First day of teaching at Badgaon village - changing established techniques

Today was the first day of actual teaching at Badgaon center. Me and Sam arrived a bit earlier to talk to the guy who has been teaching these kids for a while now. He is pretty understanding and excellent with children. As I found out his mom was also a teacher. Maybe it runs in a family. At 12 only 6 kids arrived. The rest of the crew of about 13 kids arrived late. Sam has decided to start giving out prizes to the kids who come on time as well as announcing their names. Perhaps it will encourage others as well.

I did not see many faces from last week but saw few unfamiliar faces. Not sure if it's a case of Mondays.

We have decided to wait with my introduction until more kids arrived. First of all I wrote my name and made them guess how to read and pronounce it. After many tries the best guess was something like "iron". I finally revealed the mystery and kids happily repeated many names many times. Then I told them that I come from America -> California -> San Diego. Kids were all confused with all the geography until Sam came up with good analogy. Same as India -> Rajasthan -> Udaipur.

Then I told them about my hobbies (chess, music, languages) as well as mentioned that this is my second time in Udaipur and I am planning to teach there for a while. Then I quickly asked them questions about myself and was very surprised that they actually remembered some details like that the California is a western state (I told them this also). They also remembered my hobbies. They could not get the name of the city though - San Diego.

Finally I decided to start with implementing the new system into the classroom. The system deviating from simple repetition and individual work. I have decided to spend as much time as I can making them work in groups and helping each other learn.

I have started with teaching numbers in English. The kids' ages ranged from about 1st graders to 7th. Some had no idea about one, two, three and some were fairly comfortable with numbers. What a thinker. My original idea was to separate smaller kids and teach them basics. Sam proposed a better solution. Divide the class into equal groups with all ages in them. That way the more knowledgeable kids would help those who don't know.

And it worked like magic. After a long time of separating the class into groups and rearranging the sitting three groups were formed. The kids were not used to be facing each other, they normally sit in lines/rows and face the teacher. We gave them plenty of time to help each other count 1 through 20, also in reverse order and picking random numbers. Each group had a group leader, mainly the eldest of the group or the most advanced one (suggested and chosen by the guy who has been teaching them before me).

I really enjoyed to see productive group dynamics. The more advanced kids patiently explained less fortunate ones what they know about numbers as well as tested them. In addition to helping the group the group leaders were given responsibility to maintain group discipline.

It was really great to watch them help each other learn. I thought it was more efficient than repeating after the teacher.

After some time we have given them a test to see which team did the best. We picked 5 random numbers and 5 random people from each group to answer. After each correct answer we all would applaud. There was only one group who got all the answers right. I distributed candies for each member and special chocolate for a group leader. What really amazed me is that the smallest kid from that group had no idea what 1, 2, 3 were and he answered number 5 correctly. I guess the group leader had some special explanation magic. It was a very special moment indeed.

I tried to do the activity where children have to ask questions to guess the number like "is it a double-digit number", "is it bigger than ..." but encountered difficulties. It was not easy to get them into that mode. Maybe I am rushing too much into things here. I will try to take it slow and continue number learning as the days go by. I am also thinking to get into learning about telling time sometimes later this week.

Kids were slow to go home. They kept on smiling and saying "Namaste" - "Bye" to me.