Teaching in India

by Rachel Kruft Welton

Somewhere in the blurry past I must have made the decision to teach in India, but thinking back I can't quite remember how it came about. I think it must have been one of my eight year olds who persuaded me, with the enthusiasm of small people completely devoid of any actual idea about what ‘Going to India’ really means. I threatened them with the heat, humidity, monsoon season, nasty intestinal episodes, biting insects, over-enthusiastic stallholders and the strong aroma of elephant dung, but somehow they remained resolutely undeterred.

The school in which I taught is called BLD Public School. It serves children from nursery age to 15 years old. The outside was very orange. Everyone was friendly, from the gate guard to the Principal and her son, who also worked there. There were three storeys. The recently refurbished ground floor was well decorated, with bright murals on the walls. The nursery rooms themselves were full of new toys and there seemed to be enough teachers to go around. The first floor had younger children - up to Year 4 (age 8) - and the second floor had kids up to Year 10. These floors, I was told, were due to be refurbished soon. They looked very shabby, with damaged paintwork and ageing infrastructure.

Each classroom had a set of metal framed desks and a blackboard (or piece of black-painted wall). There was nothing else except a ceiling fan. The rooms did not have lighting. Chalk was fetched, if needed. Each ‘year’ consisted of about 25 children who remained in the same classroom all day. The teachers went from place to place.

Year 10 drew the short straw in this arrangement, as their ‘classroom’ was a partitioned area at the head of the stairs. It was so cramped that the desks touched the front wall and the teacher unavoidably blocked the view of the board by standing in the only available spot between the two desks at the front.

Teaching in India seems very different from the UK. I am used to teaching practically, being a science teacher. I like my lessons to be hands on, practical lessons, with the children actively participating in their learning - drawing, writing and making things. The Indian method, by contrast, is much more bookish. They read the textbook, then they might do some questions from it, if they have something to write on and something to write with. Not all the students do, though. Some students share a notebook, others just come to listen.

The text books themselves are incredibly detailed. Certainly for science the level of detail required, even at year 10, is not introduced until A level in Britain. What I am used to teaching seems horribly simplistic compared to the textbook learning they do here. British children wouldn't stand a chance, as they have forgotten how to rote learn from books. On the other hand, Indian children do so much passive learning that they struggle to produce anything from their own creativity. They will copy, but cannot annotate.

Additionally, for historical reasons, English is seen as ‘better’ than Hindi or Tagalog or Gujurati, despite the fact that this is what the children speak primarily. All this bookish learning is done in English. How much is understood, and how much memorised and regurgitated when asked, is debatable.

Finally, to add to the woes of this impoverished school, there appeared to be three teachers between six classes on the top floor where I was teaching. The instructions were written on the board and the class was left to get on with it. Amazingly they did. This wouldn't work in the UK.

The first day I went there, the monsoon had been the night before. The roads were flooded and we had to wade (knee deep) the last few hundred yards.

‘You can teach Class VII,’ said the co-ordinator as she showed me to their room.

‘What should I teach today?’ I asked, thinking it was a reasonable question.

‘Anything you like,’ came the answer as she left.

I was now alone with a world of possibilities, a sea of curious faces and a jabbering of questions from the children. Maybe that approach works if all you do is open the textbook and read, but my Ofsted conditioning wouldn’t let me do it. I wonder how the just-out-of-college backpacker, clutching a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificate, would cope. Even as a seasoned teacher, that baptism of fire was daunting.

Fortunately I had some photos of my school and the kids to break the ice. By the time I taught them the following day, I had some ideas for lessons, so it was easier. I suspect half the TEFL backpackers would be heading for the hills after the first day, but we hung in there. The kids were lovely, and I quite enjoyed it. They were eager and well-mannered, which makes a pleasant change from some of the children I teach at home!

The school organised a trip out, I think as part of the Independence Day celebrations. We paid our money and joined the 50 or so students on the bus. The place we went to was north of Delhi, so it took a couple of hours to get there. It has the bizarre name of Fun and Food Village, though I really don't know where the 'food' bit came into it, unless you count the snack stalls or the fairground ride where toddlers could be propelled around a track inside a giant plastic cucumber. Fun was much more in evidence. The place was basically a funfair attached to an aqua-splash park, with everything from water slides to wave machines. It was the first real entertainment we'd had since we got here. After a compere-style warm up in the car park, where students were expected to sing a song or dance, we were finally allowed in. We had a go on a few fairground rides, but soon headed for the pools.

