The blackboard’s fun

This maximisation can be seen at the NP Coed Middle School Sangli Mess in Delhi. The exterior is gray and grim-faced,but a wall fresco in the front porch lightens the setting. Six concentric circles are drawn within each other. The inner-most and smallest circle representing ‘Mera School’,sparkles with children playing ball and a monkey on the loose. The second circle ‘Mera Shehar’ contains a leaning Qutub Minar and an imposing Red Fort. The ‘Mera Desh’ circle contains the Taj Mahal and the Himalayas and ‘Mera Sansar’ holds within it pyramids and an Eiffel tower. When Ashok Kumar,a class III teacher,asks students to point out the Taj Mahal,their eyes spin around the circles before they rest their finger on the dome. “Metro kahan hai?” receives the loudest response,with children leaping to point out the silver streak. Via six circles,these children have understood locations and distance.

Varsha Sehgal,head mistress of the school,says,“BaLA’s concepts attract children. It helps in counting.” Kumar adds,“It’s a ready-made teaching-learning aid. It helps to keep children involved.”

Squares,triangles and circles emboss doors to teach children shapes. Rules and scales run up and down walls to illustrate measurement. Blackboards are fixed at child friendly heights. The low window grills of junior classrooms are wavy and not straight,with a bolt fixed at one end. Children are encouraged to move the bolt along the grill. Kabir explains,“In Class I and II,children are expected to hold a pen and write between two lines. But finger dexterity is not always there. Writing comes from the shoulder,into the elbow,then the wrist and finally the fingers. We call this ‘pre-writing’,as it allows the same motor movements that are required of writing.”

Thousands of schools in different states have followed BaLA with varying degrees of success. Maintenance is an issue at the Sangli Mess school,with each side holding the other responsible. Kabir believes their work in a hundred schools in Gujarat has been a special success as they trained Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan engineers,teachers and administrators who have then implemented BaLA’s concepts through government and community funds. In Delhi,their work exists in 12 schools,and 925 schools received BaLA’s Guidelines for Vidyalaya Kalyan Samiti,brought out in collaboration with Delhi Government.

Local bodies have been adapting their concepts since 1997. A school in Faizabad,UP,has created an entire playground from discarded tyres. In Valsad,South Gujarat,an open-air library allows children to browse books in an informal and natural way.

The teacher is in the building.

Magic Math

They sit in rows in rapt attention as their eight-year-old classmate Ajay,chalk in hand and toes on tips,writes the seven times table. He isn’t dressed in the white shirt,blue trouser and red-socked uniform of Rajasthan schools. Ajay recently moved from Gujarat to Radawa in Pali district accompanying his father’s herd of sheep. He has been at Rajkia Prathmik Vidyalaya for just a few months,yet he has learnt his tables,with help from Educate Girls’ (EG) Creative Learning Techniques (CLT).

The project,a partnership between EG and the Rajasthan Education Initiative,started in 2005 and was seed funded by Educate Girls Globally (EGG),USA. With support from Mumbai-based philanthropic organisation Dasra,the project grew to cover all primary and upper primary schools of Pali district,they will start work in Jalore soon. Having started in 2005,EG has now expanded to 4,483 schools in 2011,serving over half a million children in rural Rajasthan.

In the 2011 census,Rajasthan is ranked 35 (last) in female literacy with 52.66 per cent. Safeena Husain,head of EG,says,“Educate Girls has helped reform government schools by improving girls’ enrollment,retention and academic performance,by leveraging existing community and government resources.”

At Rajkia Prathmik Vidyalaya,located just outside the city of Falna,140 km from Jodhpur,students sit on the floor with their Toy Story school bags pushed to the side. Rinku Goswami,EG field coordinator,asks Radha to add 3+2 on the board. Radha calculates,not by counting on her fingers,but with the Magic Calculator,which is a grid of numbers from 1 to 100. She finds the individual numbers on the grid and moves her fingers along it to arrive at the answer. Shakuntala,a teacher,says,“Through CLT,they learn better and faster. There has been a lot of improvement,especially in math.”

