(An old post from my previous blog: posted on February 16th, 2006)
In this post, I would like to explain what I would like to do in near future based on my experience with Muskaan.
Keeping other things apart, the basic take away from Muskaan is that the basic primary school education is terribly poor. In some schools, there are no teachers for some subjects. In some schools, even if there are teachers, they do not teach at all. Its a government job and there is no one to monitor what the teachers teach. I also feel due to corruption many unqualified and untrained teachers get jobs.
The education standards of the kids in Muskaan is very bad and they all go to government schools. Kids who are in 4th class do not know how to read sentences while their textbooks are fairly complex with essays and poems. Last year we had a 7th standard student and if we give dictation from a 2nd class or 3rd class textbook he cannot write. What I am talking is about telugu which is their medium of teaching. The situation of english is horrible. Some students in 4th standard still dont know how to write small alphabets. These examples depict the plight of government school education.
I am not blaming the Government for the situation. I did some searching about this on the internet and I could collect some facts. The Government successfully increased the number of school and the number of kids attending school.
"From the first plan until the beginning of the sixth (1951-80), the percentage of the primary school-age population attending classes more than doubled. The number of schools and teachers increased dramatically. Middle schools and high schools registered the steepest rates of growth. The number of primary schools increased by more than 230 percent between 1951 and 1980. During the same period, however, the number of middle schools increased about tenfold. The numbers of teachers showed similar rates of increase. The proportion of trained teachers among those working in primary and middle schools, fewer than 60 percent in 1950, was more than 90 percent in 1987" (http://www.indianchild.com/primary_secondary_education_india.htm)
The Government is successful in increasing the numbers. But this needs to be taken to the next step to increase the quality of the education in these school.
I have only the question but not the answer. In fact, even if I motivate a group of people say 25 to work on this problem and lets us say we give it a time-line of 25 years, at the end of 25 years we should increase the standard of education in these schools, I still dont know how to approach this problem. Its because the government education system is highly coupled with politics and government policies and changing it would mean a change on all these spheres. Also the number of government schools is huge and the change should be properly propagated. But since the numbers of so huge, any change would mean tremendous impact.
Although I dont have a concrete solution, I have some crazy, impractical ideas about this.
- Pointing fingers: We can report to the government about the plight of the schools in terms of unqualified teachers, insufficient number of teachers and the irresponsibility of teachers. Here comes the crazy part. This can be done in a very dramatic way (taking inspiration from various news channels) with hidden cameras. These teachers should be exposed to public and thrown out of jobs. There are so many qualified unemployed youth who can fill these posts. A survey can be conducted by visiting these schools and taking opinions from the students. I know its crazy!
- Collective Responsibility: Instead of blaming the teachers or the system for the poor condition of the education standard, everyone of us can act on it and contribute our part towards the cause. Take a city like Hyderabad where there are so many software professionals (IT hub) and innumerable students (many engineering colleges and universities). If even 10-20% of these people can be influenced and motivated, each school can be adopted by a group and by taking turns they can teach in these schools. I know this approach is not scalable, but at least we can change the situation in the schools in and around Hyderabad. I know, I know its not practical!!
The problems I explained here are just a tip of the iceberg. I am not a pessimist but still there are many other problems like: lack of facilities in the hostels run by government for students, child labor, lack of sanitation, corruption, lack of monitoring for exams etc.
Bottom line: I am still looking for a proper approach and solution for the questions I raised above. Hopefully in this life, I will be able to provide my contribution of two cents towards this.
Comments:
saikrishna Says:
February 23rd, 2006 at 12:09 pm
“I will be able to provide my contribution of two cents towards this.”
You are doing a splendid job and the intiative is what that is required for this nation, sooner or later people will join.
I dont have a solution to the problem you have but i would like to add that the conditions are no better in private schools. The serious problem is that teacher which is the most respected job in the ancient indian society is now taken up by people who really don’t understand its significance. I have seen many teachers who hate teaching but still work as teachers. How good is learning if you can’t apply your knowlege?
We should aim at eliminating functional illiteracy and not just illiteracy from the nation for allround development. The main problem from my perspective is in our typical indian minds which are always insecure. When you are willing to work hard no profession is bad and money is not the only measure of success.
Finally, let me finish the comment with “I wish to contribute to the project”. I wish to replicate the same project in my village when i return.
Showing posts with label Teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Teaching. Show all posts
Thursday, May 22, 2008
My experiences with Muskaan -- Philosophy and Hardships
(An old post on my previous blog: posted on February 16th, 2006)
In my previous post, I wrote a brief history of Muskaan. In this post I want to discuss more about what are the aim and philosophy of this initiative and the problems we faced (and still facing) in running an activity like Muskaan.
