The following is a piece written by Hrittika, one of our senior students. Having expressed an interest in teaching, she spent time with one of the groups from the junior school, the Shankapushpi.
Imagine walking with two different footwear on each foot. A regular sandal on one foot and a large
boot with a high heel on the other. That’s what it feels like to be a student and a teacher at the same
time. It’s hard to walk gracefully in this situation. One is constantly made to limp and trip over small
pebbles every other minute. One limb feels shorter than the other. One’s eyes are constantly fixed on
the path. This situation is not painful, but it is surely embarrassing.
That’s what I did for the first few weeks when I started helping the Shankhapushpi group with their
English classes. I constantly watched the path under my feet and played these two roles with a
pretentious comfort. I pretended to be an unconventional teacher. But what does it mean to be a
teacher? And to be an unconventional one on that? Someone who doesn’t yell or grow impatient, I
thought. That was easy, because nothing the children did or said made me angry. And it was
unimaginably pleasurable to listen to what they had to say. I didn’t have to tell myself to be patient.
As we moved from one writing activity to another, I felt more relaxed in the class. I realised I’m not
interested in the behavioural development of a child. I’m interested in commas, full stops,
paragraphs, capital letters, the ‘a’s and the ‘an’s. But I don’t merely want to correct their English. I
have never been fully confident of my use of the language. Yet, I find language itself beautiful, and I
want others to see that. Some sentences stay in my mind. Sometimes when I lie in my bed at night, I
feel like I can see a sentence or a word I had heard or spoken that day. In the darkness of my shut
eyes, I can see those words clearly written out. When I read a book, I can hear each word, as if
someone is speaking to me. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and look for my dictionary with
half- shut eyes. There are words in my mind that I must confirm the meaning of.
Another beautiful thing that intrigues me is accent. One of my friends reminds me of my accent
when I first joined school. ‘Your English had a thick Bangla accent,’ she says. Similarly, now when I
speak in hindi, I often mistake the ‘र’ sound for ‘ड़’ in my pronunciation. I find it both embarrassing
and funny when someone points these out to me. But I notice a strange satisfaction I get when my
tongue touches the roof of my mouth when I speak. Despite knowing it’s the wrong pronunciation, I
feel tempted to speak certain words dierently. I wonder if I should correct the Shankhapushpis
when I work with them. One child calls me ‘Bobby’, but he pronounces it as ‘bub- be’. Another boy
pronounces ‘ती खा ’ as ‘थी खा ’. Do I understand what they mean? Yes. Are they wrong, then? I don’t know.
Should I correct them? Maybe yes, maybe no. People use the word ‘thick’ to describe the intensity
with which an accent imprints its colours on a language. ‘You have a thick accent.’ ‘Thick’. Thick like
malai on the surface of my mother’s kheer. Is accent like the sweet cream that forms a layer on the
surface of a language? Then is it not a part of the language anymore? I don’t know.
I see the role of biases here. When I hear ‘bub-be’, I don’t feel like saying anything to the child
because somehow the sound of his words feels part of who he is. But when I hear a child speak in an
American accent, I find it superficial because I imagine it to be a product of a show they have
watched over the weekend. I don’t know in these moments what is wrong and what isn’t. What is real
and what is my bias?
After a few months of working with them, my gaze has lifted from the path I walk on to the faces of
the small storytellers surrounding me. I look at the words they write, their commas and full stops. I
hear the sounds of their words and their pauses.
But, I can’t say I have dropped my dual role completely. Sometimes I say things, hear what I have
said, and cringe. ‘Why do I sound like a teacher!?,’ I think with frustration. Sometimes I say things I
hate hearing as a student. I say things I don’t particularly believe in. But I say them because I see
other teachers say those things and children abide by them. In these moments, I look around to
make sure that none of my friends have heard me. They would have laughed or made fun of me. But
one of my friends is in this class – Kesang, one of my most brutal critics. We have stayed together
over some weekends and got into mischief together. When I try on a new dress that doesn’t suit me,
she takes hardly a second to tell me, ‘You look bad in that dress.’ I receive her unflinching glare and
curled lips in response to any unreasonable remarks I make in class. She has kept me grounded and doesn’t let me get carried away by the teacher persona I have put on.
