At the grassroots – Dailekh

The first thing that stands out to me when I see children is their curiosity. Now, they might not be interested in learning the parts of a flower (because which 9 year-old cares about how seeds are made?) but they are curious about the world around them – why clouds move, why winter days are so short, and why they live so close to their paternal grandparents but so far from their maternal grandparents. In mid-October, I was in Dailekh for a monitoring trip from work where my team went to schools in different corners of the district.

On the first day, we sat on the ledge outside the school building at break-time. We watched as the boys carefully aligned their slippers, and played a game of catch which somehow involved breaking the arrangement of slippers and then realigning them. The girls were huddled up in smaller groups; in each, two girls had their hands arranged in different positions, fingers flayed, so that their friends could jump over their hands. As children, we used to play a similar game with long chains of rubber bands. The girls had probably modified the game because rubber bands were not so freely available to them. I was affected by the kids’ creativity.

But I was also heartbroken. Although I have been seen the poor condition of teaching-learning in rural Nepal before, I still haven’t gotten used to how disengaged the students are, how indifferent the teachers are, and how dysfunctional the whole system is. The first things that I noticed was that teachers were late to class, that they were unprepared, and that they wasted a lot of class-time.

But then we’d sit at meetings with the teachers, and other members of my team would talk about both the positive and negative aspects of the school. These meetings made me realize that although the situation of these schools was appalling to someone like me, they were a fry cry from what they were a few years back.

For one, there were toilets (separate for boys and girls). The kids were clean and mostly in uniform, which means that parents understand how important school is, and how important it is that kids be able to concentrate in school. And best of all, we got to see many happy, smiling kids, which meant that they weren’t afraid of school anymore – that their teachers weren’t hitting them.

But besides those very basic things, we saw a huge range in terms of physical infrastructure, teacher motivation, school performance and teaching-learning activities. Some of these kids go to a school with a library they regularly visit, and where job charts and classroom rules help them feel ownership of and responsibility towards their classroom. Some of the others go to schools where there is a library that children can’t access because they are not trusted with the books, and where materials are hardly ever used.

Although the students were not used to listening to and speaking in English, they sang songs frequently. One of the things I loved best about my time in Dailekh were these songs. The students would be singing children’s songs in English, but in typical Dailekh folk-song tune. My absolute favorite was the Hokey Pokey, localized.

I was pleased to see a school where class teachers stayed with the same cohort of students for three years, but equally saddened when I heard teachers calling their students “ta (तँ)” (in Nepali, different levels of respect are attached to the word “you” – “ta” is the least respectful, and children are usually called “timi (तिमी)”, which is a step above “ta”), saying that the way they were singing the song was making him fall asleep, or asking a child, rhetorically, what he had learned in the three years that he’d studied in the fifth grade. I was also saddened when I found out that even some third grade students had a hard time with the alphabets. They would recognize one letter and recite the rest of the alphabet. We showed them a card with jumbled up letters, but to them, the letter that came after a “u” was always a “v”.

I passed a first-grade Math class one day, and saw that the teacher was writing the numbers 1-100 on the board. In the next few minutes, I saw two number charts on the walls. I was so angry at how he was wasting his students’ time, but at the same time, this was a little bit comic. I went a little further from the building and laughed. Later, a colleague asked why I was laughing that day. “I laughed because I couldn’t cry,” I told him.

While spending time in the schools, I saw that some of the students had guavas for lunch, mostly picked from a tree near the school, because it was guava season. When freely-available fruits are in season, the kids have mid-day snacks. The rest of the time, they don’t eat at all between 10 am and 4 pm. I can’t blame them for not learning if their stomachs aren’t full.

On the last day, we went to a school whose ECD (Early Childhood Development) classroom was one of the most fun classrooms I have ever seen. The teacher, Mrs. Shahi, sat in a circle with her students and talked to them. One of her sessions focused on public speaking. I was spellbound by her and her students. But I had just talked to a group of third graders who did not know the name of the basic colors (red, blue, green, yellow, black, and white) in English, a language they were supposedly studying for the last three years. Although children are required to have a working knowledge of English to pass the SLC, it wasn’t their lack of proficiency in English that worried me.

Mrs. Shahi is two months younger than me, has a seven-year-old and a two-year-old, and is the best ECD teacher I’ve ever seen!

This is how a majority of kids grow up, I thought. They climb trees and share guavas with their friends, they make up games as they play and make up after they fight with each other. But inside the classroom, they sit quietly, not speaking until spoken to, not listening to the teacher as he/she lectures about a topic that seems either too close to their lives (like caste-based discrimination) or irrelevant (like the parts of a flower). And some of them don’t even have access to bathrooms.

That day, I sat down on a ledge outside a fifth-grade classroom and wiped off the quiet tears that slid down my face. I had seen the kids’ potential in their innocent smiles, in their curious gazes, and in the ways that they responded to us when we talked to them, and I knew that at most, 20% of them will reach this potential, not because the rest of them will get lazy, but because our education system will fail them, and because they won’t know that they can ask for better, that they deserve better.

