I had never been this mixed

As the months of April-may approach, one of the happiest communities will be the teacher-student community in India. Most of the schools and educational set ups go on a long summer holiday, after an year long academic work of teaching-learning. I am sure, every kid would be eagerly waiting to close the books and forget the word – ‘study’. In fact, as I was recently talking to one of my student’s mother, I learnt how this little girl is gearing up for a party the day right after her exams – she and her friends are sweating it all out having rounds of rehearsals of dances, songs and dramas for the party!  In any conventional school, although March is marked with a lot of hectic cumulative assessment/evaluation work for the teachers, the only motivating piece of cheese for them is the two months long vacation that they will be looking forward to!

With this mood around, as I was closing my academic year last week, taking the last few classes and wishing all the kids the very best for their assessments in their schools, I was in tears along with my kids many a times. One obvious reason is of course the fact that I am going to be missing them for the next few months. But, what made this all the more difficult was the possibility of I not taking any more classes for these kids at all. With a notion that I will be able to contribute at a bigger scale and solve some of the pressing problems for the community, I am planning to study further. Although this is being planned for my good to scale up and spread my wings, it is making it very difficult at times to leave what I have been doing for almost five years, trying to build a system of math learning and getting children to experience Math like never before. I don’t know if I should settle contented with what I am doing, or aspire to do more. Or should this aspiration compulsorily get tied up with pursuing higher education? Is there any other way of contributing and making a difference to the community? As of now, the only option that is coming to my mind is to study further, stand out and have meaningful initiatives that make a difference to the learners-teachers across the world. After all, there is another addition to why I am doing this – I need to join my beloved husband who has been away studying for almost 8 months. It is definitely going to be a very joyful moment for both of us to catch up after such a long time. Yet, I not getting to teach the kids, not being an active part of teaching-learning space for at least a couple of years is something I am forced to come to terms with! Truly, I had never felt this mixed.

It is not the concepts that are easy or difficult, but how you present them!

“It is not the concepts that are easy or difficult, but how you present them!” – I remember reading it somewhere, long back. And every time I shared this view with other teachers, the last of the things they would do was trusting that it works! Even the teachers at non-conventional set ups were good only to look high upon this idea but not really daring to take this to their classrooms, to their students. This is what made me write this, sharing my recent experience teaching a seven year old prime and composite numbers.

As we were discussing multiplication, it was really fascinating to see how this second grade child Samir was so comfortable multiplying every time. I could celebrate almost every time I posed a question to him for the way he would adopt different strategies to compute – like when asked 14 taken seven times – he told that he would do 10 taken 7 times, and then add it with 4 taken seven times. After a few more similar rounds, I threw 19 taken 4 times at him. This time, like any other teacher I expected him to just extend the same procedure and replace the numbers. But to my surprise, he simply took 20 four times and subtracted 4! I was instantaneously thrilled at his capacity! And this pushed me facilitate his learning further, going beyond the conventional boundaries set by math curriculum or the schooling system!

I started asking him to generate all possible multiplication statements for a given product. This was ofcourse built on a good context of arranging his classmates during a morning assembly in equal length rows. As he successfully discovered all possible arrangements for a given number of kids, it just started becoming easier for him with time. And, here came the idea that for some number of kids such as 11, 13, 23, etc there was only two ways of arranging the kids – either one row will all, or one kid per row. And a name was later attached to these numbers – primes numbers. “But this wasn’t the same with most of the other numbers at all such as 10, 12, 15, etc” – told Samir. Appreciating the composition of these numbers, we named it composite numbers. And now, Samir is busy recognizing all the prime numbers between 1-100!

Who told that a seven year old neither can understand nor appreciate this classification of numbers!? By the way, we also discussed how 1 was an extremely unique number as the only way you can make a child stand in equal sized rows is just to make him stand! 1×1 🙂

“Try to do it on your own!”

It was one of the nights where we were switching television channels and enjoying our dinner, when I heard one of the channels airing a talk on Math teaching-learning. I was, and am still surprised – it was the Fields Medal winner Prof. Manjul Bhargav talking to Prannoy Roy at an NDTV 9 ‘O clock show.  I was enthralled what a lot of things that he shared about the current global practices in math learning, and his vision for improving the ecosystem for the better. What was laudable in his talk was the kind of details he could talk – the grain size of his details was so fine that any reasonable math teacher can comfortably understand and appreciate his views and suggestions, and probably might even be propelled to try out a few new ideas in his/her classroom the very next morning!

