God of learning!

Yesterday I was so pissed off that I didn’t go to school!

The Chandranagar school (where I teach) is a public space that is utilized for everything, including tying up cows, parking tourist vehicles (sometimes with music blearing out of them) and such. For the last 3 years Asha Bangalore has been trying to get a compound wall around the school so that there would be a sense of a separate school space within the community. The hope was that it would bring a notion of sanctity to that school space. We could have easily raised funds to get that wall built. But, as you all probably know by now, we don’t do things the easy way. We do it in a way so that we can complain and gripe about it, may be just so that we can get another blog entry!

We wanted the local ‘community’ to make some contribution towards this compound wall. All the usual reasoning like ‘ownership’ and ‘empowerment’ has been thrown around quite liberally in this context. For three years we have been trying, trying and trying. Recently one of the parents who happened to be a construction person even made an estimate of the costs for the wall, plus additional toilets and drinking water facility. It came to about a lakh of rupees. This included around 15000 of labour charge. Since many parents are construction workers we were trying to see if they can contribute labour in kind along with Asha volunteers (our volunteers have no skill in the construction industry or for that matter....). No movement... “how can we work for two days without wages”?

Yesterday I go to the school and I see this huge Ganesh pandal. So many lights and decorations and I asked the guy working on it how much did that cost. He said it was around 10,000 rupees. The local folks are quite happy about the pandal. I don’t think they paid that out of their pockets, some local politico-goonda must have. Nevertheless, why couldn’t they channel that to improving the school infrastructure? What do they expect this pandal would do to them? Do they really believe that Ganesha, god of learning, is going to help the children learn better? This country, I tell you...

In any case all this fretting and fuming (and blogging) has helped me calm down. With tail between my legs I am back to school today. Out of the 43 kids I teach may be one of them might find reason not to invest in Ganesha pandals, may be not... It seems like any focus on the end-result is a route to disaster. Just focus on the process...just focus on the process..

Muthu - II

For those who have been waiting with baited breath to hear what happened to Muthu, don’t worry..... nothing happened.... his mother just ‘forgot’ about our conversation....ooofff.

Muthu was ‘behaving’ fine for a couple of days before he started his antics once again. Last week I conducted a test (quiz) and made sure there were two sets of question papers so that the children don’t copy. Copying is prevalent and as natural as gravity in this school. I had told the children that the question papers are different and if they tried to copy it not only indicates their nefarious purpose but also exposes their stupidity!

Not so surprising, Muthu had copied two answers from his neighbor. I gave a 0 out of 20 and then while I was distributing the answer sheets, he was busy trying to gouge the eyes out of Maruthi (an extremely bright kid). I just lost it. I guess since the physical route was not available, I had decided to emotionally scar(e) him. I went near him and threatened to fall at his feet and plead with him. I told him that I had exhausted all other avenues of reaching out to him and the only way I can see now is pleading. There was so much emotional drama in the class, all students went “beda saar, beda saar”. Muthu started bawling, if I were he I would have prefered one tight slap...