Recently, I was talking to an group of enthusiasts called Bharat Uday Mission and I wanted to share my experiences with them. Then the first question posed to me was "what is the mission and philosophy of Muskaan?". I was taken back by the question for a moment because when we started to work for Muskaan we never sat and thought about these things. We just wanted to help these kids to the best of our abilities and utilizing the resources which are in our reach. Even though we did not sit and frame the goal and philosophy of Muskaan, to me the following can be said as its motto.
The main motivation for Muskaan is that these the kids, who are disadvantaged due to their economic and social background, do not have suitable environment at home and school for their proper development. Most of the parents of these kids are daily laborers and workers who are not educated. These kids go to Government schools which have lot of problems like lack of proper teachers and lack of proper teaching. Through Muskaan we want to create the necessary environment which helps them both educationally and socially. We teach subjects like English, Telugu and Maths. In addition to it, we have G.K. classes, yearly annual day celebrations, competitions etc which add fun part to their studying.
Another goal of Muskaan is to tell kids the importance of going to school and if there are any school drop-outs, making sure that they go back to school. Initially, we used to insist on this and take kids who go to regular school because we strongly believe that Muskaan can never be a substitute for a regular school. However due to various things, we have some kids who are school drop-outs. We tried to convince their parents to put them back to school. But since they are basically migrant, its not possible. Things stopped at this.
As the tag line of Muskaan: "Muskaan in my life" aptly explains whatever I articulated, we just want to fill smiles in their life. Now comes the hard part, the problems we face while running Muskaan.
- Volunteers: Initially the main problem is to get volunteers to support this initiative. Volunteers form the core part of running Muskaan. During the initial days, most of the volunteers were my lab-mates or batch mates or friends on campus. As days went, more and more people got interested and it because a big group. Typically, a volunteers stays with Muskaan for about 6 months to 1 year depending on their workload and in which year of study they are.
The main problem is not get people signed up for Muskaan, but make them work for Muskaan. On paper, there might be 20-30 volunteers registered but of them about 7-8 people will do the whole work. Since its a collective activity by all the volunteers, co-operation and sincerity among the volunteers is very important. Even today, we have about 80 volunteers registered. But over last few weeks there were some days on which Muskaan classed did not happen because all the volunteers who are supposed to go on a particular day, abscond themselves and do not inform about it to others.
The bottom line is that quantity is not important but dedication and motivation of the volunteers is atmost important. Since they work for Muskaan on a volunteer basis, we cannot demand any such qualities from them and they should come from within themselves. I was part of Muskaan when there used to 7-8 volunteers and at that time things went very smoothly because all the volunteers are well-motivated and responsible towards Muskaan. Today although we have 80 volunteers, I should say things are not going as well as they should.
- Kids: Another major problem we face with Muskaan is the set of kids we deal with. Some of the kids' parents are migrant laborers who visit cities like Hyderabad for work when there is no harvest in the village. When harvest season arrives, they go back to their village. Hence its not possible for these kids to join a regular school in their village nor in the city. Therefore, the set of kids we deal with constantly changes. Of course, there are about 5-6 kids who are there with Muskaan right from its beginning but this is an exception.
- Substitute for regular school?: Initially, we used to enroll only those kids who are going to regular school during the day. This is because we strongly believe that Muskaan can never be a substitute for a regular school since the amount of time these kids spend in Muskaan is about 2-3 hours. We only try to help them with their regular school syllabus. This was our mind set when we got started. But to our surprise, the standards of these kids were very poor. A fourth class student who have poems and proses in his english textbook can hardly spell even simple words. So we had start from basics. We had to start teaching alphabets, simple words, basic arithmetic etc. It was not possible to follow any specific syllabus. We decided upon some basic syllabus for each subject and had been following it. One of the problem here is that the kids keep on forgetting what was taught before. Especially if there is a vacation of 1 or 2 weeks, the kids simply forget everything that has been done previously. As a result, most of the kids are still learning what they were learning a year back or so. Most of the time is spent in revising the old syllabus.
This problem is aggravated by the fact that everyday a different person teaches the kids and its not the same person. At least we have seen to that for each subject the volunteers are fixed and hence guaranteeing some continuity. Even then it becomes difficult to communicate to the next slot volunteers what is done in the previous slot. As of today, we dont know how to handle the syllabus and the continuity problems.
- Method and mode of teaching: Since the set of volunteers keeps changing, different volunteers might teach kid in a different way. For instance, if we were to each addition, one volunteer teaches kid to add using fingers. Another volunteers teaches by drawing vertical lines on the book and yet another using small stones. At the end of it, the kid who is learning addition for the first time, get confused. It might be possible for the volunteers to meet and decide upon how to teach a particular aspect. But doing it regularly for each and every topic would hamper the interest of the volunteers in Muskaan. Therefore, we need some guidelines in the form of printed material as to how to teach small kids things like basic maths, sentence structures etc.
