Ideas for a <em>desi</em> classroom
Nabanita Deshmukh
The children sat in a semi circle with their mouths agape.
“And then what happened, Medaam?” asked a little girl close to me.
“The big, bad wolf came and blew and blew! The thatched roof of the little pig’s hut flew away!” I narrated, thinking that my dramatic tone of voice was having a great impact on the audience – until I heard a sob and a little boy began to whimper. On asking him what the matter was, he informed me that he was indeed living in a thatched hut, and so when the big, bad wolf would come, his house would be the first house to go!
A leopard for a wolf?
Ahem! It was now time for me to pause and reflect! The story of the three little pigs is popular no doubt, but this reaction brought home to me with great force that in a village where people neither kept pigs nor saw a wolf, it was definitely not the right story to tell – especially to urchins who identified so well with the characters.
This ‘whimpering’ incident happened many years ago but I have learned important lessons from it – the first being to select stories with care, and the second, to adapt portions of the tale to the audience’s background. In this incident, I had done neither, so no wonder I met this child who gave me important tips on storytelling – unfortunately, by crying!
Weeks later, I recounted the same story in a village school located near a forest. I replaced the pigs with goats and the wolf with a leopard, whose puffing and huffing could not blow the huts away because the roofs were made of solid bamboo! Needless to say, this time the storytelling session was a success.
Desi games
My second story is about a teacher, Nita, who taught in a village school in Uttarakhand. Nita used her smart phone cleverly and downloaded games and western videos to teach vocabulary and grammatical concepts. An eight-year-old daughter of a farm labourer called Sneha was taught draughts and monopoly during recess. Unfortunately, none of these games worked well with Sneha and her classmates, who came from poverty-stricken homes, where parents (or guardians) were illiterate. Disappointed, Nita labelled the kids ‘slow’, ‘distracted’ and ‘dumb’ until she attended a sports event in Dehradun. There, she was surprised to see how well rural children played desi games such as kho-kho, kabaddi, gulli-danda and ‘stapoo’ also called chindro or kidi kada in different parts of our country.
Sitting in the gallery Nita stared at the stapoo squares drawn on the floor of the sports arena and an idea suddenly struck her. “Arre baba, why don’t I teach vocabulary from the lesson through this game!” she said aloud and the next day, she did exactly that in her class.
A large stapoo diagram was drawn on the floor of the classroom. Each square of the game represented a different category – such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, birds, animals, insects, reptiles and amphibians. A player, holding a large pebble hopped on one leg from square to square beginning from the near end and finishing just beyond the furthest square. He/she then threw the pebble backwards and on whichever square the pebble fell, the boy or girl had to come up with a word matching that category. For the flower names, students used ‘jasmine’, ‘marigold’ or ‘aparajita’ and for animals ‘leopard’, ‘black bear’ and ‘mountain goat’. If the answers were correctly pronounced, the players earned a point and then it would be the turn of the next player.
The stapoo game can also be used to help children narrate stories. To start the activity, the teacher can write the following categories in the stapoo squares: setting, time, characters (boy, girl, animals), verbs and object. The player who starts the game will begin a story, depending on whichever square her pebble fell in. For example, if the pebble fell in the ‘time’ square, the player can say, “It was midnight. There was no moon in the sky when suddenly…” The next player will then continue the story based on whichever square his pebble falls in. The teacher can indicate that each story needs to have a proper beginning, an exciting middle and a positive ending. Occasionally, the teacher can also share important tips on how to make the story more interesting.
Now getting back to Nita’s classroom, the use of the stapoo game to teach, revise and recycle vocabulary immediately appealed to Sneha and her friends. Nita was surprised to see how very interesting her classes became and the way her students’ attitude changed towards learning English and other subjects.
Meaningful songs
My last and final story is about a 23-year-old volunteer called Sue Iyer who spent her gap year teaching English to young students in a village in upper Assam. Born and brought up in the US, this was Sue’s first year in India and she enthusiastically downloaded catchy songs from the Internet to teach English. One such song was ‘She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes …’. The lyrics had words which were totally alien to rural kids such as go go goggles, silk pyjamas, red moccasins and violet smart phone. Further, Sue did not use any real objects, pictures or even illustrations to help children comprehend the meanings of these new words. Small wonder then that the students quickly lost interest and Sue became irritated.
“Sing along! Come on!” she shouted but nothing changed until the headmistress, (a teacher herself) replaced the unfamiliar words with familiar ones such as rubber chappals, khaki half pant, mekhla chador, small red bindi. The children immediately brightened up and ended up singing the song with real passion and joy.
Unique ways
Nita, Sue and I learned our lessons the hard way. Nita realized the importance of desi games in the lives of her students and used this knowledge to teach vocabulary in a dynamic manner. Sue got to know why she needed to navigate from the ‘known to the unknown’ to make her teaching effective and forge deeper ties with her students. As for me, I have learned to become more sensitive to the rural students’ lifestyle and thoughts.
Luckily though, after the initial stumble, the three of us (Nita, Sue and I), have managed to make our instruction more desi so as to connect to rural children’s unique ways of learning.
The author is a teacher, a teacher educator and a writer of children’s stories and poems. She can be reached at deshmukh.nitu@gmail.com.
