A School in Motihari

Jeff and I spent three days in a small town in a rural district this week (Motihari in East Champaran), and the highlight was a visit to a local school. I sometimes complained last year about having to buy my own supplies, but this visit put into complete perspective any concerns I might have about any school in the U.S.

These are the fields around the school:

This is the outside of the school: 

I couldn’t bring myself to take any pictures of the classrooms or the children, so I’ll try to describe it in words. We chose this school because we’d been told it was one of the better schools in the district. The school is a series of four connected rooms with a long porch as a hallway. There was a small office for the principal and food storage and three classrooms (two K-2 classes and one 3-5 class). Each classroom held at least 40 children. There was no furniture in the classrooms. Each child brought an empty canvas or plastic food sack that they sat on like a mat, plus a small plastic bag with some supplies. Some children had notebooks, a few had chalk slates, and many had nothing at all. One child wore shoes, and made a big deal of taking them off and putting them on every time he got up. There were a few chalkboards in the classroom, and Hindi and English alphabets and a hundreds chart were painted onto the wall.

What struck me the most was how quiet the children were. If you’d piled 40 of the students in my old school into a room with a concrete floor and no furniture, and asked them to sit quietly, it would have quickly erupted in pandemonium. The surveyor from Jeff’s organization spoke with the teacher, who told the children to wait until it was their turn to be asked questions, and they did. In some cases, for 2 hours. I kept trying to reassure the teacher that she could continue teaching and we would just pull out the children we needed, but having a team of surveyors, let alone two white Americans, visit their school was such a distraction that it ground the regular day to a halt.

The survey is being administered to first graders, so I was really excited to get to know rural Bihari first graders and see how they’re similar and different from American first graders, since I’ve taught first grade for the last two years. I didn’t anticipate just how little Hindi I remembered, and how insanely distracting I would be in the school. Everything I did to try to engage the children just ended up in blank stares or hysterical giggles. I started simply, crouching down near a child and asking in Hindi, “What’s this?” while pointing to the child’s bag of materials. It was as if a unicorn were asking questions about advanced trigonometry. The child froze, as if I might disappear if he moved or took a breath, while the others broke into whispers and giggles all around him.

After trying to speak with a few different children, asking basic questions, I gave up on language-based communication. “OK,” I thought, “I have taught newcomers to the U.S. in the past, and children with very little English. I am a reasonably good teacher. I can show them some basic games that don’t require language and break the ice a little.” So I proceeded to show them a simple “Match the Rhythm” game, where I clap a beat and they repeat it. They were not having it – I could imagine them thinking, “Hey, the unicorn can dance!”

Eventually the survey ended and the principal generously offered us the school’s midday meal in his office (lentils with soyabean, rice and raw onion), which was really good. It was especially enjoyable because children kept walking past the office and conspicuously slowing down so they could get a peek at the foreigners, then scurrying away.

Despite how different the school was, and how differently the children behaved, they had the same natural curiosity that I love about teaching young children. I just wish they had anything in their rooms to support and nurture that love of learning.