Out of a lot of interesting views and notions he shared, one the most gripping one was he sharing that even he didn’t enjoy the math classes is his school! This comes so close to a majority of the children ranging from grade schools to university. And the reason for this disinterest is surely something that every math teacher needs to introspect – math classes so boil down to teaching some fixed procedures, memorizing some solutions, etc that they throw no challenge to the curious brains of the children. This unfavorable perception just gets bad with time, as kids go to higher classes and the text books get fatter! The amount of information they need to know to crack math tests and exams leave children with no time to actually savor the beauty in proving a theorem themselves, or even deriving a simple formula for themselves. Learning this way, it is no surprise that majority of the children hate Math by the time they reach their high schools as Math for them would just translate to more memorization!

Along with many more thought provoking pieces, what was really exciting in the professor’s talk was the last part where he shared about this current project Gyan where a group of scientists and mathematicians are working towards enriching and empowering Math and Sciences learning. I really hope that the wait isn’t going to be too long!

“She’s spreading a lot of false news!”

“She’s spreading a lot of false news!” – said a class teacher during a parent-teacher meet. The very phrase – ‘parent-teacher meet’ or in short PTM brings in a lot of anxiety, nervousness and fear if not for all, at least a good majority. It surely takes us back to our school days when our parents would visit our school, and meet our teachers to learn about our scores in the tests. The class teacher might have had suggestions for us work hard – sometimes even quantifying how many hours to work in a day, what all to cut down on such as TV, playing games, etc. It was one such days for one of my student’s parent when they woke to to the perplexing complaint about their daughter that she is seen spreading a lot of false news and gossips about other children in the class. Now, how old do you think the child is, some one who is supposedly spreading gossips about her classmates? Is she in her early teens, college going student? Or is she a high school student? She is now opening her eyes to her 8th year of her life! She is a grade three student!

What kind of a gossip can a little child like her spread? Is it that she was making up weird stories about her friends? If she is really making some according to her teacher’s claim, what kind of stories can these really be – so serious that the class teacher had to take it to her parents, and advise them to keep a watch on that. The teacher has a very strong answer to support her claim, along with an instance to share. It was a week in her class when one of girls missed the school for a very long time, like almost 2 weeks leaving a note with the teacher that she isn’t feeling well. For the first few days, her friends curiously waited for her return. But, as the days passed by, these curious little kids couldn’t probably stand her absence – sparked off the story that their friend  ‘the missing friend is missing for a long time because she has got RAPED!’. And after a couple of days, the girl returned to the class, and was surprised to see how her friends were treating her! They weren’t sharing food with her, weren’t even smiling at her! What was more shocking to this poor child is when her best friend asked her, ‘Did you get raped?’. Deeply hurt, this girl immediately went weeping to her class teacher and told her that her friends think that she was raped! The very moment, the class teacher got into the class and discussed with the girls and found out the source person who started off this dangerous thread! And it all led to that one little, an innocent girl in the class who had no clue about what rape is, but knew that small children of her age usually encounter this in the school! She also thought that rapes would lead girls like her turn unwell for long! And thus she justified how she thought her friend was raped when she wasn’t seen in the school for long.

Certain recent events in the schools, apart from damaging the lives of a few girls directly, can also be a source of other inadvertent effects like these! Gone are those days when mothers would have a talk with their daughters about private matters when the girl child was 14-15 years old. Children now, as young as 6-8 years need to be given a talk on “Good touch, Bad touch”! I just hope the requirement for such an education won’t slip further into younger age groups in the days to come!

Finally here!

Where do I start from? What should I start with? The most sorted, not so great way – to google what do others usually start with! Or for a beginner like me (entering the shop really late, while many of them are already done shopping), to google what people usually write on their blog might also be a very obvious suggestion! I am sure my search pages will be overloaded with numerous examples for me, making it too trite for me to try! Not to complicate, I want to keep this blog simple – to share ‘anything’ that may mean ‘something, everything or nothing’.

What really pushed me to start off blogging today was my visit to a few government run schools at Hoskote, which comes under the rural Bangalore. At about 10 a.m., as the town was getting up, children were there at the schools, some playing, some praying!  Having witnessed teaching-learning at the high school mathematics classes for the entire day, I feel so full with so many questions, thoughts and concepts at the end of the day.  Was there real facilitating, or did children just copy down the problems solved on the board? Did every child get the logic of the ‘problem’ discussed? To be precise, what percentage of the students were really pushed into thinking analytically? Are we making math relevant for their life, or it is simply another subject in their textbooks? Was there ‘real care’ taken in making sure every child falls in love with math? As I am reflecting on these, what also confounds me is the size of learning, the three thousand odd high schools across Karnataka. I don’t dare to think beyond Karnataka at this point of time.

But, not to forget the lovely children. The love and the respect they showered at us surely made it very hard for me not to teach them. In spite of dealing with various social elements such as poverty, little or no access to good infrastructure, illiterate parents; their energy and enthusiasm was mind blowing. Teach them anything, and they would take it. I guess this is true with all the children, always. My last question for the day – what do I really have to offer these kids? What do we have to contribute to their lives?