The morning arrives early again. The “Good morning Mr. Shay” wake-up call is no longer pleasant.
Today is a VERY big and exciting day. We are going to the school of our partner teacher till Noon. We are to meeting with students and teachers, observe classes, and Chhaya has asked me to teach her 12th grade class some Inverse Trigonometry!
Brad Fox, a middle school science teacher from Fallbrook, CA, and I are going to the same school. Though our driver gets a little lost on the way, we arrive there in plenty of time. As we walk in, we see students in uniforms and running around like most students do before school starts.
We begin our morning by meeting with the school principal, Mrs. Guliani (no relation to the former mayor of NYC). We spend the first fifteen minutes speaking with the principal as well as our partner teachers. At 7:30am, we go to the morning assembly. Every morning, the school has an assembly. The school is a K-12 school, so all the 6-12 students line up in ranks to hear the morning announcements. The assembly begins with a prayer, followed by a pledge of allegiance. Afterward, a group of students perform a traditional Indian song and are followed up by the “best man” yelling commands. These commands remind me of military commands where students assume certain positions. After the commands, two students ready some stories from the newspaper and another student reads a brief book report on the author Dan Brown. Another song is played and then a boy reads a story and asks about 5 questions. For each question, a student runs up to the stage and speaks the answer into the microphone. After one more song, our partner teachers introduce us to the assembly. They read our Fulbright biographies and ask us to say a few words to the school.
Though this show was a little bigger and longer than a normal morning, I am utterly amazed that the school gathers every morning, in quiet orderly ranks (sorted by grade and gender). Their respect and admiration for teachers is already quite apparent.
After the assembly, we go back to the principal’s office to continue our conversation on education, students and curriculum. The principal is truly an inspiration: she has been to the US many times, visiting schools and attending conferences. She is well versed in how our schools and India’s schools are alike and different. (Speaking with other teachers in their group, they had principals that were less than impressive.)
I watch Chhaya teacher 2nd period 11th grade math. She is teaching them about relations and functions, though from an entirely different point of view than how we teach it. She begins by working with sets and defining the cross product of two sets. She continues by discussing subsets, and defining a relation as a subset of the power set (lots of math that most of you reading don’t care to know about). This elegant approach is truly fascinating and I wonder how this approach would work in our schools.
Her class was also a breath of fresh air (though the room is not air-conditioned, so there really was no fresh air). The students were very quiet and attentive throughout the entire lecture. They raised their hands when they had an answer, and stood up to give the answer. The students were quite adept at reciting definitions and doing fast math. Very few students seemed to take notes in their notebook. There was absolutely no chatting or goofing off in the class. She never one called on a student by name.
After about 20 minutes, Chhaya invited me to the front of the class to speak with them about America and education. They had many questions: are their uniforms, is it competitive, what do you think of India, why are you at our school, are there board exams, is there homework, is your maths different than ours, etc.
Each period is approximately 35 minutes, and they have 8 periods/day.
3rd period was spent observing 10th grade. The students were quietly working on an activity where they were cutting a rectangle out of a paper, folding it into a cylinder and finding its area. The activity was very different than one in the US because the teacher was going through the process by writing an outline on the board and calling on students to fill in the details. For example: Outline, Concept, Materials Needed, Process, etc. It was run like a science lab, students were expected to fill out each part of the lab identically to their neighbor, though each student cut their rectangle to be a size of their choosing. After another 20 minutes or so, I was invited to have a Q&A session with the class.
4th period was my time with the 12th grade class. We began with the Q&A, though there questions were a little more sophisticated, focusing more on the board exams, college entrance exams, competitiveness and school culture. After about 15 minutes, they requested me to teach them about inverse trigonometry. Chhaya started them on the idea of inverse trig already, so I reviewed it a little and then started doing some more advanced problems involving the inverse property and principal value of a trigonometry function. They different were interactive and interested in the class. When I started to ask more advanced questions though, I noticed they made the same type of mistakes as my American students would make (in particular about the principal value type of questions). Most of them knew their unit circle trig, Pythagorean triples and trig IDs off the top of their head…which is pretty standard for seniors in America, too. Though when I gave them some tricky problems, that involved critical thinking skills, only one student figured out the answer in the same time limit that all the other students gave me a common wrong answer. After giving them a good hint, they quickly figured out the answer.
After the lecture, we had more Q&A time, photo time, and a gift exchange between Chhaya and myself. The kids just couldn’t get enough of talking with me about American kids…they are very concerned, interested and competitive.
That afternoon, we went to the National Science Center, which is much like one of our science/technology museums in the states…though much older. It’s unfortunate that their national capital has a science museum that is rather dated and has many broken exhibits. On the plus side, they had many fun and interactive exhibits, much like in San Francisco’s Exploratorium. After wandering in the museum for an hour, we met with its director and discussed how they operate and what they do.
Our last full day in Delhi before we travel about India began much like every other day. We headed to USEFI for probably two of our best meetings: the first one was with a man who runs an after-school tutoring center and the second session was with 5 students who are in their first or second year of college in Delhi. Both of these sessions were wonderful as they helped shed the light on what is really going on in India’s school.
Most student in the science track take after-school tutoring for hours a day. The national board exams, given in 10th and 12th grade are VERY competitive. Success on these exams will place students in certain high school and college tracks. Scores of at least 90% are necessary to enter into the science track or competitive colleges. Nearly all students who want to get into very good schools (or into science tracks for 11th and 12th) take after-school tutoring at a center. Also, students who wish to enter IIT (India’s Institute of Technology: probably the BEST school for engineering in the WORLD) need to take an additional exam in 12th grade. This exam is not at all aligned with the curricula of high school, so students attend tutoring to learn these concepts so they can score well enough to earn one of the 1000 spots at IIT.
The panel of students was also very illuminating, as they helped us to see the real pressures and desires of India’s youth. Most of these students were in the Commerce track (business, economics), which is one “level” below the science track. These students were very bright and motivated and made it very clear that they did not have to work as hard as the science track students, who slept on average 4 hours/night!! They all had a tremendous sense of civic pride, none of them wanted to study outside of India, or if they were, they intended to come back to India after earning their degree.
The afternoon ended with a little site-seeing and shopping. We went to FabIndia, basically a Target of India. I purchased a couple shirts and a pair of pants! We also went to Ghandi’s Ashram in Delhi, which is where he was assassinated. The museum and ashram were lovely and showed his final steps before being martyred. After visiting the Ashram, we went to the India Gate, which is a large war memorial, built for WWI, and now used to commemorate all veterans of India.
We left Delhi and headed to Kolkata (Culcutta), taking Jet Airways (which is basically like United). The flight was wonderful, though oddly enough, we had to board the 737 using a staircase, rather than the gangway that most airports have. We arrive in Kolkata with not difficulties and are quickly on our bus to the hotel, the Oberoi Grand, yet another 5-star hotel…I’m sure getting tired of this treatment! =)
