The Neighborhood Project: Teaching Kids English.

I stayed back at school today to teach underprivileged kids from our neighborhood. It's been a month since I started doing this. Most of the time, it's fun. I mean, you call the shots; you get a delicious little meal (even more delicious since you're ravenous after school) from the canteen; you teach some amusing kids; and the best part: you can tell yourself that you are contributing to your society. What more do you want?

Over the few weeks, I've come to the conclusion that kindergarten teachers probably work much more than high school teachers. If you think teaching a couple of restless, 4 year-olds the English alphabet is easy, well, you sure are mistaken! These children need far more attention, patience and encouragement than a high school student learning trigonometry. See it this way, which is harder to do: teach someone to ride a bicycle or teach an average cyclist a bunch of cool tricks? You get my point. So if I become a school principal, I'll make sure the kindergarten teachers are paid at least as well as the 11th grade math teachers.

You should know these kids we teach before I can tell you more. They are children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and most of them study in government schools. A majority  of them read, write and converse in Hindi. Usually, they tend to lag behind their private-school counterparts, academically. But that doesn't stop them from learning. Teach them a handful of English words and take a spelling test right then, they surprise you with their smarts. Ask them to read aloud with you and theirs are the loudest and most enthusiastic voices you've heard. With these children, if that vigor is missing, you know something is not right.

Today, I was assigned 5th grade students. Generally, our school counselor, in-charge of "The Neighborhood Project" supplies us with exercise sheets, which we help the students complete. My class was supposed to learn all about "adverbs" today. I started by asking what an adverb is. A show of hands: zero. This was not how I remembered the class from when I had taught them word problems in math. Something was amiss, right? So I asked them what a verb is. No response, again. So my friend, who was also assigned the same class, and I started from the ground up. We asked how many of them learnt English at school. 4 out of 13 kids raised their hands hesitantly. How much of the language had they learnt? Not enough to know how much they had learnt.

We were shocked. Here are perfectly capable children, eager to learn, but denied the many opportunities that await them because their parents can not afford to send them to private-schools. We decided to chuck the worksheets. Teaching them adverbs is like teaching a 4th grader algebra. No point. We needed to know how much of English our class knew. We started with the alphabet. All of them managed that, thankfully.  And then we moved on to simple verbs, such as 'eat', 'read' and 'study'. Only a few of the 13 students in class even knew the meaning of these words. Not a good sign. Next step? Why not start with elementary words - verbs that describe routine activities? We did exactly that. Now the board was split into 2 columns. One with English verbs like 'sit', 'stand', 'jump', 'eat', 'drink', 'read', 'write' and 'play' and the other had their respective meanings in Hindi. Then the whole class would pronounce, spell and  act the verbs together. They wrote down these words and their meanings in their notebooks. Finally, we explained to them that these words are verbs and encouraged them to recall other verbs they knew, even in Hindi .

At the end of the class, I told them to learn these words and their spellings, because there would be a test next week. I hope it helps. I hope they do learn these words. And I hope I'm assigned to the same class next week.I want this class to learn enough English to be able to complete that adverbs worksheet, soon.