One of my dreams which had remained unfulfilled for long was to join a Social Service Group and do some service to the downtrodden and the needy public of the country. This was kind of fulfilled on Thursday, as I joined Sanjeevani, the Social Service group in Trinfy!! I had Nanditha for company!
On Thursday afternoon, Su said that we will have an initiative in which we were to teach communicative English to 3rd and 4th standard students of Government L.P School Pongummodu. The class was on the 28th of June 2008 Saturday. Reaching office back at 01:00 am on Saturday morning, reaching the School at 09:30 was a distant dream. But I had the resolve to get up at 07:45, and freshened up and reached the school by 09:45.. And the reason for being late being the torrid weather. On reaching school, we were told that the students were lesser than the number that we had asked for, the reason being the hartal on the previous day! (God save Kerala from these hartals!!!). We were a group of 7 (Indu, Suja, Reena, Nanditha, Suhana, Jayakrishnan and myself). By 10:00 the kids started pouring in, and we had 28 kids in the range of 1st to the 6th standards and we started the sessions.
It was so heartening to hear the kids say “Good Morning Teacher” in unison and in tune which even A.R.R cannot orchestrate. This was the first of this kind I was doing, and I basically had some fear in doing this kind of stuff. On seeing their joyful faces, I quickly settled in and we had a quick round of intro of ourselves and the kid who first came and introduced himself was promised a chocolate. And we had Akhilesh jumping from his seat and saying “My name is Akhilesh”. It was so good to hear that, and we happily gifted him a chocolate. We then asked the kids to say their name and spell it out, and all of them were able to spell their names. We grouped them into groups of 5 and 6, ad we started the fun games. The kids were a happy bunch, and they were bubbling with energy. We found it pretty difficult containing the kids and we understood that coding was much easier! I had a group of six kids to handle; and I realized how difficult it must have been for my mother to bring me up.
We first had an activity in which we had a set of flash cards containing two letters like “AN”,”AT”,”AR”, and the kids had to form meaningful 3 letter words with the set of alphabets that they were shown with and they were asked to familiarize with the meanings of these simple words. The kids were able to form the words with ease, and they were able to relate to these words to their life. We were happy to see the kids responding in a positive frame of mind, and willing to speak out. There were a whole lot of kids who were having inhibitions to speak out during the ice breaking and the intro rhymes that we had, but those kids were starting to at least say a word of two in English. More than the lack of knowledge, these inhibitions peg back people.
The second set of activity that we had is that we had a chart paper and we had stuck some pictures of things that we see daily like bug, boat, wood, cat etc. and below that we had written the English of those pictures and stuck a paper over it... I asked the kids whether they knew these words, and they said, “Chetta, njangalku aa paperinte thaazhennu vaayikaam!!” I was like… “Oh God!!”, and we had fun time asking the kids to tell those words, and except the word “Saw” they were able to say all the simple words. In between, this activity we had the kids singing the famous rhyme, “Are you sleeping?” in their loudest voices, louder than the people just sitting behind their bench! Competition at its peak!!!!
The next activity was making them familiar to day to day questions, like “What is your name?” and the answer to those questions like “My name is ------"and so on. This is when we realized that the kids were not up to our expectations; the main reason for this being that we had expected too much from these kids and that was a mistake on our part. A few questions and their answers that we could help them with were,
- How old are you?
- Did you have breakfast, lunch, dinner?
- Nanditha went to the extent that she taught the kids to ask “Will you come next week also?”
- What is your age?
- What is your name?
We took the kids to their headmistress’s room to ask the questions and the kids were shy to ask them, but on prompting we could bring it out from them.
In the end, we had another session of our rhymes and we had Syam coming up with a story. A good story that brought out the moral that “Greediness spells your end!!” Finally we parted saying that we will be back the next week also…
Seeing their happy faces, we were pretty satisfied that more than our intentions being met, we could see some smiling faces. We left with heavy hearts and satisfied minds. A quick introspection left us thinking that the syllabus that we planned to do for these kids needs a quick rethink…
The best thing that I found about these kids is that they are very simple at heart, innocent (Nishkalankam!), and don’t know how to think in a round about manner and they are very happy at heart! This makes me come back to these kids and do more sessions for them. They are our nation’s Treasure.
“We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today!!” Very Right!!!
