Ms Bee goes to school

Hi everyone
Posting this from Namchi, the nearest big town, after a beautiful but hair-raising journey for one hour (to travel 20 k) on mountain roads in what is called a shared jeep ie a jeep absolutely crammed full with people.  I got lucky and got a seat by the window.  Last time I came here, I got to be next to the driver and had the gear stick rammed around my knees - there were four people plus driver in the front seat of a landrover!


Here are some of my experiences of life at St Pauls school....  School starts at 9.15 and children arrive by 9am.  Their first job is to sweep the classrooms and the corridor - there is no caretaker of course.  There are 10 classrooms - 5 either side of the corridor.  Upstairs there is the school office, a computer room with 8 pcs, and a library as well as a hostel for 11 children who board and accommodation for one of the teachers and their family who also look after the boarders.  Assembly is outside on the "play area" ie flattened muddy piece of ground.  Prayers are said, some christain songs and the national anthem.  Then there is usually a general knowledge quiz asked by the older children.

There are 3 periods of 45mins, followed by a 5 min playtime, followed by 2 more periods.  Lunch is at 1.15 for half an hour, then two more periods until 3.15.  The children bring tiffen ie packed lunch and eat outside, the teachers eat in one of classrooms and I get toeat upstairs with Daniel and Samuel, the headteacher and his brother, served by one of the older girls who stays in the hostel.  On Saturday morning there are 3 periods of drawing and moral education, followed by PE ie cricket or badminton or generally playing.

Each classroom has old fashioned benches with attached ledges just enough room for a A4 book with 2 or 3 children to a bench.  There is a dirty whiteboard, small table and chair for the teacher and that's it.  Each child brings their own textbooks and each lesson is direct from the text book.  They cover science, maths, english, environmental studies, general knowledge, hindi and nepali - same timetable each day.  The children stay in the classroom and the teachers circulate.  The children have a wide vocab and can read out aloud very well (albeit with some strange pronounciation on occasion).  However they very often do not understand what they are reading and find it very difficult to answer any questions.  "Learning" is very much by rote.  Their handwriting is very good and their spelling is also excellent. My mission is therefore clear - to try and get them to have some confidence to ask and answer questions and to deviate from the text book!

They are not used to working in pairs, or in small groups, or working independently or creatively at all.  Their drawing on a Saturday is copying pictures from an art book, for example.  I'm trying not to be too "Western" in my approach but simply trying to get them to speak confidently will be a great achievement!!

The other difficulty I have is that I am treated as the supply teacher.  There is often several teachers not at school (the school pays a very small wage so I guess the teachers feel it is ok to take time off if someone is visiting their family etc), so I get to cover classes.  My first lesson was physics! and my second lesson was social sciences!  Their text books are very dense and use very complicated vocab so I try to extract the main points and think on my feet on how to make it interesting!  But I can't get to prepare any lessons because I don;'t know from lesson to lesson who I will be teaching and what.  It's a small miracle if I get the same class for the same lesson the next day.  Another difficultly is that there are no spare copies of the text book so I have to ask to borrow one from the students and they have to share.  I am literally one sentence ahead of them, never mind one page!

My most successful lessons have been where I have prepared (just in case I get the same class again).  And also the students like playing games with me eg hangman, blackboard bingo, tag games where they have to circle the right time on the board etc.  I have tried to take a younger class outside to collect materials to make a nest  as birds and nesting was next in their text book but forgot to check that they understood the vocab!!!  ie they can read the word twig but haven't a clue what it is.

Despite the lack of resources, and the lack of planning from me, I am really enjoying working with the students.  They are all delightful and very keen to learn.  Discipline so far hasn't been a problem.... I just threaten them that they won't get a game at the end of the lesson if they don't behave and they all sit up and work hard!  Each class is small - between 8 and 14 students so it is quite easy to get to know them and to give them some individual attention.  Teaching in India is definately something I could consider doing....  no planning, delightful and sweet children, no discipline problems, and it all finishes at 3.15!!!

Lots of questions and thoughts about resources and the lack of colour in the classroom.... but I need to get back on the shared jeep now.

Miss Bee

It's Siliguri, therefore it's Friday (I think!)

Greetings from Siliguri!
I'm now in many miles north of Kolkata and about to launch into Sikkim.  You are supposed to get glimpses of the foothills of the Himilayas from here but all I have have glimpsed is roof tops, and yet more roof tops.  But tomorrow, I hope, will bring some hills.