Swimming isn't big in India and pretty much everyone rented costumes. The Western version of a women's swimming costume is considered risqué. A bikini (not that I would be seen dead in one) is positively obscene. Indian costumes have short sleeves, a frilly skirt and short leggy bits to conceal the thighs. I just wore a pair of shorts over my costume, and no-one seemed to mind.

At various points the music would start up and the teenagers would all start dancing in the pool by the arena. It was nice to see them unselfconsciously dancing to Indian pop, knee-deep in water, being sprayed with jets from a plastic palm tree, as if they were in Malibu or somewhere.

At home I swim all the time and both Donny and Mel can swim too. Some of the girls noted this and asked if we could teach them to swim as well. Our outing turned into an impromptu swimming lesson. Another child said she was getting the hang of swimming, as she had now been to this place twice in her life.

There was more dancing, singing, compering and a round of musical chairs. It was won by one of the teachers, because the students were too polite to boot her out of the way to get the vacant seats. Then it was time to leave. We all received a gift of a pen from the Fun and Food Village. All the adults also received a plastic plate with the logo on.

The bus ride home was picnic time. All the kids got out their rice, chapattis, spiced dahl and so on. The teachers handed out crisps and cups of Coke (disastrously messy on a jolting bus).

When we got back I discovered that we were all sunburnt again, adding to the area of skin that I'd previously damaged. Next day I read in the paper that it had been ‘unseasonably cold’ at a mere 30C, a whopping four degrees below average. It is no wonder we burnt, yet not surprising that I thought we wouldn't. It is amazing how fast you acclimatise. I was now peeling as if I had a dodgy skin disease, except for my blistered shoulder which looked like it had the skin of a shiny red rhino.

On another day, our host and volunteer co-ordinator, Vishy, suggested we spent some time at the all-girls orphanage over in Sector 15. This is mostly a well off neighbourhood so the orphanage is surrounded by large houses and spacious parks. There are 85 girls there, some with extended family in the city, others with sponsors and some with no-one but the other girls. Contact with the outside world is kept to a minimum, so life revolves around the orphanage.

Usually there are classes during the day followed by religious observance, but today was a festival, so there was a lot of milling around going on. Rooms are multi-functional. Bedrooms, the dining room and the main hall all double as classrooms. The kids make their own clothes from donated remnants and the orphanage is well supplied with six sewing machines. There is a TV in the main hall, which the girls gather round to watch. There is also a room with three computers, though they aren't connected to the internet, and a collection of books, though I didn't see anyone reading them. I saw this again and again here: they didn't use what little resources they had.

I also wonder if the kids really know how to play. Even outside the orphanage, kids start school before they are two. They are taught to hold a pen in hands that have hardly learnt to grasp. The academic cramming doesn't let up until after university, but it is all rote learning. After school classes the orphanage kids have nothing to play with, but they seem unwilling to use their imaginations instead. My kids would happily create a whole castle out of a set of stairs or a spaceship out of a bed. The orphanage girls just milled about, bored, listless and unable to alter their situation. It was heartbreaking and disturbing. It was a much deeper malaise that just having nothing to play with. They had had no-one to show them how to play. They lacked that adult attention that stimulates curiosity and wonder. They were not intellectually challenged.

Do you remember the state of the Romanian orphanages after the fall of Ceaucescu? Neglected children had been tied to their cots, some for years. There was a huge rush to adopt, but this sort of abuse takes its toll on the mind. Younger children (less than two years old) readjusted and grew up mostly unaffected. Older children, however, couldn't shake off the effects of abuse and exhibited what looked like autistic spectrum disorders (though it probably has a posh name). I'm not suggesting this all-girls orphanage abuses the kids in any way. They do their best for them, but there is still a social and emotional deficit, which is leaving the children hollow, and you could feel it when you walk around.

The older girls go out to a girls' high school, but are not allowed to have friends back or to visit friends' houses. They are kept away from the opposite sex and modern influences. They know nothing of drugs or politics or even how to use money.

They are lacking in life skills. From an early age they are taught that an arranged marriage leads to happiness and a ‘love’ marriage leads to divorce. Nearly all marriages are arranged here, and the orphanage provides this one last service before letting the girls go. Local boys’ families are attracted to the girls because of their assured purity and submissive conditioning.

