Rote Learning…Rote Humans…

So I am now successfully installed at the school. The room I currently inhabit will become a classroom once the school expands into 8th standard and beyond. For now though, it is providing very spacious accommodation for me. I now have BabaJi (the school's watchman) and Rohit (the gardener) for neighbours. I cooked food for myself and Rohit yesterday and was glad to discover he had described it to other staff members of staff as 'pure Indian'. It seems I have had at least one positive influence so far during my stay…Rohit works tirelessly to maintain and beautify the school grounds. He has one of those smiles that lights up a person's face and instantly sets you at ease. He lives in Uttar Pradesh, where he has a young wife and son. He had recently been feeling very lonely and mentioned a desire to move on from the school. My arrival has proved a sufficient fillip to persuade him to put such plans on hold for the foreseeable future. It is
humbling to know that I might have had something to do with keeping his beaming smile at the school for some time yet.

Since last writing, things seem to be moving in the broadband world. BSNL are advertising 3G, though I suspect this will not be available in rural areas for a good year or so. More immediately for us though, it seems that it may not be as impossible as first thought to connect the school. I am currently exploring a couple of options and will report back in my next blog. Also to come in my next blog will be feedback on my teacher and pupil questionnaire, which I will be handing out at the start of next week. One incident has led me to think I may get more revealing and truthful answers from the pupils rather than the teachers. Whilst eating my lunch the other day, I became aware of boisterous laughter coming from a group of the teachers opposite me. It seemed that every time I spooned some saag onto my samosa, again the laughter would begin. Seeking to discover if I was breaking some ancient custom with my culinary habits, or if I had, unbeknown to
myself, become a comedian overnight, I asked the first hindi phrase I learned – 'tum has kyon raha ho?' – 'why are you laughing?' Immediately the laughter stopped, and when I sought to press them on it, the consensus was formed that they were not laughing at me, but about something completely unrelated. I revealed to Miss Nehra (the teacher with whom I have developed perhaps the best camaraderie, since we run games periods together and she speaks the best English) that I was not convinced of the teachers' affirmation that they were not laughing at me. She replied that I could ask them a thousand times and they would never tell the truth of the matter. Their reasons for this I can only guess at, but what is frustrating is that I am very difficult to offend and had asked why they were laughing only as a means of engaging them in a conversation. At the moment my inner debate is whether to use the slowly-softly-water approach to circumnavigate
the defensive barriers some of the teachers seem to have erected, or to create a tidal wave that will sweep them away in as compassionate and ultimately fruitful a way as possible. Perhaps the questionnaire will prove a useful first ripple. Watch this space.

I come now to the topic alluded to in the blog's title. Over the last week or so, some or other of the teachers have been absent through illness or due to travel restrictions imposed by the cloaking fog-smoke that descends some mornings. As a result I have been needed to cover a number of periods. Most commonly this has been drawing – the drawing teacher is getting married soon, and when this happens one apparently has to buy a whole new life. The possibility that the students were simply instructed to copy whatever the teacher, be it drawing, English, hindi or environmental science, had written on the board had became a more concrete reality when I walked in class to cover a drawing period and asked the students to draw a cow – possibly the most common animal/meaqns of transport in the area. The students looked at me with blank faces, then at the word cow on the blackboard, then back to me with even blanker faces. The conversation that followed
went something like this:
'But sir we don't know how to make one'
'What do you mean you don't know how to make one?'
'First you show us sir, then we draw'
'You're telling me you've never seen a cow?'
'Yes sir, but you draw first'
'If you've seen one, you can draw one'
To help them get into the spirit of things and to dust the cobwebs off their imagination, I drew a cow also. Needless to say, many of their cows were significantly better than mine. Once they had produced their first cow, they took to it like a duck to water. I am pleased to say I have since worked them up to producing 'a monkey riding a bicycle next to a river near a forest.' This last working title I tried on three classes – 3rd, 5th and 6th standard. Without question the youngest pupils took to the task with least resistance and with probably the best results, whilst it took me a good 10mins to convince 6th standard they were capable of completing my request.

