Wattle basket vs hat

I have decided to write more on the daily high I get while teaching my kids.

So today I distributed the question paper to the students for their English exam, in which I have asked them to write a story about this picture.

Since they understood that it is a basket, they started looking at each other for ideas. I heard puppies, cat, snake and also komdi ke pille, which I thought must be chicks. I had to let it pass that a rule is broken by someone speaking in Marathi, since I more urgently wanted the exchange of ideas to stop. They were supposed to write on their own, so I took care of stopping them from talking. Most of them were on task when my special kid put her hands up. I went to her and she asked me, "But didi, this can also be a hat". I was happily surprised at this and I took one more look at the picture, as it had not occurred to me, and told her, "Of course, it can also be a hat. Now you have a choice. You can write about a basket or about a hat. Take your pick".

Things I can change and things I cannot - 2

Read Part 1.

Every year quite a few or may be all B.Ed and D.Ed students do their training in regular schools for 2 weeks. In my school also 2 weeks are given to these 'students'. Again I pleaded with my senior teacher to leave my class out of this as I was petrified about missing 8 days of teaching. But I was told that I don't have a choice but to give the class to these students to teach.

I had 5 'students' teaching various subjects in my classroom. The first thing most of them did was wishing my kids 'Good morning childrens'. My kids just do not know what politeness is. So immediately some of them have raised their hands and told them, don't say childrens, it is child-children and childrens is wrong. It was just a start, my kids kept correcting them where ever they found a mistake. One teacher asked my kids to give examples of common noun. When one kid said cat, she told my kid that it is a proper noun as it is the name of a particular animal. I was surprised by the confidence of my kids when he started arguing with her that it is not. Finally I intervened and told her that my kid is correct.

They kept making mistakes in their spoken language and in the things they wrote on the board. They struggled to manage my kids as my kids will not sit quiet and listen without doing something on their own. They kept calling one kid at a time to the board to write answers leaving the others with nothing to do. I kept sitting in the class and when they were making mistakes and the kids were not correcting them, I took them aside or told them after the class based on how bad the mistake was and how scared I was that my kids will catch on to that. The 'students' were very responsive to my feedback and I could see that they took in my feedback and changed their English pretty quickly, where ever they could.

I was not sure once they are out of my school whether they will remember all the things and stick to it. These students come with their teachers who observe them and give grades for their teaching. So I met up with their teacher and inquired about their willingness to take feedback from me and pass it on to their students in a more structured manner. She agreed immediately. She has seen me giving feedback earlier to her students and I felt she was a little embarrassed at the kind of mistakes they were making. So I wrote down all the things I observed into 6 major categories - Spoken English, Written English, Content Knowledge, Pedagogic Methods, Assessment Methods and Behaviour Management - with ample amount of examples from the mistakes these student-teachers were making and suggestions on how to improve.

When I handed it over to their teacher, she told me that she will discuss that with her students. That discussion part is indeed something which I cannot control, change. But then I tried turning around missing 8 days of teaching into something I thought might be useful by giving feedback to those teachers.

I tried, I guess that's where I need to stop worrying. The rest is out of my hands.

ps. My favourite teacher from my school is a teacher who taught me for 2 weeks like this when I was in 8th grade, her name is Susan Titus. I am actually still searching for her.

Things I can change and things I cannot -1

A few of my friends have expressed concern over my last post. For 3 days continuously when I couldn't sleep at night, the third day I got up and just penned down what was coming into my mind. It didn't help my sleep, but it is making me write this post. This is my attempt to apply the serenity prayer to my life; mainly to my teaching and things which surround that.

God, grant me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change;

Courage to change the things I can;

And wisdom to know the difference.

I think I have been having trouble in the last sentence or may be at times I try too hard and take my failures to heart before I realise that it was a line 2 and not a line 3.

