Skip to main content

Whack-a-Mole


Isn't he darling? We do a lot of drawing here to cement in their minds different concepts and words. For example, today for English class, 4th standard drew Spiderman standing and sitting to learn those two words.

Whack-a-Mole.

We just found out the government did not own the land "sanctioned" to us for the new school. Who owns it? Our very reasonable neighbor who lives in a big house next to the slum. His son is studying at MIT, so our neighbor "gets" Americans and we talked for a long time (in English). He offered to help us buy another piece of land in the area for the school. We'll see where that goes.

That same day (yesterday, Sunday) we found out we had royally ticked off our landlady. She was furious with us for cleaning out the room she is renting to us to serve as the office (top right). She is kicking us out entirely on Wednesday, out of the office and, it appears, out of the school. She has already hired a contractor to build a one-room apartment next to the shed for the school where preschool is help. The contractor came by today during school and very apologetically explained this to out teachers. A nice man, he looked completely stricken when he saw the school. Looks like we'll be hosting all the teaching materials in my car and teaching out under the sky for a while. We'll figure this out. Every day has been a crisis.

Last week, the gas for the stove was not working and we were about to go caveman style to cook. Then the water truck didn't show up to replenish our tank of water, so again the school lunch was in jeopardy. Kaplana called in a tanker truck and saved the day. Before that, it was our government teacher, Vijaya (more on her next post). We had a tough time integrating her. She doesn't really speak English and has a strong bias against teaching English in standards 1-5. There is a lot of pride in promoting Telegu, which they call the Italian of the East because it is rather lyrical, up and down, sounding.

Whack-a-Mole will continue, and all of the above was no surprise. These kinds of projects unravel all kinds of challenges as you get in there and tug around. Kalpana is always the angel during these crises.

Comments

Post a Comment

Leave a Message

Popular posts from this blog

MobilesForGood: EDU

Together with the students, parents, and teaching team, we did it. Ten years of the Rainbow Primary School. Our school is a government-funded, local-language (Telugu) school that serves 230 children every day absolutely free. We celebrated by opening  an after-school center last month with the best education NGO in the world, Pratham. For the past five years, I've worked on research projects and helped NGOs that have an interest in developing mobile tools for learning. Globally, there are three populations of students that need to close the education gap. 1. 52 million children globally not in school at all. Most are out of school for one or more of these reasons: conflict/no public services (fragile state), lack of legal papers, migrants, or they are female. Migration is a big issue in our area around the Rainbow School. 2. 200 million children globally are in school, but suffer from poor in-class teaching. These students cannot read at grade level. The most common reason...
Post a Comment
Read more

Our New After School Center

Rambabu, the Pratham leader for our state (Telangana) and his team are amazing. The Rainbow School now has an after school center, and after school tutoring program, and an in-school teacher training program. The after school program now has computer training! These computers will be used for some of the older kids, and I'm sure we'll get a lot more tech once things start rolling. 1. We now have four teachers working full-time at our after school center.  2. In the after school program, we have over 40 students and expect 20 more teenagers when computer and English instruction officially begin. 3. Letters to our sister school in Miami continue. 4. Our Rainbow School continues to host after-school activities as well!
Post a Comment
Read more