thoughts on teaching

Someone recently wrote to me and asked me if, between all our day trips and weekend trips and partying if I am doing any work. That is a very good question and the answer is most certainly yes. I just haven't yet organized my thoughts on how it is going...

In general teaching is going really well. I think this may be because we prepared so well back in AZ and because we (usually) get a high level of cooperation from the schools here.

Here is my teaching schedule for the upcoming week. I will teach with my partners Abhisheik and Briana and our translators Mani and Priya, unless otherwise instructed.

Monday: Chettinad School, 9-10:30 9^th standard class

10:45 – 12:00 10^th standard class, both English speaking

Tuesday: Don Bosco Nagar School, 12:30 – 3:15 separate genders

Wednesday: back to Chettinad School, same classes

Thursday: SMIS Clinic for HIV+ women, 3-5

Friday: final day at Chettinad School

Each school allows us different amounts of time with the classes. Some give us a total of eight hours to teach the entire curriculum, some just two or three. The challenge then is to get across the most important information in the short amount of time. Also, some headmasters of the more conservative private schools give us restrictions on what we can teach (no sex ed, can’t use the word condom, etc.) This is sometimes remedied by splitting up the boys and the girls like at Don Bosco Nagar. I generally prefer this because the girl students are always much better behaved. Even when they are not split up, the girls sit and listen to us like little angels and the boys are the ones that yell stuff and mess with each other and cause commotion.

However, in their defense, the kids we teach here in India are still better behaved than American kids. The other day I saw a kid get smacked by a teacher for trying to leave the classroom without permission. Also at a more rural school where the kids are more rowdy, all the teachers carry rulers and hit the tables to command attention. I think I am going to start doing that myself…

In general, Indian students are VERY bright. They pick up on new concepts very quickly and ask intelligent questions. Even very complicated biology and immunology doesn’t seem to challenge them.

The average ages of the kids we see are 12 – 16 but they always look much younger because they are so little. Also class sizes range from 18 – 50 students. (Now you might start to understand why it’s so important to be flexible. We might show up with three teaching groups ready to do the first half of the curriculum in two hours. But the headmaster might inform us that classes have been rearranged and we are now splitting up genders and they only wants two teachers per class for three hours total. Then we have to consider the student’s level of English. Maybe the school isn’t as English-medium as we though and we have to factor time into the lesson for sentence-by-sentence translation…This is not unusual).

The easiest classes are at the private religious schools that teach in English. That way our counterparts have to do little or no translating and they can just teach along with us in English. Also the classes seem better behaved at these schools – corporal punishment is my guess. And another note about religious schools, almost all are very Catholic. …

We get asked all kinds of questions too. My teaching group and I made the mistake of having a question box one time. We passed it around at the end of a session and allowed students to insert anonymous questions. Most of them had little to do with AIDS and prevention, but rather "who is your favorite rock star?" "how do you like India?" and “do you have a boyfriend?”.

[The boys really like Abhishek]

Despite all the obstacles, I honestly do think we are getting the message across a majority of the time. There are a lot of barriers that can get in the way, but when it comes down to it, we are Americans coming to little schools in this town and we want to talk to young students. For that reason alone, we get peoples attention. Maybe the ninth standard class didn’t understand everything about immunology, but they saw some older students talking about HIV/AIDS. So they start to realize that this disease is a problem in our society and there is something they can do to protect themselves. Perhaps our teaching will prompt more students to talk about it with their friends or families. We’re hoping that this way, myths can be dispelled and facts can be taken seriously. At least, that is what we tell ourselves for right now so we can keep our sanity...

-S