Mapping minds in govt schools

Bansie Vasvani

The principal turned on the air conditioner like a pro with a flick of the remote. It was getting too hot for comfort in her clammy office that just about accommodated her desk and two red stained chairs. “You’re throwing my children in the deep,” she said accusingly, as her diamond nose ring glistened in the white tube lit room. Deep end is good I thought, remembering how my father watched me flounder in the deep before I learnt how to swim. 

I had just joined her low income English medium school after spending three years volunteering and teaching in ostensible English medium government schools and after school programmes for the underprivileged. The fallacy of such schools in which the students were scarcely conversant in English was downright distressing. I wanted to help make a change.

“We give notes,” she intoned, masking her irritation and impervious attitude towards educating more than a thousand students in that school. By now I could decode that notes meant generating standard questions and answers that the children memorised and regurgitated on cue. However, more than half of eighth and ninth grade students performed below grade level.

Barely a handful could write a basic grammatically correct sentence in English. I needed to backtrack. The linguistic process of conjugating regular and irregular verbs, and having a firm grasp of the tenses seemed like Greek to my students. Meanwhile, the principal assured me that my mounting concerns were misplaced and all was well.

Note giving was anathema in my book. My crime was trying to make my students think and write on their own. Yet I had to find a way to comply, lest I be summoned more regularly to the principal’s stuffy room. Though I will say, I admired her beautiful wardrobe of colourful silks and starched cotton sarees as she droned on. 

 While the allotted ninth grade English textbook for the Karnataka state board exam, SSLC (Secondary School Leaving Certificate), comprised an interesting mix of poetry, prose and drama by both Indian and Western writers, the students were unable to discern narratives by Kushwant Singh and Vijaylakshmi Pandit for example from lack of adequate training. Nonetheless, after laboriously working through each text word by word, I introduced the strategy of brainstorming to help my students begin to think critically.

This activity of non-linear mind mapping was music to their ears. They felt like they had been released from a cage. Someone was actually giving credence to their ideas. Schools such as theirs’ existed on the premise that first generation learners were incapable of learning or thinking. Mindless, tiresome spoon feeding was the mode of their education with complete disregard to whether they were learning. Over time, my 9th graders reveled at rapid ideation, and writing their own answers to questions in the textbook, and ones I made up to encourage lateral thinking. 

I can’t claim that the exercise was easy, because to them it appeared like a bolt out of the blue. It took a few months for the students to grasp what brainstorming entailed. They were hesitant and afraid, then struggled to expand their thoughts into sentences, especially with so much emphasis on grammar and structure. We did indeed have a book full of notes, but not in the manner they were used to.

They began to understand that there could be variations in their answers, and that it was okay. They were allowed to experiment and introduce ideas they wouldn’t have dreamt of doing. I hovered over them, my eagerness spilling into every corner of the room.

As the quicker students began to flourish, the average ones made an effort to think and write properly. Even the weakest lot wanted to learn.

The management and I had a fall out over my insistence on a methodology of correction they were averse to. I left abruptly before completing the school year. Even though I was full of remorse, and I would never know if brainstorming was the key, I came away with the notion that, yes, I did throw my students into the deep end, but at least I showed them how to swim.