So, where to begin?  The journey over was fine and I remember looking down an evalator at the richness of the shopping area with sparkling marble-like floors at Heathrow and wondering what on earth Mumbai airport would be like, and imagining that the next time I see such luxuries would be in NZ.  I am soooo pleased that I arrived at 00.45am - taking the taxi into "downtown" Mumbai felt fine as the warm air rushed through the taxi, and the roads were light on traffic.  The first thing you notice is the huge amount of people sleeping on the streets - for some, there's no choice, for others, it's cooler outside than in their abode.  Loads and loads of what we would call "shacks" (though after what I saw in Kolkata, a shack is a pretty substantial building).  And people just sleeping anywhere - on the pavement, in the road, on bales.  The area around the hotel was pretty well protected by police - I still haven't worked out all the different sorts of police yet - I'm sure helped by the fact I was staying a few buildings down from a very palatial hotel which was built by a Parsi man who was outraged that he couldn't get a room in a good hotel when he arrived in India a couple of centuries ago.  I wasn't very far off the Gateway to India (photo already supplied by Loz) and I was heartened to read that although built to commerate the arrival of George 5 and wife (woops might have got my kings mixed up - the dad of the Colin Firth!) in India, it was also the place where the British left - hoorah!  Overall Mumbai felt it was a mix of cool and trendy and bustlingness with a big dash of (indian) tourists.  I am of course speaking from my little seaside enclave.

On to 5.30am on Monday morning where I faced the great CST railway station and took a big breath and walked inside.  Again the first thing I noticed was probably about 150 people sleeping on the floor and people just walking around them.  I got told off by a policeman as I was standing too close to a queque of people who were then frogmarched onto the train - there was a a bit of breaking of the ranks and one of the police officers starting hitting a couple of people with these huge truncheons.  It was awful to witness in itself but always shadows of the Holocaust are present around people getting onto trains.  However I am sure that these people really did want to get onto the train.... Of course, no queques for AC 2nd Class 2 tier and no police to meter out punishment if we walked too quickly.  And so, my great train journey across India started.  I kept expecting Michael Palin to appear as I felt I was in a travel documentary.  India in the middle bit at least from Mumbai to Kolkata is incredibly flat after about the first 1.5 hours, fields after fields, after fields with villages, towns, villages, towns, water holes, different fields.  Which all sound quite dreary but I was totally immersed in the vast differences.  And when I wasn't looking out the window, I was being entertained by the fantastic pantry car staff and the numerous people walking down the train, calling out their wares.  I thought I was going to make friends on the trip but I was in a end berth and so had a little "cabin" to myself which was great as it gave me lots of space just to soak up being there.  It was a fantastic 30 hour trip and I felt well cared for by the staff.  I did get talking to a woman towards the end of the journey who was going to Kolkata to buy saris as her daughter was getting married in November and was invited to the wedding! 

Howrah Station is another of the famous Indian railway stations in Kolkata and I got of the train, having thanked the woman for her kind invitation but unfortunately would be in New Zealand etc etc.  I got into another pre-paid taxi and was taken to my next bed for the night.  Howrah is on the other side of the Houghly river which is huge and there is huge bridge over it, reputedly the world's busier bridge and I was introduced to the dleights of Indian driving...OMG is all I say.  Pedestrians, cycles, cycles rickshaws, auto rickshaws, taxis, cars, lorries, buses of various descriptions, and anything else which has a wheel were all going over this bridge with no lanes and no sense of safety.  I kept breathing in and thinking of that bus in Harry Potter film which getting very thin.  Then over the bridge and over a ramp and into the thronging mass that is Kolkata and suddenly the bridge felt a very safe place to be.  I shall never forget the view - people everywhere, walking, carrying huge loads on their hands, little stalls on the pavements, and on the streets, cycles, cars, buses, then suddenly a tram!  Incredible levels of poverty... people picking through rubbish piles, sleeping besides rubbish heaps.  And so noisey.... because everyone uses the "pavement" to live in, or work from, then people walk on the road and sometime on the pavement, and so everyone honks either to let you know that they are behind you or to get the slower vehicle in front to move over or just because.  So the streets are noisey from about 6.30 in the morning till about 11 at night.

Fraid I didn't see much of K as I had an attack of tummy problems, preceded by a nasty fall as I failed to negotiate a bit of the pavement (hope you realised that I am using the word pavement here in a loose way) so happy to leave K and take the train to north to Siliguri.  Siliguri is just as noisey but alot more manageable and tomorrow the bus to Sikkim!

will try and blog soon.