Bottom line: I am still learning based on my past experiences and hopefully will be able to come up with a model to solve the above problems.
In my previous post, I wrote a brief history of Muskaan. In this post I want to discuss more about what are the aim and philosophy of this initiative and the problems we faced (and still facing) in running an activity like Muskaan.
Recently, I was talking to an group of enthusiasts called Bharat Uday Mission and I wanted to share my experiences with them. Then the first question posed to me was "what is the mission and philosophy of Muskaan?". I was taken back by the question for a moment because when we started to work for Muskaan we never sat and thought about these things. We just wanted to help these kids to the best of our abilities and utilizing the resources which are in our reach. Even though we did not sit and frame the goal and philosophy of Muskaan, to me the following can be said as its motto.
The main motivation for Muskaan is that these the kids, who are disadvantaged due to their economic and social background, do not have suitable environment at home and school for their proper development. Most of the parents of these kids are daily laborers and workers who are not educated. These kids go to Government schools which have lot of problems like lack of proper teachers and lack of proper teaching. Through Muskaan we want to create the necessary environment which helps them both educationally and socially. We teach subjects like English, Telugu and Maths. In addition to it, we have G.K. classes, yearly annual day celebrations, competitions etc which add fun part to their studying.
Another goal of Muskaan is to tell kids the importance of going to school and if there are any school drop-outs, making sure that they go back to school. Initially, we used to insist on this and take kids who go to regular school because we strongly believe that Muskaan can never be a substitute for a regular school. However due to various things, we have some kids who are school drop-outs. We tried to convince their parents to put them back to school. But since they are basically migrant, its not possible. Things stopped at this.
As the tag line of Muskaan: "Muskaan in my life" aptly explains whatever I articulated, we just want to fill smiles in their life. Now comes the hard part, the problems we face while running Muskaan.
- Volunteers: Initially the main problem is to get volunteers to support this initiative. Volunteers form the core part of running Muskaan. During the initial days, most of the volunteers were my lab-mates or batch mates or friends on campus. As days went, more and more people got interested and it because a big group. Typically, a volunteers stays with Muskaan for about 6 months to 1 year depending on their workload and in which year of study they are.
The main problem is not get people signed up for Muskaan, but make them work for Muskaan. On paper, there might be 20-30 volunteers registered but of them about 7-8 people will do the whole work. Since its a collective activity by all the volunteers, co-operation and sincerity among the volunteers is very important. Even today, we have about 80 volunteers registered. But over last few weeks there were some days on which Muskaan classed did not happen because all the volunteers who are supposed to go on a particular day, abscond themselves and do not inform about it to others.
The bottom line is that quantity is not important but dedication and motivation of the volunteers is atmost important. Since they work for Muskaan on a volunteer basis, we cannot demand any such qualities from them and they should come from within themselves. I was part of Muskaan when there used to 7-8 volunteers and at that time things went very smoothly because all the volunteers are well-motivated and responsible towards Muskaan. Today although we have 80 volunteers, I should say things are not going as well as they should.
- Kids: Another major problem we face with Muskaan is the set of kids we deal with. Some of the kids' parents are migrant laborers who visit cities like Hyderabad for work when there is no harvest in the village. When harvest season arrives, they go back to their village. Hence its not possible for these kids to join a regular school in their village nor in the city. Therefore, the set of kids we deal with constantly changes. Of course, there are about 5-6 kids who are there with Muskaan right from its beginning but this is an exception.
- Substitute for regular school?: Initially, we used to enroll only those kids who are going to regular school during the day. This is because we strongly believe that Muskaan can never be a substitute for a regular school since the amount of time these kids spend in Muskaan is about 2-3 hours. We only try to help them with their regular school syllabus. This was our mind set when we got started. But to our surprise, the standards of these kids were very poor. A fourth class student who have poems and proses in his english textbook can hardly spell even simple words. So we had start from basics. We had to start teaching alphabets, simple words, basic arithmetic etc. It was not possible to follow any specific syllabus. We decided upon some basic syllabus for each subject and had been following it. One of the problem here is that the kids keep on forgetting what was taught before. Especially if there is a vacation of 1 or 2 weeks, the kids simply forget everything that has been done previously. As a result, most of the kids are still learning what they were learning a year back or so. Most of the time is spent in revising the old syllabus.
This problem is aggravated by the fact that everyday a different person teaches the kids and its not the same person. At least we have seen to that for each subject the volunteers are fixed and hence guaranteeing some continuity. Even then it becomes difficult to communicate to the next slot volunteers what is done in the previous slot. As of today, we dont know how to handle the syllabus and the continuity problems.
