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.

A new year: same challenges

The new academic year brings in bigger challenges. 7th standard students who shout "square" and "rectangle" looking at a triangle is just one of that. If I had a little bit more time and energy the one thing I would have set out to straighten would have been the attitude of teachers towards teaching and learning, in my school. As of now what I understand from the teachers in my school regarding attitude towards learning is that, they have none. They think their responsibility as a teacher finishes when they 'teach' and they have absolutely nothing to do with the students learning.

Scene 1, lunch time, 5 teachers are having lunch.

T1: In school A they pay Rs.7000 to the teachers.

T2: But there are 70 students in each class. Rs.7000 is not worth it if you have to shout your lungs out every day at 70 students.

T1: But they give printed notes to each student in the class.

T3: Oh, thats great. Then you just have to go to the class and give the notes to the children.

T1: Of course, you just have to read that out. Thats your responsibility. Whether the students are learning or not, is not.

It took me a while to gather my jaw and tongue from the floor and look composed again. But then it got me thinking. If T1 actually didn't have any doubt in her mind about the students' learning being her responsibility, she wouldn't have even mentioned that, would she? So may be there is a little bit of hope there.

Hopeless is what I would say about the next one. I have shown my principal, the pathetic results from the tests which I have administered in 6th and 7th standard. Few days later.

Scene 2, T4 approaches me.

T4: Do you think I haven't taught anything to the students last year?

I: Oh! When did I say anything like that?

T4: The principal told me.

I: What?

T4: She told me that the 6th std students do not know anything and I haven't taught them anything.

I: Ah, I have indeed told her that the 6th std students do not know things at their level and thats all what I have told her.

T4: Ok. I have taught everything last year. But haven't you seen how they are! They just don't learn.

Here she doesn't even have a doubt in her mind about the learning part being her responsibility.

Do I really need to take it upon myself to hammer some sense into their heads? Even if I try, would there be any change in them at all, or will I be wasting my time and alienating myself more?

Out of body experience

You are walking down the aisle in a mall and suddenly you see yourself walking as if you are totally another person. Have you ever experienced that? It is indeed a freaky experience.

2 days back I picked up two of my staff at TFI to get back to the training institute and was waiting at the traffic signal. Suddenly I look at the rear view mirror and my holy life jumps out of my skin.

For you to understand what I mean, you should know what I drive. I drive a rare species of Scorpio which is a Sports model, yellow in colour with uniquely patterned side and front bonnet stickers. I call mine Tweety. Though I do not know exactly how many of these cars are there on road, I know that there are just a few and it is a very rare thing for a Sports Scorpio to meet another Sports Scorpio, let alone get followed.

So I looked through the rear view mirror and saw the same car behind me. The really creepy thing is the car behind me has the front bonnet sticker torn at the same place as my Tweety. So when the light turned green I started moving hoping that the freaky feeling together with the duplicate car behind me will pass. But it started following me. Imagine you are walking, you turn around and see yourself walking behind you. Then you start running and you behind also start running following you very closely. You can even see the small coffee stain on the white T-shirt on the you following you. You look down at your own coffee stain and start running faster.

Then at one traffic signal I left enough space on my right and both the Sports Scorpios were parallel to each other and I saw a similarly freaked out man staring at me from the other vehicle. Once I started moving the other Sports Scorpio overtook me and took a left turn and went while I continued straight ahead, shaking my head to hard trying to get back into my own body.

Story of Alex and also me

First day of the academic year I was faced with these 3 kids in class who have been detained in class 4. We had this small discussion and at the end of it I promised them that I will be working with them and I will work very hard. In turn they promised me that they will also work really hard and this time pass 4th std, that also with really good marks. This was one of the very first conversations I was having in class and during that I found that Alex was able to talk in English unlike the other 2. That was a good start.

Alex was 13 year old, have failed in all classes at least once till then. Alex could read 22 words per minute. He was 4th in Maths and 6th in English from the bottom of the class. Not a very bad place to start considering that I have only 13 kids. In the paragraph he wrote about himself he wrote this.

My seafe
My Name is Alex I am in Std IV. B. My school Name is [xxxx] Meb school is ver samll I aM 13 year old My Fared is in Ramase I vele group i vere becea Ramase oabesur. My Mother is in Plosel. My salasey is ver in Docasese. My 5

Looking at the things he has written and the way in which he read, I started doubting whether he is dyslexic. So I started using strategies which I would use for a dyslexic, after searching in the web and after discussing with my mentor who has experience with such kids. Making him read one word at a time covering the rest of the words, making him place his finger on the page after writing each word for leaving space while writing etc.

But slowly I started seeing behavior which I was not really expecting from a 13 year old. If he doesn't listen in class and if I ask him to listen with a slightly stern face, he would sulk. He is rather big at 13 when compared to the rest of the class and sits on the front row. When the rather short ones who sit at the back cannot see and I ask Alex to move in, he would not. He always kept losing his books, pencils, erasers and felt that it was my mistake that he was losing them.

He also lied like no body's business. So when he doesn't want to stay back in my extra class he would tell his mom that I am not well and he would tell me that his mom has asked him to get home early so they could go to the church. When he returned home 3-4 days continuously his mom came in to find out what has gone wrong with me. When we found out what was happening his mom and me decided to stay in touch more often.

Once he told me when we were talking about planes, that his father has actually made him fly a fighter plane. With all the right actions, he showed me how he pulled the lever up and the plane moved up and how he needed to pull it down to bring the fighter back down. May be by this time I have already had a feeling was there was more to Alex than what met my eyes at first.

He also told me towards the end of the year when the summer vacation was approaching that he is going for a holiday to London. Knowing his background I knew this can't be and casually checked with his mom whether he has heard about some one going to London and she told me smilingly that "you know him by now, it is all in his head".

Slowly the kids who were behind him when we began the class, started moving ahead of him and he stayed almost where he was. His reading fluency improved from 22 to 40, but then there were others who improved fluency from 7 to 50. His Maths skills stayed the same. He could count, add and subtract without borrowing or carry over in the beginning. He managed to conquer borrowing and carry over. But multiplication, division, geometry, measurements all evaded him, which the other kids picked up though with a lot of struggle.

In the meanwhile I kept talking to his mom to find more details about him and I found one thing which may be mattered, that he was prematurely born and was in the incubator for a while. May be that explained or may be I shouldn't be really searching for explanations.

Once I heard my co-fellow talking to her kids mother about a special educator for students with special needs, to whom she wanted the kid to be taken to. I jumped at the opportunity, got the number and passed it on to Alex's mom. I kept checking whether she has called. It took solid 2 months before she managed to contact the special educator. She got Alex's mom to get his IQ checked and it turned out to be 64, which meant moderate mental retardation. I kicked myself hard for not recognizing it earlier and wasting his time. Then his mom was given the details of a school for slow learners which refused to take him in since they can only handle kids whose IQ is above 70.

Now the special educator has started taking classes for him twice a week. His mom is also trying for admission in another school for slow learners and it should go through.

I learnt that I have my limitations and it is better for my kids and myself that I realize that. Because at the end of the day I managed to change the wrong course Alex was in and hopefully put him into a less harsher route for his mental abilities. I am indeed going to track his progress and see whether he is adjusting to this new course and also gaining from it. Will keep you posted.