The Elastic Child

We started the day as we start most days here; we woke up around 6:30am, all showered with a small tank’s worth of hot water, and joined the girls in their apartment for a home cooked breakfast of coconut chutney and some sort of starch.  But the day continued, like most days here, with surprise after surprise.

As we exited the rollercoaster, which here in India they call a car, we expected to find our students in the street eagerly awaiting our arrival with chaotic joy.  To our great surprise, though, the students were all quietly waiting in the school for us to come teach them.  Nirmal Nagar had gained a reputation among us Dukies as being extremely undisciplined and thus the hardest school to teach, but to my dismay we made tremendous progress.  I teach the second level students at Nirmal Nagar which we consider to be more academically advanced than the other students at the school.  For the past few days we have been attempting to teach basic phrases such as “What is your name?,” vocabulary of body parts, and beginning phonetics.  The students had been struggling to learn our material, but for the first time, I felt as though every student in my class knew how to ask and answer some basic questions, knew the vocabulary for most body parts, and understood that different letters make different sounds.  I was ecstatic with the progress that the students had made with only a few days of class.  I can’t help but think of how much we can teach these students, who I will admit, seemed nearly impossible to teach when we first met them.  I think that the routine we have established has greatly improved our capacity to teach and the students’ capacity to learn.  Everyday we learn and discover new teaching methods.  For example, today we tried a new method of teaching phonics that Hannah suggested.  We started with a basic word such as “cat” and changing only the first letter: “cat-> mat-> hat-> sat-> fat…”  The students, for the first time, understood that each letter makes a different sound.  We have also discovered the magic of music to teach.  The Hokey Pokey and Head and Shoulders are two of the children’s favorite songs.

After our lunch break, which is always a moment of great relief, we delicately weaved our way up a narrow street to Sri Sai Nagar school.  We had concluded, perhaps a little prematurely, that Sri Sai Nagar was better behaved and would thus be easier to teach.  While the children are clearly more advanced than the students at Nirmal Nagar, their disciplining needs some work.  We have not been able to get into a good groove yet, but I still have much hope.  What surprised me most about today was our story time.  As I sat down to read in front of the class of roughly 30 students, a not so shy Shiva Kumar grabbed the book out of my hands and read the entire story with very few mistakes to the whole class.  I was so taken aback that I didn’t know how to react.  I had never expected the students could learn to read in our two short months here; I was flabbergasted and in awe of Shiva Kumar for already being able to read and comprehend the story at near grade level for a native English speaker.  It was at this moment that my previous doubts in the students camouflaged in a lack of discipline disappeared.  These students are brilliant and just need someone to give them patience and resources to learn.

After a short coffee stop and a not so short trip to a shopping bazaar, we returned home to a delicious Indian style dinner and an intense World Cup soccer game of the US versus Algeria.  The night ended with an ever-so patriotic Manoj cheering on the US and educating us all in the unifying power of the World Cup.