At another primary school in the village of Vera Boriya,on the outskirts of the city of Bali,a Gram Shiksha Sabha is in progress,in this school,which has never had electricity. Moustaches and turbans fill the silent room. The women sit outside under a makeshift canopy. The session starts with an EG coordinator reading out the names of the students who have been missing from class,shaming the father in front of the village. The gathering nods in unison and murmurs disapproval.

EG has increased girls’ enrollment in Pali district through such measures. Three blocks in the district are said to now have 99 per cent enrollment for girls. EG has succeeded in bringing girls to school through 140 trained volunteers who work within the community.

Jagdish Singh,sarpanch of the village,who worked for 14 years in Mafatlal Bangalore,and has travelled the country,delivers a taciturn message,“Send your children to school.” A man delivers the sarpanch’s message to the women waiting outside. Pawan Kaur,from behind her bandini veil,speaks passionately to the women,urging them not to keep their daughters home. Kaur’s daughter completed Class XII—she knows the advantages of education.

In a classroom,Shailendra Singh,another EG coordinator,conducts a ‘post-test’ to gauge the student’s English,math and Hindi skills. Eight-year-old Chetna comes up to the teacher’s desk,effortlessly reads the numbers,and does the addition and subtraction sums. She reads “flag”,“sun” and “lion”,moves to the reading passages and reads out aloud,“Children are the…” She wrestles with “future” and Singh helpfully prompts: “Future”. “…of the country,” Chetna says rapidly,looking up from the paper for the first time,flashing a triumphant smile.

The pre-test and post-test surveys of around 1,000 children from EG projects have shown that children reading Hindi paragraphs have gone up from 42 to 59 per cent since January 2008; English reading has increased from 15 to 43 per cent and two-digit addition and subtraction has increased from 26 to 57 per cent. Post-test results of another 18,000 plus children from the entire Pali district will be available by the end of May 2011.

EG has partnered with 10 Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas (KGBVs),government-run residential schools for girls from marginalised communities,to provide them with Life Skills lessons.

At a KGBV outside the city of Sojat,girls discuss Jeevan ke Rang. Santosh from Class VI,with sun-yellowed hair,picks a card which says: “Describe an incident when you were brave and helped others.” She replies quickly,“I was walking to school with my friends. Boys started teasing us. I told my friends not to worry. I beat them up. They never teased us again.”

The girls then take out a scrapbook,Mera Astitva Meri Pehchan (My Identity),that has illustrations and writings. Between these A4 sheets lie big dreams and vast hopes. Anu Bishnoi wants to be a cop—complete in khaki and finished with a moustache. Durga Kumari wants to be Katrina Kaif,she’s drawn the actress in trousers and with carefully coiffured hair. Neelu Mali wants to be Jhansi ki Rani. She draws a woman with blazing eyes—filling water from a hand pump. “She is helping others,” says Neelu,by way of explanation.

Vijaylaxmi,a field coordinator,adds,“The girls are more confident now. They speak freely. Parents realise school is doing their children good. We do scare them—tell them that their ration card,job card will get cancelled if their daughters stay home.”

Learning by Doing

At the Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Municipal Mumbai Public School in Worli,classes are all about sitting in circles. So whether it is picking up paint brushes and splotching red on papers,wielding scissors to make paper designs or simply reading,the children sit in one giant circle on the floor. The teacher doesn’t face the class; instead she is part of that circle.

The English-medium school,which has classes from Junior KG to class III,works in partnership with the NGO Muktangan and believes that children learn best not by studying but by doing. Muktangan,an initiative of Paragon Charitable Trust,works in close partnership with the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM). There are currently 1,700 children studying across seven MCGM schools,which work with Muktangan,with 300 students being added every year.

A teacher-student ratio of around 1:15 helps teachers to focus on each child. “The Muktangan model was started to address the shortcomings of mainstream education. The focus was to reduce the teacher-student ratio. Since our teachers and students come from the same socio-economic background,there is a better understanding and both feel at home,” says Sunil Mehta,managing trustee,Paragon Trust.