The other side of being a teacher is taking decisions. Not decisions of punctuation and paragraph
breaks, but other important decisions. How should the free learning time be spent? What should be
done now, and what should be sent home as homework? How many pages should be read? Should I
read or ask them to read? As a student, I have always hated things being decided for me. I always
thought when I become a teacher I will not interfere with any of this. But I have found that some
children find it really helpful when some decisions are made for them. If all decisions are made,
children may become extremely dependent on their teachers. And sometimes children choose the
options which are easy and comfortable to follow. They may choose to read only half a page in the
week because they don’t enjoy reading. Therefore, a balance has to be found between my
interference and the child’s own plan for him or herself.
In the beginning, I noticed that most of them were distracted and inattentive when I addressed them
in a group without Tandi. Though none of them ignored me completely, I found it very dicult to
hold their attention for too long. The classes with Tandi are relaxed but not slack, slow – paced, but
never boring. She is agile and responds to each child without delay. A few classes with Sha have been
very interesting to observe, too. There’s a rhythm in his speech, movements and flow of thoughts
that grips the attention of his audience. In a few instances, when I have handled over three kids
together, I have tried to imagine myself as one of my teachers and acted like them. Sometimes it
works; at other times, it doesn’t.
It is always easy one on one. There is immense time to listen to what they have to say. After having
worked with all of them individually, I find it easier to handle them together. Sometimes one of them
tells me a story that has nothing to do with what we are learning. Then midway, the child realises
that they have gone o topic and they come back to the class themselves. At the start, when I worked
with a child individually, I ended up helping the child with nearly every word they wrote or read.
Later on, I learnt the need to step back and listen.
I have noticed that some children love writing on their own and hate intervention, while some feel
that what they write isn’t ‘correct’- either the spellings or the content itself. Therefore, they want
someone to help them form the sentences. Perhaps it is better for these children to be left alone with
their book and pencil. A relationship with words may grow when they spend uninterrupted time
with their own words.
After the trip, the children read a book called Bhimayana, that talks about Dr B. R. Ambedkar and the
various eorts he made to legally abolish the caste system in India. The children went on walks to a
nearby village and asked people about their lives and their surroundings. They jotted down their
observations and sketched regularly. In class, they learnt about caste and its origins. They did a
bunch of writing activities based on the themes of caste and divisions – like writing poetry,
newspaper articles and news headlines, etc. They ended the project with a short play in Kannada,
enacting an event mentioned in the book.
I found this project a wonderful introduction to the concepts of caste and divisions in society. But I
noticed that despite so many discussions, some children had a vague and abstract understanding of
the topic. I wondered if it may have been because of the social environments that they are growing
up in, which are well protected from the hazards of society. Perhaps their understanding of caste
and divisions in society will become more coherent with time as they read more and observe
dierent people and their lives.
When I read their articles describing the village, I noticed how they make sense of the world by
drawing meaning from their own context. They wrote as Shibumi kids looking at a village. Or city
kids looking at a village. This is natural, but one’s understanding of the world is incomplete if one’s
vision is restricted to one’s worldview. Atticus Finch famously says in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, – “You
never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb
inside of his skin and walk around in it.” I wonder how this quality may be developed in an
individual- where one can forget oneself and become what one is observing, even for a few
moments.
Most of the children sound very similar to each other when they write. This may be due to a lack of
reading outside school or because they don’t read various kinds of texts. Or it’s because the same
teachers edit all the articles, causing them to sound very similar. During the Bhimayana project, they
constantly referred to the book to get ideas for their write-ups. This added to the homogeneity of
their writing voices.
No creative piece is ever completely original. It is our fears, our small likes and dislikes, and our
hidden strengths and weaknesses that set us apart. I have learnt from my writing that it is when I
write honestly and not necessarily appropriately that my pieces turn out well. Perhaps the children
hesitate to hear their own voices, and it feels comfortable to sound like someone else. Therefore,
they don’t write their raw thoughts, but they write what sounds ‘right’ or what should be written.
This may not be true for everyone. Perhaps they write similarly because that’s what they all think at
that moment. I also realise the impact of my own statements on their writing voice.
Apart from these various meandering trails of thought I have described so far, there is one thought
that feels certain and clear. More than education or growth or language, my interest lies in
childhood. I like spending time with children. I envy them for the lightness they possess. By being
around them I hope that some of it will rub o on me
