Teaching

Alison - The Fast Track pupils are certainly a challenge!  There are about 10 of them - but that number seems to change on a daily basis.  Our classroom is an open plan in the proper sense of the word!  There are only two walls and the rest is open to the elements.  There are fans in the ceilings and as the room is up 4 flights of stairs I am exhausted and sweating by the time I arrive.  The boys say 'Come here Aunty - sit under the fan"!! 

I have now worked out names which is a help - I can tell them off by name!  I am trying to help those with real difficulties - one boy Azad who is 19 has very little reading and writing .  He works at a hotel after break so our lessons are only in the morning before 'tiffin'.  He is happy to do simple sentence work and loves to play games with flash cards - me hiding them behind my back and then seeiing if he can read them quickly when I bring them out.

The others can be a real challenge - often just geting up in the middle of a lesson when they have had enough.  I suppose the fact that many spent  years living on the streets it is hardly surprising.  It has been good bringing an element of fun into the lessons.  They get little chance to play while they learn so when I made them all stand up and race to point to parts of their bodies as fast as possible- they loved it!  When I asked one of them to come up and pretend to be the teacher they loved it even more!  It has been nice spending some time in Toni's lesson with her bright boys who are running the mini sports as they are very bright and achieve a lot in a short time.  I get frustrated because I worry that they will achieve very little before I  leave - but I suppose anything will make some difference.  I will certainly never forget having 2 little hot bodies pressed up either side of me while they are writing out some sentences!  They want to get as close as possible which is lovely but it would be even better if it wasn't 30 degrees!

Toni - I think we both feel as if we have been here for ages - the teaching is great - the main frustration for me being that there aren't enough computers for each child to have one - and the computers that are there  seem to work as and when they feel like it. The kids are incredibly patient and most of them are just great - there are some more challenging ones, but given the fact that many of them lived on the railways for many years it is hardly surprising - you just have to accept that what you thought might take 15 mins will take several lessons - my aim with one particular troubled group is to get tham to sign in, email and send/receive an attachment before I leave!  This group are known as Fast Track and are the group that Alison talks about above.

Today I had the Fast Track group in 2 lessons - with 1:1 attention this morning, we succeeded in sending and replying to an email - later, with only myself and Alison it was more like a damage limitation exercise and we achieved very little.  Am going to have a bit of a re-think regarding what I do with them - they will never make any progress at this rate.  One of the boys is actually excellent at emailing and sees his computer period as a time when he can email his sisters who live away from Calcutta - it's  obvious that he misses them very much.  Who am I to insist that he sends simplistic messages to his classmates instead?  He takes great pride in showing us the pictures that they send him.

As a complete contrast, I have my 'Team' twice a week and they are very bright boys - aged around 14/15.  We are doing a project which aims to show them how I.T. is used in different areas.  We are going to run a Mini Sports Day and the boys will be responsible for choosing the events, producing the publicity, recording the results, designing a website, creating a newsleter etc etc.  I think the concentration on each of their faces when I was explaining 'the Plan' says it all!

We thought we would let you hear a little bit of the teaching side of things - just in case you thought we were just here to enjoy ourselves....  which we are doing of course.

Must wind up now - Tim Grandage - the incredibly charismatic  founder of Future Hope - is coming to take us to have dinner with the boys in one of the homes this evening - yummy!!

Do comment on our blog - we love to hear from you - Alison has the record number of comments for her last blog about the pantie hat - hardly surprising - the thought of it still makes us crease up!  xxxx

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