There are many things being done by Zilla Parishad in Maharashtra to change the education system, most probably as a run in to the implementation of RTE. One major thing is the way in which student learning is being assessed [moolyamapan (: ]. Instead of just having 4 unit tests and 2 semester exams, they have put in place formative assessments, which assess the students' daily learning. The summative assessments, which are given lesser importance, replaces the unit and semester tests. The students are supposed to be evaluated in 5 different ways (orals, written, projects, homework, class work, group discussions etc). This is supposed to reduce the pressure on the students and also is recognising the fact that different students perform differently in different tests and making them all just write, is not really going to show their real mastery.

Now when it comes to implementation, the whole point is lost. In my school now the last week of the month, no teachers are in classrooms. All of them are preparing their formative assessment reports. The students and left to do what they please in their classrooms wasting precious time (their favourite past time being shouting and howling, especially the seniors). I first explained to the senior teacher who is responsible for getting the records in, the actual idea behind these changes. I also told her that it is not about just making these reports, but it is about observing and testing the students in such a way that the results can be put to use in improving the teaching process. She responded by telling me that the Zilla Parishad people are only going to check the records and they are not going to come and observe the classrooms.

The next day when she reminded me that I need to make separate sheets for each student and one sheet for all, I asked her whether we can keep the work lesser. Since she thought I was worried about my spending too much time in doing that, she told me to just use my class time to do that. I told I am not bothered about the time I spend, as I need to prepare the sheets for only 13 students and it is not going to take much time and I will do that at home. By this time I was pleading with her and I told her that I am only worried about the other teachers spending their class time. By the time she left my class I was in tears and she just couldn't understand why I was crying in front of my kids for a silly matter like that.

This was a thing which I wanted to change, thought I could, but failed miserably.

Wake me up!

I know it is a nightmare

I should wake up any time now

It is gonna be over soon

I wait some more

But it is not getting over

I am in deep water

Water, isn't that supposed to wake me up?

But I am still going down

Something is curled around my left foot

Or is it my right?

It is pulling me deep down

Now I can't breathe

I panic, I struggle

My leg is free now, but

I don't know how to swim, do I?

I can't remember right now

Somebody, anybody

WAKE ME UP!

Drama: Initiation

One big goal for my students by the end of the year is to perform a drama. The idea was to improve their speaking skills through that. Once I started the sessions I realised that there are so many by products which I get from the drama, the improvement in speaking is just a small part of it.

I considered myself zero in the realm of acting, forget about teaching it. My friend and colleague Aditya, who is a professional, came to my class to kick off the session with me. Adi first put some ground rules in place and then gave the kids a monologue.

Hei Mr. Apple, you have hurt me a lot. So, I will kill you and eat you. Ha ha ha..

The emotions with which they were supposed to be done were also given. Happy, sad and angry. One third of the kids were assigned one of these emotions. They were also given 3-4 mins to prepare. Then the kids started performing and I almost had my jaws on the floor. I found a completely different set of students in front of me. Some of them were very nervous, but some of them looked like they have been doing this for their whole life or they were meant to do this. In fact acting made them come alive, blossom. We rated them on a few parameters for our reference for matching their roles in the drama.

Then they were given a dialogue between the lion and the mouse in the story "Lion and the Mouse". The kids were paired up and were given 5 mins to prepare. They performed and dazzled me.

Taniya in std. VI cannot read even a single English word. But when she came in front of the audience and cried looking at Mr. Apple in hand, I wondered where was this girl hiding all this while. Shahid in std. VII just started speaking in English this year and has a vocabulary of less than 100 words in English now. But when he roared and laughed as the lion letting go the erred mouse, I could almost see his mane.

That day I left from school with a completely different view of my kids and a huge smile on my face.

I was supposed to get another professional to come and do the casting and training for the drama. But there was a delay of a week for her to come. So I decided to handle the class on my own till then. There I discovered that I am not really as bad as I thought and I could show my kids a thing or two myself. Day after day, I kept giving my kids new scenarios and dialogues and they acted them out. By the end of one week the transformation I saw in some of the kids was stunning. The voice became louder and clearer for some who were nervously speaking in the beginning. The confidence levels were soaring.

I am so excited about the possibilities the drama sessions are bringing and I have never seen my kids so much excited about anything. May be this is the answer to a lot of questions for me and for my kids. Lets wait and watch.

