Teaching and Stuff

All of a sudden it seems like I have no time left here! I went along thinking how we were leaving on Friday August 3rd, and thought I had 11 days left. But tomorrow we're driving up to Visakhapatnam to get a big pile of library books for the kids (thank you donors!) and also to buy the new Harry Potter book for ourselves (You might think no one could spoil the book for us when we're in a rural town in India, but you would be wrong. Anyway, we're looking forward to it and we don't know that much.). So that cuts two days out of our time here, bringing me down to 9. But we'll probably leave for Hyderabad on Wednesday, so we can spend one day with Grace's relatives. That means our last full day here is Tuesday, which cuts three more days out. Down to six. So under a week left! And we're only going to be able to teach Friday and Monday because Tuesday is a test day! So our responsibilites really are winding down!

I mean to talk about us teaching in this post. Things are a bit different now then when we were travelling around from place to place. We've been fixed in one place for about a month now. We left for two days to go to Visakhapatnam for our anniversary but otherwise we've been here nonstop. So I don't feel like a chronological order is quite as important.

Our very first class was on the day we arrived. After visiting the classes we were asked to talk to one. About what, no one said - I think they just assumed we were gifted speakers. Anyway we got put in front of a class of ten girls all 16ish and all moving into the vocational junior college in a week or so (there some will study fashion and design, some will study electrical engineering, some nursing and others computer animation!). Two chairs were brought out and we were just supposed to talk with them.

...

Well, we asked everyone their names, then their favorite foods, then favorite movies, then how many brothers and sisters they had and then we were a bit stuck. They asked us where we were from and, as I said, our answer confused them. They have a lot of trouble placing Grace since she looks Indian, was born in Andhra Pradesh and understands Telagu but spent her life in America, speaks with an American accent and can't speak Telagu. Grace decided to wear only western clothes from that day forward so people would think of her as American.

They also asked us if there were kangaroos in America and we said no. They went on to ask us about what Church we went to and so forth. The Hebron orphanage is run by a Christian organization and they pray together for a half hour every night (note that prayer consists of at least 20 minutes of song). Anyway, they're really into what I would call Christian folk praise songs. They clap their hands and sing things like "God is so good, God is so good, God is so good, he's so good to me!" It sounds a lot better with the tune. Anyway, they always ask us to teach them praise songs, and we always let them down. One girl also characterized the Hindu temple music which wafts in from across the river as "devil music."

We didn't think that class was so successful. When we left we made up a list of conversation topics - we still weren't sure what we would be doing. We were told we would be taking some classes but we were given no instruction on what to do with them, so the next school day we sat in on two classes and observed how things were taught.

The English class we watched was aged 14 and the class was similar in it's themes to an English class in the states, rather than a foreign language class. It was more like language arts. The students have a textbook of stories, poems and speeches and each day they read one and talk about it. When I say "they read it," I mean the teacher reads it aloud and the students follow along. She asks questions rapid fire as she goes. Example:

Teacher: "The Magician pulled a rabbit out of his hat and showed it to the crowd with a flourish." What does "flourish" mean?
Student: (yelling and reading out the definition of "flourish" from the stories little glossary) "a small movement performed after an extraordinary task!"
Teacher: Good, sit down. And what did the magician pull out of his hat?
Other Student: A rabbit!
Teacher: Good. "The Audience applauded and shouted..."

In this way the teacher walks the class through the story. At the end she asks more general questions about the story.

We also watched a biology class for the 13 year old kids. The teacher talked about the order of life - from atom to molecule to amino acid on up to organism and population. These terms were written on the board and the class quizzed frequently to see if they remembered what was said ten minutes earlier.

We were to take an English class in a few days. We decided to teach it like the Indian teachers taught, at least to start. We were given all the student texts and prepared for our first class. This was to be a small class of only 10 students, but the oldest ones, aged 15. The reading we were to teach was a speech by a heart surgeon about the value of suffering in life. The gist of it was suffering helps us appreciate the good things we have and when we face suffering well it ennobles us.

The first class we watched it took the teacher the whole class to get through the story so we prepared some questions about the story and then five or six general questions to follow up.

Well, when we arrived we presented the story in the space of 15 minutes, leaving us 25 minutes to fill. I improvised a ton of stuff from the story and we managed to fill the time. I asked the kids to think about this and that and "why did the author use this metaphor?" and "the author uses a statistic here, what's a statistic?" etc. The class went alright but we knew we needed a better lesson plan.

The next day we were going to teach a class one year younger but much bigger - 40 students. This time we had a (really, rather lame) story about a boy who wanted a donkey (he gets a donkey in the end). It was called "My Donkey Sally." Fortunately for us it was very long and we didn't have to worry too much about running our of time. Of course we did again. The problem is Grace and I didn't want to walk the kids through the story one sentence at a time. If they needed that much prompting it didn't really seem worth it to read the story. They would lose the thread of it much too quickly. And we didn't feel like we were playing to our strengths. This was a foreign approach to teaching for us and we felt the kids would get more out of the classes if the regular teachers were taking them. We weren't offering anything new or interesting.

