves—the photos will not be of Naveen showering.)

We spent most of yesterday in what I’ll call an alternative school—a one-room building and rubble-strewn yard where one of our program directors, Nutan, has taught for four years.  Her pupils generally aren’t in school elsewhere, and the education that Nutan and her volunteers is able to provide is very, very rough.  Yesterday morning, we worked with a group of mostly 9 to 12-year-olds of both sexes, then spent the afternoon with 12 to 16-year-old girls.  Generally the children speak Hindi but no English.

Nutan and me

 
inside the school

outside the school

the schoolyard

There is a family on this trip with Naveen and me that is presently participating in its sixth Globe Aware vacation.  John, Meg, fifteen-year-old David, and David’s friend Nikhil brought a treasure chest of teaching tools with them, including world maps, inflatable globes, magnetic letters, and cards with animal photos and names.  Those tools greatly aid our pedagogical efforts.

We began each session sitting around in a large circle with the children and introducing ourselves, giving our names and some detail with which we thought the children could identify.  For instance, Naveen tells the group that his family is from around Bangalore, and I tell them that I’m from Georgia, home of Coca-Cola.  The children introduce themselves and ask questions of us through Nutan and A.J., a local who works with Globe Aware.  We often talk about sports—cricket is a local favorite.

We break into smaller groups and attempt to give something of a formal education, pointing out various places on the world maps and globes and teaching the children to pronounced their names.  Yesterday, I taught my groups to identify Russia, India, Australia, U.S.A., and Africa.  Some of them already knew where India was, but everything else appeared new to them.  We reviewed the animal cards, and pointed out where giraffes, penguins, spider monkeys, etc. lived.  I’d encourage the kids to point to the map as they spoke the name of a place, and give high-fives when they got something right.  I also encouraged them to shout, as that is both entertaining and kept me awake, as I’d arrived at 5:30am and gotten up three hours later.  Our group had a great chant of “Russia!, India! Australia! U.S.A.! Africa!” going until Nutan asked us to quiet down.

*                                  *                                  *

India is experiencing the paroxysms of modernity, and it is fascinating to watch.  Outside the gleaming, glass-sided offices of international corporations, cattle, goats, and hogs eat garbage in the streets.  Beside the speeding, beeping Tata automobiles, camels pull carts of produce to market.  Women in particular are driving social change.  In Delhi and Jaipur, the recent gang rape of a 23-year old woman has sparked protests seeking to overhaul India’s lenient, outdated rape laws.  The protests have caught the Prime Minister’s attention.  In our afternoon class, Nutan argued with a 20-year-old woman who came by about the direction that the young woman’s life could take—Nutan said there was a future outside of domestic work.  The young woman wasn’t so sure.  In our morning class of 9 to 12-year-olds, the girls were noticeably better students and quicker learners than the boys.  The future may be theirs.


lunchtime

making some faces with the cameraman

splish, splash

mooooooo

renowned international educator James E. Butler III poses with two bright pupils

Naveen Ramachandrappa poses with some goats



No comments:

Post a Comment