Whacked-A-Mole! Whacked-A-Mole!

Here are the boys acting like...boys. They were dancing and tickling all at the same time.

We whacked-a-mole. The landlady is now an avid supporter of the school...until April. Then we get kicked out. But we whacked-a-mole again! The land transfer paper is now signed by all the necessary government people (see the post on "Indian Bureaucracy"). It turns out we had the plot behind our very nice neighbor's plot so there was no conflict over the land. Now the only step left is filing with the proper revenue government guy. Since we took five weeks running these government yahoos down just to secure the land, we have launched project "Kick Down the Door." Seems there is some supreme being to all the bureaucracy called the District Collector. This all-powerful person is highly recommended to me by my nonprofit friends. They consider him to be a reasonable, unassuming man. So I asked a friend to ask a friend who has connections to get us an appointment. Then we will "Kick Down the Door" and get our building funds papers signed (we hope) in one week, not five. Time is short...April is only four months away.

Last, we are spending a lot of time whacking the biggest mole of all. There is one core competency required to fulfill our goal of successful student learning: quality instruction. We are hoping to learn tips, tips of any kind, from the model schools built by others around India. I am stealing ideas left and right. The teachers are both delighted and frightened. No one really expected so much of them before. In particular, the professional government teachers like Vijaya were left orphaned by the higher ups in the administration. So they made their own way. Now all our teachers at RPS get as many the school supplies they can handle, but they have to file TEACHING PLANS. Yuk, they don't like that. We want to emphasis experiential learning methods because these children have not had formal schooling in a long time, or not at all. That is labor intensive for the teachers, they are on their feet a LOT more.