Gifted Kunal

Kunal is the gifted kid in my 5th std. He most probably has ADHD (Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). Last year almost all my energy went in making him listen to me for some time and not disturb or not hurt the other kids. But this year he has come back from his summer vacation a slightly better version of himself. He can sit for more time without the need to jump at the back of the class and the energy I am spending on him is much lesser.

He is the only one who could read at 60 words per minute when I started with my class last year. By the end of the year he has improved that to a 100 words per minute, this time also while understanding what he is reading.

Last year he could not listen to me while I was teaching the whole class. So once I finished with the class I spent 4-5 minutes with Kunal and he would grasp it in that time. This year he is studying together with the rest of the kids and that is indeed a great relief.

Think, imagine, infer, predict - these are a few things I keep making my kids do in the class. Kunal shows me levels to which he can take these which I don't expect from them usually.

Below is the story he has written for this picture I gave for their unit test for story writing.

Friendship

There are five friends in the story. There name is Joy, Robin and Amir. They are best friend. They live in the sea. One day one shark has com to kill to the joy. Crow decided to kill that shark.They go to kill shark but they din't kill the shark why? Because they became friend.

One day one man fishing in sea, shark cut his boat. Man was fall in water and than man was kill. 1 year gone 2 year gone 1 big octopus came kill the shark. What will happen next?

I forgive his spellings and grammar and give him the whole 5 marks for the story.

One day, I gave a rather higher level problem to the kids after teaching a lesson. Kunal took one look at the problem and says "didi, this is very hard problem". I was almost getting disappointed at him giving up on the problem so quickly. He got up from his place and while walking to a corner of the class announced "I need more blood in my brain for this". He went to the corner stood upside down for a minute balancing nicely on his hands and head. Got down and walked back to his place telling, "Now I have enough blood in my brain to solve that problem" and finished the problem to my delight.

Saturday is a fun day

Saturdays are kept for improving my kids' speaking and listening skills. It is actually a holiday, so it takes intrinsic motivation from the kids to come to the class. They are sacrificing their play time, so the class need to be really fun.
I started the class with a boring one. We were learning sight words and reading sentences on that day. The only fun thing they did that day was to sing the phonics song. My old kids knew the song already, but for the 6th and 7th standard kids, that was new and they equally enjoyed it. But I didn't even make the reading a game which I usually do when they are reading the words from my laptop. If I continued like that the attendance would have become nil in no time. Then I asked the kids what they wanted to do on the next Saturday class. They told me to bring and teach more songs.
So the next Saturday I took print outs of the lyrics (they learnt the word lyrics and so many other words from the song that day) for them to read and taught them the official theme song of World Cup 2010. They went wild and sang the song again and again with the music playing at the background. I might have got bored after some time, but not them. After some time I switched to teaching them making sentences. I gave them a sentence and a question word and they made questions and answers. This time it was fun and they were all jumping up and down with their hands up in the air to give me the questions and the answers. I also revised the basic auxiliary verbs and their usage. It was almost like they were learning without realising that. We finished the day by singing the song again a few times. At the end of the day they demanded that I bring the lyrics of the Waka Waka song of Shakira, again from the World Cup.

I brought them the song next Saturday and they had fun with that. Not so much as the previous song as this is a little too fast and they couldn't keep pace most of the time. But they always caught up by swallowing a lot of words with some funny effects. Again we played sentence blocks and by now the kids knew how to make the questions and answers, though the structure of the sentences left much to be desired. By now I knew that the best way to get the kids back next Saturday would be to ask them what they wanted to do.

So, here I am trying to find movies which they can watch. Tomorrow is Kung Fu Panda day. I haven't seen the movie, but I hope the kids like it. The kids also spread the news that they are having fun on Saturdays and I see a steady increase in attendance. I hope to see many more kids tomorrow and I know they are going to demand more movies. Any movie suggestions are welcome (1.5hrs long, as I need the rest of time to teach). I might have to make a huge collection to last all the Saturdays to come.