Little Failures

I was a failure at age six. I appeared in an entrance exam to go one of the biggest most popular schools in Nepal, and failed. Thankfully, I passed another one of these exams and ended up going to another school, which I came to love in no time. When it was my brother’s turn, I told him to fail all his other exams, so he could study at my school too.

That was eighteen years ago. Kathmandu today has become an even more competitive place, and more children compete for each seat at leading K-12 schools. For children whose parents can afford some of the more-expensive well-reputed schools in town, life has become more and more stressful in the past few years. Now, I admit that kids who give entrance exams to these schools are some of the most privileged children in all of Nepal, but that doesn’t – shouldn’t – give us the excuse to subject them to these extremely stressful “entrance exams”.

Kindergartens teach kids to read and write and add so they can pass these exams. At five, our kids can write the English alphabets better than they should be able to because that’s how they prepare to pass these exams. In preschool, which should be about learning to be, play, and cooperate with other children, they sit at their desks and learn to differentiate b’s from d’s. In Kathmandu, preschool is not just an extension to life’s daily learning about the world’s colors and textures, but a place where you prepare for the race that you will prematurely soon enter.

But who are you going to blame? The schools in question (the big, well-reputed, famous schools) have ten-times the number of kids apply than they can accept. How do you screen them? I’m all for parent-interviews, when teachers try to find out if the parents’ goals and expectations match the school’s, but I’ve heard people criticize them passionately, saying that only the children of the richest fanciest people are accepted. The kindergarten schools are only catering to their customers. Parents often choose kindergartens based on their acceptance rates– no joke.

So… parents. When a two-and-a-half year old is asked the question, “which school will you go to?” and she answers with one of these popular names, it’s obvious that we’re doing something wrong. Your kid should not know the rankings of K-12 schools, even after (if) they end up going to one of these schools. Your kid should be taught that rankings don’t matter as much as personal characteristics and always striving to better yourself.

And you… you should remember that your kid’s school is not the only thing that will determine how they learn and how their potential is met. You matter. Your children see you (both parents, and members of the joint family, if there are any) as role models. How you talk to them, and to the other people around you, is important. How much freedom you allow them, what kind of activities you encourage and what kind of activities you engage in, are all important. Your eating habits are important, trips to the museum, or the zoo, or a hill in the outskirts of town, is not just for the school to organize, but for you to make time for. Your child’s school is responsible for their educational upbringing, but not for their overall upbringing.

I remember the second entrance exam I gave at five-and-a-half, the one I passed. They asked me to say which circle was bigger, and there was a question with a picture of a teddy-bear but I don’t remember much else. I remember writing the Nepali alphabets again in grade 1, ka, kha, ga, and forgetting the two times-table before learning in grade 2 that if one person has two eyes, then eight people have sixteen, and that’s what multiplication is.

At five, our kids don’t need to have learned anything. We need to preserve their curiosity and help them explore the world, teach them how to wipe their own bottoms and then wash their hands before they can write the a b cs.

Teacher Training week 1: Education Philosophy

I am participating in a three-month-long child-centered teacher training for the primary level, and am enjoying it a lot. My college classes in Educational Studies, which I also enjoyed a lot, focused mostly on issues in education, as opposed to pedagogy. This training focuses on teaching children in a way that is effective and enjoyable, and I hope to learn a lot.

In the first week, we studied Educational Philosophy. One of the most important things I learned was about the “Zone of Proximal Development”. This refers to the space between the child’s achievement (what he/she can do without help) and his/her potential (what he/she can do with some assistance). Tasks that are too close to the center of a child’s ZPD is too easy for them—they complete them fast and end up wasting time afterwards. Tasks that are far from the reach of a child’s ZPD frustrate them because they are not able to achieve them. Successful teachers can determine the changing ZPD of individual students and engage them accordingly.

This concept seems to be as important for other professionals who work in education as it is for teachers. The very idea of ZPD rejects the notion that children can learn at a similar pace. The concept itself also dismisses reliance on textbooks as a viable pedagogical technique.

The poem “Children Learn What They Live” by Dorothy Law Nolte really touched me. It emphasized that children learn not just from what they are taught, but also from what they see in the world around them. This means that much of learning happens outside the classroom, and that not just teachers, but parents and other caretakers need to be careful about how they deal with children. Children are shaped by the subtle things they pick up from the world around them, and the personalities that develop in childhood stay with them (and have stayed with us) throughout their (our) lives.

During the first week of training, we also talked about classroom rules and job charts. Our teacher told us that things like these increase children’s participation in and ownership of the class, and model democracy to them. In the process of making classroom rules, we also talked about the importance of avoiding negative language. For example, it is better to tell your students to “use respectful language”, as opposed to saying “don‘t swear”. “Don’t swear” emphasizes the swearing, and may cause students to be rebellious and do the very things they have been asked not to do.

