Wednesday, July 05, 2006
First Impressions from School
From the very next day of my arrival, I decided to start teaching the school kids. I decided to start with English from 8th class and gradually go down till 6th. When I spoke to class 8th students, I found them very weak in basic grammar. So I started with very primitive things like understanding various tenses, how to identify them, what are the rules to translate each of these etc. Initially, both I and the students had tough time with each other - I am still grappling with frequent usage of English words while speaking in Hindi, and they are grappling with a teacher with different dialect, pronunciation and way of speaking. Slowly but surely, I am making good inroads into 7th class but 8th is still a challenge, primarily because most of the students of this class are very quiet - difficult to know what they are thinking.
One thing which is amazingly obvious is the divide between boys and girls. Girls are very quiet and are generally away from boys. Even in the class they are seated separately than boys. They play volleyball during recess while boys play cricket. I must point this incidence out - one day, after finishing a logical step, I decided to generally chit chat with kids and ended up asking who all want to play cricket. To my surprise, almost every girl in the class raised her hand. I asked them if they had played earlier, and they responded in negative.
The good news is that now-a-days, whenever students of 7th and 8th have a free period, they come to me and ask me to teach them. I am still not teaching 6the standard, so one day a few of them came to me and asked me when I will start teaching them. I had no answer for them because I don't know if I can teach them properly as they are learning very basic things in English and I am not sure if I can do a good job out there.
I have observed that lot of times the students would know the answer to a question, but they don't speak up, even if I ask them, specifically. It seems to me that they are not encouraged to try out and fail. Due to this, their confidence is almost zero, and they won't open their mouth at all. I am trying to change it a bit, by not resorting to any kind of punishment at all even if they are crazily wrong.
Another interesting observation is that these kids are very scared of writing on the board in front of rest of their class-mates. Even if they tell you the correct answer verbally, they won't be able to write it on the board. I slowly found out that these kids are not very strong with spellings also. I am trying to make a lot of these kids to write on the board when they know the answer. Sometimes, I ask them to write even when they are wrong and then ask someone else to come and correct it. This way, their hesitation of writing is kind of going away. During initial days, something very interesting happened - I asked a girl, who answered correctly, to come and write her answer on the board. After lot of reluctance, she came to the board, wrote the answer and smashed the piece of chalk (which she used to write) on the ground and rushed back to her seat (of course on the floor), as if to show her furiousness. Truly speaking, I got little scared of her and since then I am very careful not to push her to write on the board ;-)
One thing which is amazingly obvious is the divide between boys and girls. Girls are very quiet and are generally away from boys. Even in the class they are seated separately than boys. They play volleyball during recess while boys play cricket. I must point this incidence out - one day, after finishing a logical step, I decided to generally chit chat with kids and ended up asking who all want to play cricket. To my surprise, almost every girl in the class raised her hand. I asked them if they had played earlier, and they responded in negative.
The good news is that now-a-days, whenever students of 7th and 8th have a free period, they come to me and ask me to teach them. I am still not teaching 6the standard, so one day a few of them came to me and asked me when I will start teaching them. I had no answer for them because I don't know if I can teach them properly as they are learning very basic things in English and I am not sure if I can do a good job out there.
I have observed that lot of times the students would know the answer to a question, but they don't speak up, even if I ask them, specifically. It seems to me that they are not encouraged to try out and fail. Due to this, their confidence is almost zero, and they won't open their mouth at all. I am trying to change it a bit, by not resorting to any kind of punishment at all even if they are crazily wrong.
Another interesting observation is that these kids are very scared of writing on the board in front of rest of their class-mates. Even if they tell you the correct answer verbally, they won't be able to write it on the board. I slowly found out that these kids are not very strong with spellings also. I am trying to make a lot of these kids to write on the board when they know the answer. Sometimes, I ask them to write even when they are wrong and then ask someone else to come and correct it. This way, their hesitation of writing is kind of going away. During initial days, something very interesting happened - I asked a girl, who answered correctly, to come and write her answer on the board. After lot of reluctance, she came to the board, wrote the answer and smashed the piece of chalk (which she used to write) on the ground and rushed back to her seat (of course on the floor), as if to show her furiousness. Truly speaking, I got little scared of her and since then I am very careful not to push her to write on the board ;-)
// posted by amAUzed @ 4:08 AM 
