So we've been here 2 months at this stage so we thought we'd do a brief run through of our projects and the work we do. (Well here's mine, Patrick will do his once he has finished playing Tropico)
Altogether I work on 4 different projects 5 days a week, all of them involving teaching English in varying levels.
Tollygunge Nabadisha:
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| Nabadisha Cuties |
Hope runs four Nabadishas in Kolkata, one of which is in Tollygunge (15 mins walk from my flat). This project is for children who live in the nearby slums who do not go to school. Set up in conjunction with the local police, and housed in the local police stations, this is a ground level education project and possibly one of Hopes most important. The children who attend Nabadisha's do so on a voluntary basis so the emphasis is on a fun, pressure free learning environment, that the children will want to return to.
I work in Tollygunge Nabadisha 5 times in the week, working with two sets of children. Three mornings a week I work with 8-12 children ranging from 2years to 6years old. My aim here is to teach basic creche English to prepare the children for structured education while also keeping the younger children busy so the teachers have uninterrupted time to teach the older children.
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| Oldre Tollygunge Kids |
Two evenings a week I am back in the Nabadisha teaching English but this time to older kids. I have a group of 6 kids, who have very good English. This makes for a different teaching experience, as I can actually converse and debate with them as opposed to constantly saying "The duck is yellow. What colour?
YE-LL-OW.
Punorjibon:
As we've already gone through, Punorjibon is a home for boys who have come out of rehabilitation for glue addiction. I come here 5 times a week to teach English one on one. Group classes wouldn't really work in Punorjibon as all the boys have varying degrees of written and spoken English. In my class I have Sujon and Polash - Sujon has very good written English and Polash has very good spoken English. I put the two boys into the same class together with the idea that that they'd help each other but they are two messers and when I ask one to explain something to the other I'm pretty sure what they are saying is not what i've asked. Sometimes they try to teach me Bengali phrases but when I repeat them they usually dissolve into laughter, I don't even want to think about what i'm saying...
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| Imran doing his ABC's |
Then I teach Saddam who is a lovely boy, so eager to learn and Arvind. Arvind loves to read so I have him reading Roald Dahl which he thinks is hilarious but makes for awkward teaching when he asks me to explain words or phrases.
At the moment we're reading the Twits and he asked me about the sentence "Dirty old hags like Mrs Twitt are always scratching their stomachs". I almost died from embarrassment - Arvind laughed his head off. My last student in Punorjibon is Imran. Imran is the newest boy to come through rehab, in fact I knew him from my last stay here when he would have been on drugs and living on Howrah platform. He went to detox because he wanted to become a carpenter so now he's living in Punorjibon learning his ABC's with me. He's funny because the minute I walk in the door he'll drag me to the classroom, i'll teach him for an hour then he'll tell me ok, thank you and push me out the door, Literally.
Seed Girls Home:
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| Hugs at SEED |
Anyone who got my emails from the last time I was in Kolkata will know all about Seed Girls Home so I won't bore you again. A protection home for at risk girls in Howrah, I go here twice a week. Currently there is 13 girls so I split them into 2 groups depending on their English. There has been a new addition in the form of Rabiya so now I have 3 classes as Rabiya has no English. The girls here are great, very fun loving, affectionate and eager to learn. Also because the home is outside Kolkata and i'm there during lunch time, the lovely housemothers give me my lunch too. Twice a week it is some of the nicest food i've ever eaten - sorry Mam but it's true!
Panditya Coaching Center:
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| Meditation at the Nabadisha |
Hope runs several coaching centers around Kolkata, with an aim to giving slum children who go to school an extra hand with their education. In India, a child is placed into a class depending on age not ability, and will continue to go up in class as the years go on, regardless of how suited to the learning level the child is. Hope runs coaching centers in the mornings and the evenings, to provide extra classes in various subjects and help with homework, along with counselling and hygiene studies. Also the children get a meal as they leave, an extra incentive for the parents to allow the children to continue with education.
I teach English in Panditya Coaching Center 3 times a week, 2 classes an evening. It is very enjoyable and as close to teaching in a secondary school as I can image, the kids here are all teenagers and there is a lot of hormones flying around the classroom. Makes for interesting teaching!
Elaine (15th of November 2010)
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