Teaching - INDIA Volunteer Stories

Teaching in India - Anne Bate

St Thomas’ School in Kerala, where I was placed for a month to teach English, is still in the process of being built. Half finished, work had halted for the time being while the owners waited for enough money to complete it. Meanwhile, the upper floor was sketched out, optimistically, by a forest of steel poles just waiting for the concrete to be poured. In fact the whole school had a sense of having been hastily thrown together, but not quite completed.

I taught in rooms that were simple concrete shells, with open rectangles for windows and doorways, and the lessons being taught in other rooms along the corridor drifted in and mingled with your own. I taught one class in what was intended to be the school hall; a long building, open on all sides between waist height and the roof and with some bamboo matting suspended from the tin roof to combat the heat of the sun. Two teachers taught at the same time in this room, with a rather inadequate screen across maybe half of the width of the room to separate the classes. My thrilling introduction to the Present Continuous was thus improved by a parallel Geography lesson on Madhya Pradesh.

The school is in a tiny village quite a long distance from anywhere interesting, and six hundred children aged between 4 and 15 are bussed in every day from the surrounding villages. A lot of rural districts in Kerala are very pretty. This one isn’t; I tended to escape every weekend to go somewhere more interesting.

I came to St Thomas School as a ‘mature’ volunteer, having taught English in UK schools on and off for the last 30 years or so. I had travelled in India before, but never had an opportunity to stay and get to know one place. I also wanted to do something useful, rather than just sight-seeing , and to live among the locals. Teaching in an Indian school was the perfect answer. I lived with three other women on the school staff in what was proudly called ‘the hostel’, but was in fact a couple of bedrooms and bathrooms and a sort of kitchen at one end of a teaching block.

It was pretty basic accommodation, but perfectly acceptable if you are used to the concrete mattresses and cold-tap-and-bucket washrooms that are a feature of Indian life. One of the girls brought me a cup of tea every morning, and they made a simple breakfast in the little kitchen. Lunch was brought over by one of the school maintenance staff, and in the evening we ate cold what was left over from midday.

The school had had volunteers from Projects Abroad before, and were probably expecting some energetic and attractive Gap Year student, so I hope I wasn’t a great disappointment to them. Maybe what I lacked in youth I made up for in experience, though, and I was soon allocated a teaching timetable which concentrated on teaching grammar to the top couple of classes who were preparing for national exams, but also gave me a chance to teach ‘conversational English’ to some of the younger classes across the school.

The standard of English in the school was very poor. It is officially an English Medium school and although there are some excellent teachers there, with fluent English, many of the teachers didn’t speak English at all, and others spoke it so badly that the children struggled to get going in the language. When working with the younger children it was difficult to know what to do that would keep them interested. They are used to learning in a very rigid manner, parrot fashion and whole class chanting, while the teachers tended to shout quite a lot and smack their switches on the desks to keep order, convinced that just the fear of the stick would keep the class in order.

Certainly the children were amazingly well disciplined compared to primary age kids here in the UK. However they were unable to cope with more relaxed methods of teaching, group discussion and interactive lessons, and tended to riot when the leash was taken off! After a couple of lessons where I was unsure whether I, or a class of 46 seven year olds had come out on top, I established a formula that seemed to work – and without a cane, too!

Mostly with the young children I told stories; simple fairy tales like Goldilocks, Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood. As their English was lacking somewhat, I basically became a one woman singing, dancing and acting show, trying to bring the stories to life. Judging by their silence and large eyes it worked, although they might just have been stunned by the odd woman leaping around their classroom and occasionally breaking into song. Then I would ask the class questions about the story they had just heard, using the more traditional Keralan teaching methods of question and answer, repeat after me, all chant together (Fee Fi Fo Fum, I smell the blood of an ENGLISHMAN!)

The older children were a different matter. They were an absolute delight to teach and my main challenge was to make them lighten up a little and lose their paralysing fear of making a mistake while I taught them grammar in the formal style required by the Keralan curriculum. A lot more singing and acting, as well as very silly drawings on the board helped to achieve this, and by the end of four weeks I managed to make them laugh at my jokes rather than writing them down in their exercise books in case they came up in an exam.

Boy did I learn a lot too. And I fell in love with the children, and even with the school, with all its idiosyncrasies and frustrations. I would go back in a heartbeat.


Anne Bate

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