“We follow a unique model and various concepts are introduced to ensure that children enjoy the learning process. Students of junior KG have a “show and tell” section where they bring and discuss objects like toys and books. The idea is that the children must develop independent thinking through experiential learning and inquiry,” says Usha Laxman,director (resources),Muktangan.

Reading Right

At the gates of the only school in Theru Beedi village,about a hundred children gather and wave excitedly when we arrive. It has been a week since the government higher primary school closed for the summer break,but the children of this remote village of silkworm-rearers in Kanakapura taluk,Ramnagar district,Karnataka,continue to file in every morning,because,as Naveen,a bright-eyed class IV student,says,they “like to be taught”.

The school is one of 127 in the taluk adopted by the Sikshana Foundation,a non-profit that has been working with government schools in the state since 1996,and one of 50-odd schools that have secured a ‘100 per cent’ result this year as per evaluation standards of the widely-accepted Annual Status of Education Report. The ASER 2009 report found that only 32 per cent of all class IV children and 67 per cent of class VII children in rural Karnataka could read class II-level Kannada text,and that 11.1 per cent of class IV children and 38.7 per cent of class VII children could do basic division. In 50 of the schools in Kanakapura adopted by Sikshana,however,these percentages now stand at 100; surveys by external agencies and management professionals indicate the others are fast catching up.

At Theru Beedi,as children sit in circles and busy themselves with fashioning boats and cranes from paper as part of summer camp activities,headmaster Mallikarjunappa shows us into his office. A whiteboard lists goals for the academic year,among them targets for the number of pages to be written and read by each student every day. “After Sikshana came four years ago,this school has changed tremendously. For the first time in this village,there is competitive spirit among children,” he says.

To achieve 100 per cent results as per ASER standards,the three full-time teachers at Theru Beedi,besides Shilpa,a 19-year-old aspiring teacher who has been working under Sikshana’s para-teacher scheme for the last 18 months,have been paying special attention to academically weaker children and monitoring their progress.

In one of the five classrooms in the school is a neatly-stacked shelf. This is the open Sikshana library. “When we started thinking about plugging the holes in the schooling system back in 2005,we found that most children could read their textbooks,which they had already memorised,but little else. The problem was they had nothing else to read. Though the government provides books to all schools,these are usually kept locked up. So we decided to let the children choose what they’d like to read,” says V R Prasanna,CEO and programme director of Sikshana.

Sikshana operates across 400 rural schools—most of them in Karnataka–and reaches out to over 50,000 children in classes I through VII,spending as little as Rs 400 a year on each child. This money is spent on buying books,newspapers,and ‘spot prizes’ for children,besides paying for the salaries of para-teachers and an annual week-long trip to Delhi for 80-plus meritorious students.

S Sanjay,a class VII student from Theru Beedi,was part of last year’s Delhi expedition,his first trip outside his village. Inspired by the Nehru Memorial Planetarium in Delhi,Sanjay says he wants to be a scientist when he grows up. The nearest higher secondary school,15 km away,is in Maralwadi,but that doesn’t stop Sanjay from going to school regularly.

Reading may be the new hobby at Theru Beedi—the children here regularly take library books home and note their impressions in their Sikshana diaries—but it is writing that best illustrates the ‘competitive spirit’ that Mallikarjunappa spoke of. A few years ago,the children would hardly write,for fear of ‘wasting’ the only notebook provided by the government. Since Sikshana began giving them free sheets of paper,they now strive to outdo one another in writing faster and filling the most number of pages.

Shruti,a Class VII student,interrupts her bangle art to say that she has won several spot prizes. “I have won pencils,pens and even sketchpens,” she says,smoothing her long hair. The daughter of a coolie,she lives with her grandmother in Theru Beedi and never misses school.

Srilakshmi,a 32-year-old teacher,says Sikshana’s quality management programme for teachers gives teachers the support and encouragement that the system doesn’t. “We feel respected and we feel like working more,” she says.