Nirmal Diary - Part 2

Its been quite some time that I have not written anything. I do not wish to give any explanations but the reason is that I do not have a good access to the web in Nirmal. I decided to chip in few words today. Actually what encouraged me to do so was a party at a Yogesh's (a close friend) place where we talked about the documentation issues. In reality I have been jotting many points in my diary about my experience at Nirmal. Today I decided to write at any cost.

The result is out:

We declared the first final results of the first academic year of the school. Pheew.....What an experience this has been? Will narrate some of the incidents and the changes I have tried to bring in what, I consider, was a REAL mess.
On 27 April, 2008 (Sunday), the results were declared. Actually I am satisfied with the secondary school results. It is 100 %. Some students need to work harder, which I am sure they will. But overall the performance has been good. Now I must say that some of the higher class students are really impressive and the issue is just of exposure to the wider "ORGANISED" knowledge data base. (Comment: By the way, many of them are from the backward class communities. The SCs/STs/OBCs etc.). The issues are of low confidence level and power of expression. The poor power of expression is due to poor english, which depletes the confidence. I have been teaching physical sciences to 8th and 9th classes. Now, when I joined, the students memorised the answers and reproduced in the exam. I consider it a dangerous trend. After a regular talk with the 8th and 9th class students, they have begun to make efforts to express themselves. This has resulted in a slight downfall in the performance but I am sure it will pick up when we work on english language more rigourously next year. (Comment: Honestly speaking, I must confess that during my school days (and even college days) I had the bad habbit of memorising the things. Things started changing at Masters level and changed completely during my stay in Germany. Courtesy: My boss Prof. Dr. John Burrows and my advisor Dr. B.-M. Sinnhuber). Another important issue which I have stressed on is "learning with understanding" . I shall write a blog on learning environment in school later.
The result of primary section has been satisfactory. I am not too happy with that. I shall have to work on that during the next academic year.

The issue of overaged students :

One major issue during the last academic year has been the overaged students in primary classes. I will give you an example of a case which has freaked me out. I was observing a very tall buy in 1st standard for quite some time. I was curious to know his age. I asked the class teacher. What she narrated zapped me. The guy was studying in a telugu midium school in 6th class in 2007. So this year he should have been studying in 7th class. One bright sunny morning (The mornings are always bright and sunny and HOT in this part of the world) father suddenly felt that he should be admitted to an english midium school because the future is english. The present vice principal was the acting principal before I joined. And on his wise advise he was admitted to 1st class. (By the way the vice principal has been in the field of education for last 25 years and he has M.Sc. and B.Ed. degrees. I feel that probabely he is a good example of typical indecisive teacher in a school education system in India). So, continuing the story, I did some back of the envelope calculations and concluded that he would be around 21 years old when he reaches 10th class. I went crazy. I called his father and advised him to admit the boy to 7th class in telugu midium school in 2008 which would waste his 1 year. This was the worst case scenario. Otherwise (and as this happened in January), He could be given some private tuitions and made to appear for the 7th class exams so that he goes to 8th class. This would be the best scenario. Fortunately the man agreed. But it took me almost 1 and half hour to convince him. I almost went dizzy when he told me that there is one more similar case in class. I was to discover one more case 2 weeks later. Now these were extreme cases. The cases of students being 2-3 years elder have been aplenty. That mess is being sorted. Things will be fine soon. Amen.......