I tell this story to highlight both the need to cultivate a child's imagination and the worrying trait that seems endemic within the curriculum teaching practices of 'copy and repeat'. The students right the way through the school are spoonfed answer after answer. In English this manifests in an ability to read and quote verbatim quite complex vocabulary, but not the slightest idea of how to use that vocabulary independently and outside the perspective of the given sentence. In a wider context, this current emphasis on rote learning may well be one of the causes for the children's lack of application to their homework. With the spark of curiosity having been replaced with the damp ditch of routine, the children perhaps struggle to motivate themselves. Such an approach serves over time to limit a child's imagination, and thus their ability to comprehend and cohere what they are learning into a vibrantly interdependent holistic world view,
producing instead a series of sterile headings under which they file certain words and concepts – soil erosion and deforestation under 'Environmental Science', poetry and rhyme under 'English' and so on. Inhibiting the imagination in this way also robs a child of one of its most potent resources for problem solving, meaning there develops a vicious circle as they grow older, where more and more they depend on being given the answer rather than having to work it our for themselves.
At this point I would usually launch into some overly wordy tirade about how this rote learning is simply the educational mirror of the way our entire gloablised social structures operate – ensuring that there are sufficient peons available with sufficient capability to perform the necessary functions required by the corporate-economic paradigm with which we've allowed ourselves to be yoked.
My preference these days is to focus on the positivity of seeking to be the change. So let us return to the 'monkey riding a bicycle by a river near a forest'. I was not aware of it at the time, but it has since become clear that this monkey is no ordinary monkey, but rather 'the hundredth monkey' made famous by Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields. Allow me to explain. Until yesterday, I had given this drawing task to 3rd, 5th and 6th standards. As stated, once they overcame the belief that they were not capable of drawing what was asked, they embraced the challenge warmly. However, I still had great difficulty in getting them to embellish their pictures with anything else they might wish to include. Even once they had decided to put fish in the river and birds in the trees of the forest, they tended to rely on eachother for inspiration, rather than their own imaginative faculties, and still needed some prompting and encouragement from me that it
was ok to 'make it up'. But again, once they saw the enjoyment to be had in giving their artwork their own personal touch and populating it with whatever they saw fit, they loved the task.
Fast forward to yesterday. I was covering another drawing period, this time for 4th standard. I set them the 'monkey riding a bicycle by a river near a forest' challenge, hoping to test my not exactly genius theory that 3rd and 4th standards, having not been so 'roted' would find the work easier than the more rote-ingrained 5th and 6th standards. More than just confirming this idea, I received a jolt of pleasant surprise when one of the students showed me his picture – in it were the requisite monkey, bike, river and forest, but there was also something at the edge of the forest that looked like a cross between a tortoise and a beetle. I asked him what it was and he said the name of some Indian bug I have already forgotten. What I have not forgotten, because instantly an unprompted voice from within whispered 'hundredth monkey,' is the sense that having guided the students of 3rd 5th and 6th to make their own additions to the picture, this
child in 4th had known intuitively that it was commendable to add his own details without any word from me.
I leave the reader to draw their own conclusions from the above. I shall move on to tell the other side of the story, because of course, nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. Aware of this I have tried to look at the rote learning from another angle, to see if there is something I am missing. Is it possible that the worlds of imaginative and rote learning can meet in a marriage that will benefit our entire educational family? My present understanding is that the two approaches are as the two legs of a person. Of course the person can move with only one, but will take a great deal longer to get to the same place, and their range of movement and activities will be significantly limited. The odd couple of a monk and a student have given me an idea of perhaps how to combine the rote and the imaginative. In the travel blog of a friend, she mentioned having come across monks who learnt English by memorising sheets of Eminem lyrics. Then during a
computer period with 5th standard, I showed some of the students the usual method for performing a rap poem. They immediately began imitating my rhythmic annunciation and associated gesticulation and hand waving. I have a hunch that engaging the children in some form of rote/rhyme learning may be a seed to develop a way of learning certainly English more effectively. I shall report back.

Great challenge…

As feared, the reception from the teachers to my questionnaire was luke warm to put it kindly. The large silver lining to this cloud however is that it has hinted at the nature of the beast we may be dealing with in terms of trying to get the teachers onside and helping to paint the big picture. It seems we face not disunity or disinterestedness (certainly not from all the teachers) but that far more insidious monster – apathy. The reason for their apathy toward my questionnaire is their feeling that many people have come from England, asked there concerns, listened to their suggestions…and sweet FA has happened as a result. This has led them to the collective belief that it is pointless to tell me anything because nothing will get done even if they do. Initially I became quite despondent when I realised this was the case, wondering what I'd got myself into etc. However, a chat with the Principal lightened my mood. He was of the opinion that
certainly the teachers had some grounds for their feelings but that, given the bureaucratic teething problems the school has had to deal with, such a state of affairs was unavoidable and that many of the changes the teachers hope for cannot materialise overnight.
The fact remains that the teachers do feel slightly let down and I believe we take their feelings lightly at our peril. Next week I will hopefully take a few steps toward the root of their concerns and will then be better placed to suggest any action that might be necessary from the UK.

The students, equally predictably have been very forthcoming with their responses. A skim through reveals a few common strands – namely cooking and music classes and a water cooler.

To my great indignation, a large bus full of students drove into the middle of my 2nd standard games period football pitch. So it was that the geography students of Kurukshetra university announced themselves. They are here doing a socio-economic study of village of Lehrian. I have only had the chance to briefly pick the brains of India's bright young things. I will report back once I've made a fuller acquaintance. They of course have wasted no opportunity in ascertaining from me the EGI (Essential Gora Information), consisting of 'are you married' 'where are you from' 'what are your qualifications' 'how many family members' and 'what is your job in england'. I am thinking of putting together a video/powerpoint presentation to answer these questions, or of seeing if there is some form of investment scheme I can setup whereby I earn a commission for every time I answer these questions.

Today, a day earlier than the rest of the country, we celebrated children's day, in honour of J. Nehru, India's first Prime Minister who had a true love for children. In the last two periods of the day we had a dance program, where students from each year group could come on stage and perform an impromptu dance if they so wished. I should here mention that it took a showing from yours truly to convince the children to get into the spirit of things. It seems arab springs have never been seen set to Indian music before, and that I have worryingly memorable snake hips!

Here's a poem I wrote a couple of days ago that seems a suitable testament to children's day and to our school's principal.

See you soon.
Xx

The Principal and the slide

I heard it told that school Principals
Cannot afford the time for cares
That their schools will go to the dogs
Without stern punishments and stares

So you can imagine my surprise
When through the window I see one day
Our Principal leading the kinder garden
For a lesson in creative play

They filed out like a troop of magic ants
With Principal the Head-Ant guide
And stopped with bubbly anticipation
In the playground by the slide

Calling for hush the Principal asked
What else the slide could be
And in the silent moment
One sensed imaginations were set free

'I'm climbing up to heaven'
Said one girl with a laugh
Her friend replied that if she liked
They both could ride on her Giraffe

The timid boy was not so sure
About the plan to climb K2
So he bid his braver friend go first
And said 'I'll follow you'

Till two by two all the legs
Had scaled the dizzying height
Then descended back to terra firm
With peals of fresh delight

While, immaculate in his pressed shirt
The Head Ant warmly smiled
Thanking life for that most beautiful song –
The laughter of a child