The orphanage takes in girls that have been abandoned or orphaned. There are many more abandoned girls for cultural reasons. Girls are undervalued here. The dowry they require makes girls expensive to raise and marry off. Many baby girls simply disappear; so many in fact, that the gender ratio is skewed to nearly 40:60 in favour of boys. That is one shocking statistic. By those figures, these girls are the lucky ones.

After our visit to the orphanage, I formed a cunning plan. The school’s dining room was in a shabby state. An estate agent would have described it as ‘in need of modernisation’. Basically it hadn't been decorated in 30 years by the look of it. The paintwork and even the plaster had been eroded away by the passage of time and hundreds of small people brushing against it. I reckoned a couple of days work and a lick of paint would sort out the majority of the mess.

The other volunteers were up for it and Vishy cleared it with the woman who ran the orphanage. We got hold of sand paper, and putty for the cracks, and set to work, whilst a hundred brown eyes peering at us through the windows. In the end only Alexis (a volunteer from America) was able to help me, Mel and Donny with the work. We raised a hell of a dust sanding the flakey bits off the walls. A painter and decorator here would develop respiratory problems in no time if they worked in that dust and grit every day. Donny and Mel looked like ghosts, their faces and hair coated.

The putty was a mix-it-yourself job from powder. We didn't have enough so we just filled in the largest holes and cracks and left the rest to get painted over. Several girls helped us clean up the dust bath we had created. We had to wipe every surface.

We left the painting until the next day for a number of reasons - the biggest of which was that we had no paint. Instead we set up an art class in the big hall. Earlier in the day we'd been down to the stationer's shop (a backstreet cavern where we could only peer at the wares across the counter which blocked the way in). For the cost of about a fiver, we got enough colouring pads and sketch books for 85 girls to be well entertained.

Well, the first few kids were a bit tentative but after they got settled in and started colouring more and more joined in and the class took on a life of its own. I take back my earlier statement about the kids not being able to play. They need things to play with and someone to organise and encourage them, then they are quite capable of playing. What I'm unsure of is whether they will play with the resources they squirrelled away if there is no-one there to motivate them. I wonder if they will just hoard the pens and colours and stampers in their lockers instead of using them.

We went on a hunt for paint in the Sector 15 market. We finally ended up at Pooja Paints, run by a pair of Sikh brothers. For five amazing minutes it was like being in a modern hardware store. We could choose colour from a catalogue and the paint machine mixed it for us. Donny and Mel chose "Peach Passion" for the walls, which went nicely with the brown and orange tiles already there.

Back at the orphanage we made an extension for the roller from a piece of bamboo. Alexis did the rolling and I did the edging. Mel and Donny did a bit of both and really got stuck in. We got about two-thirds of the way around the room before we ran out of paint and had to go and get some more. Alexis, Donny and Mel decided they'd had enough for the day and went off to play with the girls. I carried on edging the ceiling, standing on tiptoe, balanced on a table.

Some of the girls came in. Manju, who was 15 years old, said : ‘Can you help me?’

I said: ‘Do you mean “Can you help me?”’

She looked understandably confused and I could feel the conversation slipping into the surreal, so I handed her a roller and showed her how to put paint on it. She got the hang of it really quickly and only hit the ceiling the first couple of times; she was really careful.

After that I had so many girls slapping paint, on with more enthusiasm than accuracy, that I had to employ the ones without brushes as splatter-removers. I gave them a bit of rag each to rub off the excess paint around door frames, tiles and off the floor. It was a hive of industry. I think it is hugely important for the girls to have contributed to their own environment - to 'own' the process of improvement.

We went back the next day to finish off the last bits. Alexis started painting the door a deep orange with gloss as thin as water. It got everywhere. I drew round all the kids’ hands with markers to make a snake across the back wall. I wrote their names in each one. It looked really good. I finally feel I have achieved something here - maybe, just maybe, for a brief snapshot in time we have made a small difference to these girls' lives.

**

After we returned from India, we decided to raise funds for the orphanage. I had spoken with Vishy and he listed other items needed, such as air conditioning units, clothing and sheets. Even then, this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what they really need. The list of essentials Vishy gave me would cost around £1200.

Subsequently, my kids' school had an auction of the harvest festival produce and this has raised £368. By February 2009, Alexis raised over £2000 with a fund-raising evening, which kitted the orphanage out well for the moment. My kids' school raised another £50 and the school I work for raised £50. The £100 has gone to buy a computer for a group which treats people with leprosy.

First published in VISA 87 (Oct 2009)