School, Eid, and More School

Tuesday 21st:

Tuesdays are normally field days, but this week things got changed around a bit, and today was a school day. I didn't take my camera along today, just focussed on teaching.

Wednesday 22nd:

I had known that today was a Muslim holiday, but as it was written up as Bakrid on the calendar, I hadn't realised at first that it was Eid. That made me feel a bit bad, but at least I found out my mistake in the morning so I had time to wish 'Eid mubarak' to people before the evening came around.

There were no festivities at the SEDS farm, but it was a public holiday. I used the time to try and do some uni work, and to do a lot of cleaning as a productive form of procrastination...  I found a big-ish centipede on our steps when I was washing them down too...

Thursday 23rd:

Thursday is also normally a field day, but this time around it was another school day. I particularly enjoyed teaching the science class today because the science topic had moved on to the human body. Having studied anatomy and physiology for 3 years as part of my undergraduate degree, I was very much in my element helping the children to learn about their skeletons, and the different types of joints.

Some of my illustration on the board (excuse the crap phone photo!)

During the school's lunch break, the young maths teacher Dhananjai had a driving lesson. Several of the SEDS staff are having driving lessons at the moment, and he is one of them. I asked him if I could come along to see how it was going, and he agreed.

Dhananjai had explained that he had difficulty with a few elements of driving, the gears and the steering, and when we were out on the driving lesson I could understand why. The young driving instructor did a lot of taking the wheel, changing the gears, and using the pedals himself. There didn't seem to be any periods of explaining what needed to be done and why, and allowing the driving student to practice the techniques, which is how I had learned to drive.

This seemed to be very much in common with the Indian style of school teaching as well, whereby the children are not given much opportunity to think for themselves before they are told the answers to questions or problems. I'd love to do some training with the teachers to encourage them to facilitate the children to do more active learning, but I'm not sure how well this would fit in with the government exams, which just test the children's ability to learn the book material by rote.

After having lunch at the house, I spent some of the rest of the afternoon with Rashna in her production centre. She showed me around her projects and we talked a bit about ideas for reaching more of a market to increase her returns. We also talked about the possibility of going to some government schools to do some craft lessons with the children there.

I was still feeling enthusiastic about teaching the children, so in the evening when the local children arrived for tuition and I saw that there was no teacher in attendance, I went up myself and spent the evening helping them with some English work and checking their homework.