The Great Wall of Mastan Nagar, and the Greatest Challenge: new and slow learners

The new school year is starting off strong. There are eighty-four new students, three new teachers, and an entire new staff of helpers (except for Beeb the cook, of course). Here is a picture of our students who won "Best Attendance." From the left: Santosh, Baleshawri, and Suman. They got to see Spiderman at the IMAX and eat candy and ice cream until they could eat no more.

At the building site all is well. The team constructed “the Great Wall of Mastan Nagar,” our fourteen foot high retaining wall. The contractor starts pouring the foundation tomorrow.

I also visited an amazing Naandi-built government school in central Hyderabad to see what ours will look like (except much, much smaller) post-construction. I am very jealous of this school: trees, garden, open spaces, classrooms the size of our entire first floor, and a computer room!

Back at the school, after planning and many good ideas, Usha Madam has come up with a “scheme” to help integrate the slowest learners or new learners.

This is by far our greatest challenge. Students frustrated by their challenges are the root cause of truancy. So we have an enormous truancy problem. Another other cause is our poor shed; the place chases kids away. Truants also includes children who never received instruction at other government schools, or who had to step out of school for some years and cannot attend classes with their peer group.




Usha Madam put them into a special classroom that sits outside her office. This special class has a small number of students and their own junior teacher. Then she or the junior teacher tests the students orally every day for any improvement, and works with the individuals who are the most challenged.




There is a daily updated CLAP PROGRESS CARD (don’t ask what CLAP means, some acronym in Telugu) that has all the student names and either a check (good) or an x (needs work) that comes from the daily oral exams. There are weekly “slip” tests (on a slip of paper, and paper is a real luxury) and quarterly exams. The end result: there are no surprises. The teacher’s weekly reports at our regular meeting all include data on student performance. Now we can share what works or doesn’t work with each other to help the most challenged students and move into a set of proven teaching methods.

This weekend, we have a student rally, parent meeting, and meet with Project511 (www.project511.org). From their website: “Hyderabad Round Table 8 (HRT 8), a voluntary community service organisation and MV Foundation, a NGO put their hearts and minds together to initiate Project 511. The charter of the project is to fund the maintenance of Government schools by way of meeting their operational expenditure and any additional maintenance overheads including inducting more teachers.”





This would answer a lot of prayers. And we do mean a lot of prayers… our teachers are Hindu, Christian, and Muslim and they pray a lot. Usha Madam always says “God Proposes.”