School Attendance

I was asked by my alma mater (Agnes Scott College) to give a talk, via Google Hangouts on issues surrounding women and education (I am honored and stoked about it). “Women and Education” is a pretty broad topic, and I’m sure that if I wanted, I could fill up two hours of time just blabbering, but I’m choosing to do some research instead. I don’t think I need to make a case either for gender equality, or for girls’ education on this blog. Over the next three weeks, I will be posting statistic related to women’s education.

According to World Bank data, 61% of the 106 million children who were out of primary school in 1999 were girls. The gap has been shrinking gradually since then, a large gender gap continues to exist in literacy rates as well as in completion/graduation rates in all levels (primary/ secondary school, as well as tertiary education.) Almost ½ of the world’s out of school girls are in SSA, and around ¼ are in South Asia. In the last 15 years (since 1999), the number of out-of-school girls i n South Asia has decreased 58.7%, from 23 million to 9.5 million. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the number has decreased more slowly, from 25 million in 1999 to 17 million in 2008.

In this post by the World Education Blog, World Inequality Database in Education data is used to show how different countries fare in terms of educating it’s poorest women. I love this table because it talks not just about girls’ school enrollment, but focuses on poor girls, who are the most likely to be out-of-school. Here’s a picture that shows how the bottom 10 countries fare– in terms of percentage of poorest girls who have never been to school, and average numbers of years that 17-22 year old girls get in school.

Nepal is 31st – 22% of our poorest girls from age 7-16 have never been to school , and the poorest 17-22 year-old girls in Nepal have, on average, 3.2 years of schooling.

Two comments about these statistics:

1. What does “poorest” mean– poorest 5%, 10%, 20%? I’m sure there is some kind of measurement, but it would be nice if they’d told us. If it meant the poorest 5%, it would mean that only 1.1% of all girls between 7 and 16 had never been to school. If it was referring to the poorest 20%, it would mean that 4.4% of all girls between 7 and 16 had never been to school. That’s a big difference.
2. I care about the numbers more than I care about the rankings. Nepal could rank last on literacy rankings, but I would be more than happy if we had a 95% literacy rate. That would make me a lot happier than if Nepal ranked 50th and had a 90% literacy rate. It would also mean that all other countries had a literacy rate that was between 95 and 100%– what could be better?

Intersections

The day after the SLC results came out last year, I was walking home from Sundhara, looking at the Bagmati, thinking about life. At the very end of the Bagmati bridge, about a dozen feet before I turned right into my street, I saw a familiar face.

We started talking. She told me her son had failed the SLC (School Leaving Certificate, 10th grade completion exams). Though passing the SLC does not guarantee a good future (most jobs require at least a twelfth-grade or college degree) failing it means you can not go ahead in your education.

Only 41% of the students that took the SLC exams last year passed, and the exam, also called “the Iron Gate”, is such a big deal that the kids who fail end up feeling like failures. Many students do not re-take the exams. They don’t have the minimum qualification for any job, never finish their high-school degrees, and never go on to higher education. More than 50% of today’s youth go n to these futures.

I felt terrible. This woman works at the kitchen in a big school in Kathmandu to she can send her sons to a much smaller school. The whole day, and especially at Lunch time, the school where she works was probably abuzz with statistics about how many students had passed with Distinction, and how the rest passed in First Division. She, on the other hand, did not even know how many subjects her son had failed in because “our landlord, who looked on the internet said it was four, but his school says it’s just two”. She told me that she didn’t even tell him how disappointed she was because she didn’t want him to do anything stupid. Every year after the SLC results are published, we hear of students who attempt suicide, all because they didn’t pass an exam. <

And then a tear-drop slid down her cheek. She told me about some private institution said they could guarantee pass marks in every subject to that if she paid Rs. 8,000 a month ($85). “But I can't. I feel really bad, because I can't even do this much for my son.” But Rs. 8000 is enough to for food and rent for a month. These institutions that guarantee results are selling people hope for lots of money, for more money than most people can afford

"It's such a big deal for people like you to even recognize me on the street and talk to me."
"It isn't Didi," I said. "We should recognize people like you. You took care of us when we were little ." She was insistent about how my parents must have raised me with the correct values, simply because I was acknowledging her presence.

Close to one year later, I don't know exactly what her son is doing, but I know he did not go back to school. His mother tried to look for opportunities for him to work as a driver, and even open up a small shop, but didn't have enough to invest. The last I knew, she was thinking of sending him abroad to work, at a time when so many people come back in caskets from Qatar every month.

People like her, who work so hard just to make ends meet, should at least have the assurance that their kids can get a decent education, that they don't have to “invest” to give their children a secure future. The size of people's dreams does should not depend on the size of their wallets. They are the reason good public education systems are so important.