Primary education- an experience

At some point or the other, we all curse the Indian education system, complaining about the sad plight of present educational scenario.Some would try to suggest brain drain,exam-pressure,etc as some common causes. What about the solutions? Suggestions vary from strengthening our grass-root i.e primary education to relaxing the exam pressure at the higher secondary level and such. But how many of us actually take it up and strive to find a solution rather than simply complaining?

Have you ever wondered how it would be to actually teach the primary kids? There's nothing much to teach them, just teach them the alphabets, some numbers, names of few animals,fruits,vegetables, months and days,etc.Trivial, isn't it?Well, frankly most of us would be in awe of their innocent face and acts to be able to teach them.We  understand that primary education is the base of learning, yet we finch away from the opportunity many a times because we doubt if we can manage them, let alone teaching. They come in a variety;some shy and some smart yet naughty.And a normal classroom has invariably a mix of various types- smart/talented and confident, sincere yet shy, lazy who would study only upon forcing, and most importantly the stand out ones-who will fight,sleep and disturb others and what not, except studying.The first and the last types are the hardest to manage, leave teaching. And if you are a first timer, I'm sure you'd be confused what to do with them.Been taught to be gentle with kids, perhaps most of us would try to deal with them patiently and with loads of love. Once you realize you've to deal with their tantrums regularly, you might get a little frustrated, understandably.Even simply scolding can't pacify these little devils.The main problem persists, how to teach them. There doesn't seem to be much standardized content for the 1-2nd graders. More importantly, its difficult to retain their attention for a long time.There lies the importance of planning out things beforehand as to what to teach and how to teach.

 There had been a time when we were more focused on secondary classes as we felt more comfortable there and primary classes were cancelled in case of insufficient volunteers. Times have changed; now even as the high school and above students fear English, some of these tiny tots would be fluently asking you ‘what is your name brother?’. These results haven’t come easy , it has taken lots of hard work and planning from the dedicated volunteers with help from various teacher-training workshops and bulla-sessions to have come this far. There's a joke out here that you get 'promoted' to primary from teaching higher classes. Even though teaching is the main motive, to be able to teach effectively volunteers need to understand the child as well,to get into their level and think like them. And for this, the volunteers have to resort to a little groundwork like visit the kids' house and talk to their parents and more importantly talk to the students' regularly- all what parenting might sound like.And all the while you have to keep improvising your teaching style and content so as to keep the kids' interested.Monologue teaching gets boring and so does too much of board work sounds like spoon-feeding. On top of that, the learning pace of the students varies greatly which means you can go neither too slow nor too fast.If you are engaged in teaching a relatively slower student, the faster and smarter ones are likely to throw tantrums with boredom. A quirky solution as suggested might be to give bonus questions to the smartypants while giving attending to the weak students.A good understanding of the language and cultural practice of the area helps a lot, especially while correcting kids like vishal who would say 'ishq' when asked to pronounce 'x'.For this,we lay emphasis on phonology as well, repeating the words with proper accent and knowledge of which part the tongue touches. Apart from language skills, one very interesting subject is maths, as the kids say ' sawaal do bhaiya". As you can guess most volunteers would prefer to teach maths/numbers over anything else as its symbolic and most students would already have some familiarity with it. But as we found out its not so easy to make the kids understand clearly the trivialities of numbers. Connecting the basic arithmetic operations with some familiar activities help them understand better like- addition as collecting all the similar things and then counting,subtraction as loosing or taking a loan, division as distributing a 'roti' equally between the siblings,etc. Also, because of their familiarity with currency denominations, they handle money problems better than problems involving abstract numbers.

Dumb-charades can also be used as an effective teaching technique to make the kids more inquisitive, search for answers themselves while engaging their various senses.That way they learn to use their mind and search for answers within themselves rather than waiting for someone to tell them an answer.As for the language skills,  the usually followed route of alphabets-words-sentences didn't seem to help much for the kids,especially those without any guidance.For them, an alternative might be to teach them the alphabet,then the daily usage words and sentences and again back to learning the whole set of unfamiliar words,signs.And there are various modes of learning-visual,audio and kinesthetic; so to be able to teach effectively its important to be able to link modes.Be sure, one single technique won't work with the kids, so its important to innovate and adapt continuously while understanding them.Various organisations like Pratham, Akanksha,Eklavya,Teach for India have been continually working on developing personalised content for these kids. Complementing them are various useful sites like KhanAcademy.org, JodoGyan etc. which help the people working in this field to access resources and use them for effective teaching.Just a tip,in case, someone misses a class, someone from amongst the students present in the previous class can be asked to present before the class.This way, both revision  and completion of missing classes can be done simultaneously. As people are mostly obsessed about boards and JEE,etc primary education grabs very little attention. Quite understandably the primary teachers without the extensive publicity and motivation might find it frustrating at times as results take time.They motivate themselves internally by deriving happiness from little success; perhaps that's why you can see the calm faces and gauge their patience.

Well, perhaps I could go on detailing the things we did but that won't be of much use for what works for one needn't work for another.We have to understand that they are a bunch of creative kids, we just have to give wings to their dreams. I am not an educationist or a professor to give an expert opinion about what should be done and what not. I’m a mere graduate, albeit with a teaching experience of 3 years courtesy Prayas, IIT Kanpur.This post is the result of everyone who with their efforts and/or encouraging words motivated us to dream bigger and strive harder to get it. And most importantly, a big Thank YOU to the little angels who provide doses of entertainment and happiness whenever we're down.:)
Chota baccha samajhke unko na samjhana re !

Some important links and sites:
1. http://www.khanacademy.org/ -- a brilliant site, a must see for anyone interested in getting the basics right 
2.http://www.teachforindia.org/
3. http://www.pratham.org/
4.http://eklavya.in/go/
5.http://www.akanksha.org/
6.http://arvindguptatoys.com/-- This is another masterpiece of a site where you learn to make  little toys and do small experiments cheaply and innovatively using trash items.
6.http://home.iitk.ac.in/~ag/jagriti/
7.http://realheroes.com/
8.http://students.iitk.ac.in/prayas/

The last two have been quite a support and inspiration for us whenever we've felt low and demotivated. Prayas has literally been a second home for most of us(volunteers) as we spend a lot of quality time there, discussing tidbits of education, kids and lots of personal and common issues as well.Here, we've experience care and love like never before-maybe it's the result of such prolonged association.Maybe that's why we at times tend to slip into dreams of our own- some small and some big like having a school where can make a few dreams come true,etc.Attached below is a video how we go about merging the dreams of ours and the kids at Prayas.

P.S- Thanks a lot to Sambit, Ashutosh, Ravi Bhaiya,Namita,Laxmikant, Saurabh bhaiya and everyone else working upon helping these kids live a dream.Go on. Sorry for such a long post.