I haven't been able to pen in all the days that I visited Seva Chakkara in my recent

(March 11-April 9) trip to India. Here is the reflections of one of the days there.

 

March 13th The Day Of The Tangoes

 

I went to Seva Chakkara and spent most of the day there. Many children recognized me right away. They even commented on the amount of weight I had put in the last year. (Ah well :)).

As I reached the orphanage Velayudham was starting for the hospital. He has been in very bad health lately and a few weeks back his right side was partially paralyzed.

I met Lakshmi who is now spending all her time at the orphanage now and coordinating many of the activities. This left a doubt on the functioning of the computer institute since that is what she was working on the last time I visited. Sukanya, Velayudhams daughter, is now responsible for the food and nutrition of the children. Muttu is managing the computer institute with Jaivel. I heard that they are planning to close down the computer institute...well I'll find out the details of this in my second visit.

I went into the new hall for the children. It's part of the orphanage premises and pretty convenient. The hall is larger than the smaller hall where the children stayed earlier. The hall is divided into partitions to have the different classes.

Two of the old teachers Gauribai and Sumati were there. There were three new teachers for the primary classes (I-V). They are quite well qualified and quite enthusiastic. The three new teachers are Gajendran (science) and Renuka (math) and Shella(social studies). Since I have seen Gauribai in the last few years I sat in her class which was class V. They were going over their essay on republic day. There were three girls and four boys in the class.

I started with looking at what they had written and tried to talk to the children the girls are very docile and shy. The guys are defn a lot more "brutish" and talk a lot, but when it comes down to putting things down on paper, the girls are far ahead.

Anyway, I started with Manimegalai's essay, the essay was in general pretty good, there were a bunch of spelling mistakes, some were caught by the teacher and some were not. I decided to look at a few more books (Kannan, Jaysudha, etc) that is when I realized that all the essays were the same, ah ok so the essay had been copied from the board sometime earlier. That would explain the completely inconsistent spelling and extremely good sentence formation. I sat down with different children to either get them to correct their spellings or see if they understood the words they had used. They didn't have a clue of either. They just copied it as they saw it and she asked them to write it many times till they knew it by heart.

Many of the children were even getting confused with her "h" and "n". By now I had had enough, I had to ask her, there are like seven children in class all of them getting confused with your h and n why don't you change the way you write so they do not get confused? We tried a couple and then she came up with two letters, which she was comfortable with and were pretty easy to identify. That she couldn't think of this without me telling her is however sad.

Maybe I wanted to know how things were and maybe I wanted to prove a point to Gauraibai. I asked Manimegali what her favorite animal was, she said it was a monkey. I asked her to write a paragraph on a monkey when I couldn't get across the idea I asked her to write one sentence on a monkey. I asked three other children in the class for their favorite animal all of them said a monkey?! I asked each of them to write one sentence about the monkey. One of the children probably reading my mind changed his mind to a lion. So he started writing about a lion instead. The operation took about an hour :(, starting from being able to spell monkey right to writing a complete sentence or spelling wild or fighting...

Ok so apart from Gauribai even the children were naturally starting to feel a lil bad too, ok so time to switch to good boy :), I encouraged each of the children children to finish their sentence each of them got a chocolate and we all clapped when each of them finished. You will not believe how happy the kids were!! It is really sweet how small things make children happy.

Gauribai explained to me that the children do not use English for any of the subjects (including mathematics) so they only study it to pass the exams and even the schools encourage the same system. I asked Gauribai how she liked the alternatives of education conference demonstration day. She said it was nice and the techniques were like what they had seen in Arcott school. But, it will take a while for our children to learn like that. Some of the children do switch to English medium in higher classes and have a terrible time. There are also fewer options for class XI and XII in Tam medium schools here which is also an issue.

It was time for lunch and the children got a good excuse to run for it :). I had one of the children distribute chocolates to all the children. In the mean time I pulled out my mystery box of tangoes. Tangoes or tangrams are a chinese puzzle that is made of seven geometric pieces five of which are triangles of different sizes, a square a parallelogram. These pieces can be used to make a variety of shapes some resembling animals. While the children were eating lunch I put one of puzzles that resembled a running man and left it in the class.

During his visit here in Nov Chandra had mentioned that the food was not very good. Hence, I wanted to eat there myself and check. There was a allo sabji which I really liked, a banna sabji which I don't like, a bananna, a vada (was pretty good too) and papad the main meal was rice with rasam, morecorumb, and buttermilk. The food was really good. I think since Sukanya has taken up the responsibility of food, it has been decent.

I went back to the class a lil late hoping that the children would be curious about the pieces. Sure enough they had moved some of the stuff around by the time I got back..he, he mission accomplished. I asked them if they would like to try initially, only a couple were enthu, but watching them the rest joined in. They were like, hey it is easy da, then they would try to do it then let them continue. Nothing like cheering and clapping to get the best out of the children. Soon it wasn't only the children of class V in the picture and kids of all classes joined in. It was really amazing and the children in grade 2 or 3 were the fastest. It seems we get less creative as we get older. But, one of the children in class V was REALLY, REALLY good. He got quite a few of them that I let him do really fast.

OK! So since I took only two sets of pieces the children had to wait for their turn. The child who was really good kept waiting for his turn and I asked them the bring cardboard and drew the pieces for him. In no time he had cut out and made his own pieces, what enthu!! He was also guzzling question cards down by the minute!

Then something cool happened, the science teacher in the next partition looked at the cards and helped his entire class to make their own pieces. They started taking cards and doing it in their own classroom.

The kids from the younger classes hadn't made their own pieces and filled in a signup form and went back to their classes. I called them when their turn came.

The excitement in the children was really worth watching.