So we regrouped. We ended up having a week to think about it because we got sick for that length of time.

Third times a charm. We decided our classes would be all about having the kids practice expressing themselves in English. Originally we envisioned them writing original things and playing lots of games that involved speaking and communicating in English with nothing. We planned to avoid having the students be read to, lectured to, or read silently to themselves. As things went on we focused our energies on speaking in English.

I had downloaded a manual written by the Peace Corps about teaching English as a foreign language in a developing country when you yourself have no english teaching qualifications. The perfect book! It warned us to introduce changes into the classroom gradually because the kids would need time to get used to a new style of teaching. Our eventual goal was to get the kids working in partners for most of the class so they got the maximum practice speaking. But we decided to work up to that over a few class periods.

The very first classes we arranged we planned to make ice breakers. We just wanted the kids to get used to the idea that they would need to be confident and comfortable speaking a lot in our classes. And that they could not get through our classes by sitting passively. We had to set up 3 different activities for our three class size levels. There was the old kids class, which was just 10 kids. But there were also three classes of 40 and two classes of 80 kids.

For the small group we decided to play a version of "Taboo." We made on the computer about 100 cards with different english words on them like "Wedding," "Monkey," "Water," "Doctor" and so on. We cut these out and divided the class into two teams of five. One at a time a member of the team would come up and try to get his teammates to guess what was on the card. He had to find a way to describe the word in English without saying the word. For example with the word, "Fire" he might say, "It's really hot, it burns" and someone would yell out "Fire!" Each team had three minutes to get as many cards as they could. The kids were really good at this and we ran out of cards with five minutes left in class. But they really liked it and we invented a new game for the last few minutes.

For the classes of 40 kids we played a game called "Find Someone Who..." For this we made tons of handouts each one with a 4x4 grid on it. At the top of the handout it said "Find someone who..." and in each square of the grid it said something like "...went swimming this week" or "...has three brothers." The kids have to get up and walk around the room and talk to each other and find someone who matches each description in the grid. Since there were 16 things to find it took them a good 25 minutes. Then we went over the answers. This went rather well too.

We had a harder time with the class of 80. We weren't sure what to do with them all. We ended up inventing a form of Bingo where the kids make a 4x4 grid on their own paper and randomly put a letter in each box. We had a grid on the board and we would say put an "Animal" in this box and if they could come up with an animal that began with the letter they had put there they could fill in the square. Other squares were "cities," "movies," "things that make noise," etc. It took half the class for the kids to understand what we wanted them to do, but I think they got good practice listening to directions.

By the way, we didn't pull these games out of the air. There's a suberb website called www.eslcafe.com which is chock full of more english class activities than you can imagine. And we didn't teach all these classes at once. We taught two per day meaning we saw each class twice or three times in a week.

We were encouraged by the success of these classes and tried more ambitious things. For the old kids we tried to teach them the game "Mafia," but it was a complete failure. If you don't know how to play Mafia, well, it's terribly hard to explain (which may be why it failed). It's a game of lies and deception where you have to try and protect a secret identity while other people try to figure out your secret identity. But I think the kids could not grasp the idea that in this game lying and deception were encouraged, were the whole point. Example:

Person whose Secret Identity is Villager: Are you Mafia?
Person whose Secret Identity is Mafia: Yes, I am Mafia.

That was frustrating. We called it off after two failed tries and played 20 questions instead. They didn't grasp the strategy of this at all. They just guessed whatever they happened to see. For example, I was thinking of "Ghandi." These are the questions they would ask:
-Is it a desk?
-Is it a book?
-Is it a blackboard?
-Is it a mobile?

When I explained it wasn't anything they could see they went:
-Is it a dog?
-Is it a house?
-Is it a desk?

Yes, they would ask the same question several times from different people. Eventually they got a little better.

For the big classes we still didn't dare risk having them try some big game so we asked them to write a paragraph entitled "If I could go anywhere..." At the beginning of the class we brainstormed countries on every continent and things you could do there and we intended them to write statements about where they wanted to go and what they would do there. We collected there answers at the end of class.

This showed us very clearly how varied the English language skills were in the class. Probably less than 5, certainly less than 10 people wrote exactly the kind of thing we wanted with no major errors. The majority of the class wrote sentence fragments about either A) how they would go to Delhi and see the Taj Mahal or B) how they WENT to Hyderabad with their parents and saw some kind of film studio amusement park. Probably about a third of the kids just copied the names of countries and activities off the board. These ones clearly had not understand a word we said and just copied what was on the board, verbatim onto paper.

One paper was really sad. It said something about how the kids had never been anywhere because his parents were poor farmers and they couldn't go anywhere. But it ended on the upbeat non sequitar "I want to be a doctor when I grow up." One kid wrote about going to New Zealand and meeting the power rangers. But most everyone wrote about India and Andhra Pradesh. We got the impression they don't really dream about visiting the wider world. Personally, since India is on the move economically, I think it's OK for them to have ambitions to visit foreign lands. When they enter the job market in five to ten years time, it might be really good for them.

