First week down… and only one child fainted

(From the last week of September 2010)

This week, I observed classes at a local boy’s secondary school. As I walked into the school, I was immediately struck by the orderly chaos in front of me. Students ran around the school grounds, chasing each other and playing a combination of dodgeball and soccer with small plastic balls. They were all curious about me, but only from afar (though a few bravely came up and said “HiwhatisyournameIamfinethankyouverymuch”) When the morning bell rang, however, all the boys went straight into their classrooms, where they would spend the rest of the day, aside from a 10-minute break in the morning and a 45-minute lunch. At 9:30am, junior teachers take attendance, and then move on to other classrooms for teaching while senior teachers take over the class. Students stay in the same classroom for the entire day, while teachers move from class to class. The schedule is different every day for the students, though the same subjects are taught. No one seems to know why this is- it’s just the way things have always been done. But the students don’t seem to mind this set-up, and I can’t imagine how you’d constantly shuffle 50 students in and out of the classrooms. In my first three days of classroom observation, I saw:

• 7 English-medium math classes
• 3 Malyalam-medium math classes
• 2 English classes
• 1 Malayalam-medium chemistry class
• 1 English-medium social science class

The students in the classes ranged from age 13 (8^th standard, or the equivalent of 8^th grade) to 15 (10^th standard/10^th grade). The school was founded by Catholic missionaries, and is still nominally managed by a priest, but it is funded by the government and has a mandate to provide education to all. 50% of its students come from families at or below the Indian poverty line. The average class size is 50 students, which is above the mandated limit of 45/class, but the school is oversubscribed and teachers have agreed to the increase. These students are packed into classrooms that are about 15’ by 18’, arranged into tight rows consisting of a bench to sit on and a table to write on.  The teachers stand on a raised platform in front of a blackboard. There is a computer lab with an LED projector for classes to use if they need, as well as chemistry and biology labs, but most of the instruction takes place in those 15×18 rooms.

It’s hard to imagine teaching 50 students anything of significance in a 45-minute period, but these teachers manage to do it. As far as I can tell, most classes consist of a teacher at the board going through one or two examples of a math concept, and then asking students to do practice problems which the teacher checks. Classwork and homework are not graded, and student marks come down to two measures: 80% from the semester exams and 20% from the “teacher evaluation”, which is a loosely defined rubric mostly left up to each teacher to determine. There’s a lot of pressure on students to perform well on the exams, as that often determines whether they get to move on to the next grade level at all.  In mathematics, students are definitely doing advanced-level work. Class 12 math students (equivalent of high school seniors) are doing a combination of calculus and linear algebra.

Despite all the pressure (or maybe because of it) and huge class sizes, the students are remarkably attentive to their instructors. Students are extremely excited to volunteer answers, and each one readily seeks out the approval of their teacher on every practice problem they go over. Needless to say, it’s a strange experience for an American math teacher. The only slightly rowdy class I encountered was an English-medium social studies class taught by a female teacher. I asked her if she thought the boys were a bit more rowdy because of her gender, and she replied that most social science classrooms were rowdy because “the students don’t value history very much. They’re more focused on maths, science, and English- though they all still love their P.E. classes.” Still, they would hardly register as a rowdy class in America. She only asked them to quiet down four times, and they always complied.

While I’m really impressed with the work the teachers are doing given their limited resources and enormous class sizes, I couldn’t help but chafe at times with the teaching style. It’s almost exclusively a memorization and regurgitation model, with little opportunity for students to think deeply about the material. When a student gave an answer, a teacher never followed up or asked “why?” One teacher was going over histograms (bar graphs) and frequency polygon graphs (line graphs laid over bar graphs), and as he went through the example, he simply completed the entire problem and had students copy down his work. There was never an opportunity for students to make decisions about the problem- how big or small to make the intervals on their graphs, or which set of information should go on the x-axis versus the y-axis. In every case, the decision was made for them. He took all of the interesting mathematics away from the students! I witnessed that over and over again in the classrooms I visited. It made me wonder whether, in the process of churning out huge numbers of engineers and computer programmers, Indian education might be limiting the kind of creative thinking and dynamic learning that produces innovation and pushes scientific discovery. I know it’s tough to meet 50 different students’ needs in a 45-minute period, but couldn’t the students be given a chance to figure out how to construct the histogram on their own first? Or at least direct the teacher as he goes through the example problem on the board? I know this school is a very tiny snapshot of education in Trivandrum, which itself may be different from education in the rest of Kerala and India. But they do follow the same curriculum as most government schools in Kerala, and they claim to be one of the better government-funded schools in the area.

The students themselves are a real treat. They’re funny, smart, eager to learn, and excited about my presence. After just one morning in their classrooms, they quickly got over their nerves and started mobbing me in the halls and on the playground. They shook my hand and asked for my name, or gave me a sweet because it was their birthday, or introduced all their friends by their nicknames. There was one student, however, who wasn’t quite so excited to see me. As I said, I spent my first three days simply observing the classrooms. I never took over a class or directed a lesson. On Friday, I observed an 8^th-standard English-medium math class. A thin, nervous-looking 13-year-old student seated in the first row volunteered to answer a practice problem on the board. He carefully got out of his seat and went up to the board, where he grabbed a piece of chalk and started to write. He made a simple mistake (used an addition sign instead of a minus sign) that was caught by fellow students. As he realized how lost he was, he anxiously glanced in my direction and began to wobble, then fainted into his teacher’s arms. I got up and helped move him to a bench, where he lay down and soon recovered, but he decided to lie down for the rest of the period, what with his embarrassment at fainting in front of an American teacher. So contrary to wild ideas and stories family members are conjuring up in their heads, I was in no way behaving brutishly. I do admit, however, that my presence likely caused the student to faint, though he “has a nervous disposition” anyway, according to his teacher. Can I really be blamed for that?

I really enjoyed my first half-week in the classroom, and I’ll be spending a few weeks exploring other schools while this one is mired in exam preparation. It turns out that having a serious-looking white guy who causes students to faint in your classrooms is a bit of a distraction at a time when students need to focus. So after the November exams, I’ll return to take over a few classes and do a bit of teaching. In the meantime, I’ll visit other schools and work on getting official permission to volunteer in government schools across Kerala.