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

Gray Matters Capital and the Rockdale Foundation

While all is very well at the Rainbow School, I'll pause to highlight a "sister organization" supporting budget private schools in India. Gray Matters Capital and the Rockdale Foundation have an annual symposium in Hyderabad, called "Enterprising Schools." Buddies of mine from here in Palo Alto, the Hewlett Foundation and IDEO, are heading out there next week. More info is on www.enterprisingschools.com My IDEO fellas organized a whole list of very low-cost teaching aide ideas to present at the symposium. Ideas like using old newpapers to teach literacy. They put the list up on the website under "STEAL THIS IDEA" - click here for the list! (in pdf form) BEST WISHES for a successful symposium, I miss you all in Hyderabad!
1 comment
Read more
On Monday, August 18, I was so happy to return to see the Rainbow School. The teachers have made a plan to shift from Telugu to English medium. My friend at Pratham, one of the largest education NGOs -- serving 5 million children in South Asia and Africa -- agreed to help my teachers. My co-partner, Kalpana, is taking the lead on a facilities upgrade. She will oversee an upgrade to the preschool and main building. Kalpana and I have found donors in India and the United States. The children were sharp, completely up on their marks. The teachers were creative, driven, relentless. More to come!
Post a Comment
Read more