A Not-A-Lot Day

The last couple of days have been a bit unusual. There is a strategy conference happening at SEDS this weekend, and a whole bunch of people are coming for it, some are board members and others will invited guests so that there are a range of ideas possible.

This means that the women fieldworkers have all been at the house, slaving away with cleaning and cooking and other preparations for receiving the visitors and setting up for the conference. As a result, Alex and I haven't been out to the field again.

I went to the school yesterday (30th) and helped out with some lessons yesterday, and today I mostly worked in the office, doing university course work, some assignment work, and some general reading about the role of social work in development. I also started to do a bit of job hunting, just thinking ahead...

I arranged to go to the teachers meeting in the afternoon after lessons finished, and Alex tagged along too. I wasn't sure of the format that the meeting would take, but I had wanted to introduce to the teachers some ideas I had, but that I hadn't gotten much response about when speaking to the teachers individually.

So, at the meeting, I offered to introduce the kindy teachers to some number and alphabet videos that they could play on their phones from YouTube, to help the smaller children who were struggling to learn these. I also suggested that they use flashcards to practice recognition.

I also offered the teachers individual English lessons, and gave out my WhatsApp number so that they could contact me privately in case they felt any shame at requesting lessons.

My main idea was a vocabulary list I had come up with since I began teaching my class. It is a list of all of the vocabulary that I had to introduce to my class in order to get them to interact better, and therefore to learn better. My lessons had progressed much more smoothly once I could do things like ask them to give examples, say when they don't understand something, and so on. As Ananda Vidyalayam is an English-medium school, then I thought this English classroom vocabulary would be useful for the teachers as well, and so I said I would make some posters that could be put up in the staff room to help the staff members learn them.

There wasn't a huge amount of enthusiasm for any of my ideas, but Balaji the head teacher and a couple of the female teachers did seem quite supportive and appreciative of the effort I was making.

I haven't taken any photos the last couple of days, so here is another Scooby picture. This is him doing one of his favourite things. His other favourite thing involves food.




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