- Method and mode of teaching: Since the set of volunteers keeps changing, different volunteers might teach kid in a different way. For instance, if we were to each addition, one volunteer teaches kid to add using fingers. Another volunteers teaches by drawing vertical lines on the book and yet another using small stones. At the end of it, the kid who is learning addition for the first time, get confused. It might be possible for the volunteers to meet and decide upon how to teach a particular aspect. But doing it regularly for each and every topic would hamper the interest of the volunteers in Muskaan. Therefore, we need some guidelines in the form of printed material as to how to teach small kids things like basic maths, sentence structures etc.
Bottom line: I am still learning based on my past experiences and hopefully will be able to come up with a model to solve the above problems.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
My experiences with Muskaan -- Intro
(An old post from my previous blog: posted on February 15th, 2006)
I am part of a group called "Muskaan" which teaches kids of slums near IIIT in the evenings. This post gives an introduction and logistics of Muskaan.
About two years I joined a group called "Muskaan" which started just then. One of our professor Dr. Prosenjit Gupta took the initiative of teaching kids of near slums of IIIT in the evening. He called me and asked if any students in IIIT will be interested. I spoke to my fellow Ph.D. and MS students and was able to group about 9 people.
For a long time, I was very much interested in doing something for the poor and economically disadvantaged people. I was very happy to part of Muskaan and serve these kids. In the initial days, we used cow shed of a man who owns cattle. Kids used to reach there by 5:00 PM and we conduct classes till 8:00 PM. Initially, our biggest challenge was to make these kids come to Muskaan regularly. We used to give them intensives like chocolates, books etc and conduct fun classes like story telling etc to evoke interest towards Muskaan.
By the end of 2-3 months, we had about 25-30 kids in Muskaan. Then something went wrong: we were asked to vacate the cow shed we used to use. Then we shifted to another room which was across the street of the old place. Things went fine for about month or two and again due to some problems, we had to vacate even that room. We then approached a school in Indira Nagar to use their classrooms in the after hours of their school. The school people were more than happy to give us the place. This also didn't last for long. We were again thrown out for no reason.
At this, we thought we had to close down Muskaan. We even conducted classes under a tree on the side of the road. Then finally, Muskaan moved to IIIT which is its permanent location. IIIT's old canteen which is located very close the main gate was given by the institute to support this initiative.
Everyday kids collect at two pick-up points. Volunteers collect these kids at 4:45 PM and bring to IIIT for classes and again drop them back at the pick-up points at the end of the day. We have currently about 20 kids. Recently there was an overwhelming response from volunteers and we have about 80 volunteers who signed up for Muskaan. Muskaan is also part of IIIT standard curriculum where in UG students can join Muskaan for a semester and get one credit of extra curricular activities.
I am part of a group called "Muskaan" which teaches kids of slums near IIIT in the evenings. This post gives an introduction and logistics of Muskaan.
About two years I joined a group called "Muskaan" which started just then. One of our professor Dr. Prosenjit Gupta took the initiative of teaching kids of near slums of IIIT in the evening. He called me and asked if any students in IIIT will be interested. I spoke to my fellow Ph.D. and MS students and was able to group about 9 people.
For a long time, I was very much interested in doing something for the poor and economically disadvantaged people. I was very happy to part of Muskaan and serve these kids. In the initial days, we used cow shed of a man who owns cattle. Kids used to reach there by 5:00 PM and we conduct classes till 8:00 PM. Initially, our biggest challenge was to make these kids come to Muskaan regularly. We used to give them intensives like chocolates, books etc and conduct fun classes like story telling etc to evoke interest towards Muskaan.
By the end of 2-3 months, we had about 25-30 kids in Muskaan. Then something went wrong: we were asked to vacate the cow shed we used to use. Then we shifted to another room which was across the street of the old place. Things went fine for about month or two and again due to some problems, we had to vacate even that room. We then approached a school in Indira Nagar to use their classrooms in the after hours of their school. The school people were more than happy to give us the place. This also didn't last for long. We were again thrown out for no reason.
 |  |
| Muskaan in the initial days | Muskaan's first annual day celebrations |
At this, we thought we had to close down Muskaan. We even conducted classes under a tree on the side of the road. Then finally, Muskaan moved to IIIT which is its permanent location. IIIT's old canteen which is located very close the main gate was given by the institute to support this initiative.
Everyday kids collect at two pick-up points. Volunteers collect these kids at 4:45 PM and bring to IIIT for classes and again drop them back at the pick-up points at the end of the day. We have currently about 20 kids. Recently there was an overwhelming response from volunteers and we have about 80 volunteers who signed up for Muskaan. Muskaan is also part of IIIT standard curriculum where in UG students can join Muskaan for a semester and get one credit of extra curricular activities.
 |  |  |
| Excited kids during the function | Volunteers with kids | Volunteers with kids |
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