We adjusted our lessons a little downward after that eventually settling in on a running theme of a trip to New York - though I explained that the skills they would be just as usable anywhere they went that spoke only English. We first started playing games where the kids were divided into two teams and they had to construct full sentences and speak them outloud to get points. When they made mistakes they could get the points back if someone else on the team could correct the error. This was a really successful activity.

Eventually we brought in partner activities. We had great advice from our friend Emily about how to first do this. We wrote a conversation on the board between a tourist and an airport receptionist about how to get to the tourist's hotel in New York. First we went through this as a class, then we divided the class into two halves. One half read outloud the tourist's lines and the other half read outloud the receptionist's lines. Then they switched. By now they had read both sides of the converstation three or four times. Then we had them do it as, gasp, partners!

They were really shy about this at first but there are two of us so as we marched up and down the aisles we were able to talk to each partner group and get them to do the conversation for us. After five minutes of this we had partner groups present their conversations.

Over the next few days we started pulling back the help we were giving them on the conversation. First we erased all the exact lines and wrote generic terms, changing the converstation from this:

Tourist: Good afternoon, can you help me?
Receptionist: Of course, what can I do for you?
Tourist: I need to get to my hotel in Manhattan. How do I get there?

to this:

Tourist: Greeting. Ask for help.
Receptionist: Polite response.
Tourist: Needs to get to hotel in Manhattan.

Then they had to make that into a workable sentence with their partner.

We eventually got it down, at least for the older classes, so we just had roles assigned for them:

Tourist - Wants to see United Nations, needs to know where it is, when it's open and how much it costs.
Receptionist - Knows the United Nations is at 42nd and First street, open 9-5 and is free.

Later we moved onto giving and receiving directions from a map that we drew on the board. The first class we did this on was a wash because, again, we overestimated the english skills of the class and I drew a way too complicated map that had street names too small for the kids in the back of the classroom to see. We remedied this.

Over four weeks we came to the somewhat sad conclusion that, with the exception of the oldest kids, the age of the student had no bearing whatsoever on their english language skills. It became starkly clear when we did the same activity with the 14 year olds and the 10 year olds. The ten year olds did better. Each class has a group of two or three who are excellent, four or five or ten more who are pretty good and the rest who have a lot of trouble. If we ask them to make a full sentence using the words "statue of liberty" and "see" they will say something like: "I to see statue of liberty." The stronger students will then whisper the right sentence to them (points are at stake after all!) but this wasn't as helpful to them as you might imagine.

The kids really need to all be subjected to an English language comprehension test and divided up into skill levels not grade levels.

The worst was yesterday. One of the classes of 80 students was finally divided into two classes of 40 because more classrooms were completed. Well, most of the strong kids in that class of 80 must have ended up in the other class because these kids did not understand a word I was saying. I would write on the board "Restaurant" and point to it saying, "Who can tell me what a restaurant is?" Then they would all yell out "Restaurant!" Eventually we figured out they thought they should just repeat any word I pointed at. In the class of 40 only two or three people understood me a think. But hey, they can read english, if not understand it. They certainly know how to put the letters together to make a word, even if they don't know what that word means.

So now we only have a few classes left. Originally we wanted to have a major game using all the skills they learned from us but it seems like such a small amount now! We have till Friday to figure it out.

I'm also teaching Physics a little bit. I've taught two classes so far. The first one went pretty well considering I showed up for class and was given the textbook. But it all came back to me and it was just the class of the ten oldest kids so they really paid attention. The next one was the opposite, a complete disaster. Without the two of us in the room the kids misbehaved all over the place. Normally one of us is teaching and the other is sort of keeping an eye on things. Then we switch. But when I taught physics on my own the kids just talked and talked and I had to shout and people still couldn't hear me. It didn't help that the assigned topic was really boring - "how to use a vernier calipers."

A Vernier Calipers is a little tool you use to accurately measure the length of something. They're not high tech, they've been around for a hundred years at least. But these kids didn't have access to any so here I was drawing this instrument on the board and explaining how to use it. If I had control over the content of their tests I would have skipped it, but what can you do. Anyway, I had to spend the majority of the class yelling at them to be quiet and making threats. One of the good kids in front told me the only way they would be quiet was if I beat them, which is what I needed to do as a teacher. The other teachers also said beating is necessary to get the kids to stop talking, but it's discouraged much to their chagrin. I think it's actually banned but how do I know, I'm not everywhere. Anyway, of course I didn't beat anyone. But still it was a terrible class and it slowed the lesson down so much that we didn't finish and we'll be going back to the Vernier calipers later.

It's too bad that there are no materials for demonstrations. That's the best part of physics class. Instead we draw demonstrations on the board and they just have to take our word for it that things happen the way we say they will. But for tenth class, which I'm teaching tomorrow I've come up with a little demonstration. I've tied my shoelace around a scrap piece of wood and I'll swing it around my head to demonstrate rotational motion. Then I'll throw it to demonstrate tangential velocity. It's too bad they've already finished their unit on Gravity. I was eager to take a class field trip to the roof and throw things off then time the descent.