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Published: March 18th 2011
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The past week has redeemed Jaipur from the frustrations of our first encounter. I spent the week teaching at the Fairy Land Primary School and reveling in the company of some of the nicest, most genuine people I have met on my trip. The school is a private English Medium school run out of the home of Babu and his family. I showed up monday morning at 9:30. The children were split into two groups. In the back yard under an overhang were 15-20 six to eight year olds. On the side of the house in a small 15x10 foot patio with two blackboards were 16 nine to eleven year olds. As I walked to the side of the house they jumped up with huge expectant smiles "HELLLO SIR!" I had expected to tutor individual children with reading or math. Instead the teacher handed me the chalk and said "you've got until 1PM, I look forward to hearing what you are going to teach." Are you shitting me? That gave me four hours to come up with illuminating things to talk about. I sat down in a chair and burst into laughter at my situation, an action which caused the kids
to look at me like I had lost my mind: the crazy bearded white man laughing at the wind. I managed to stall for time by introducing myself and shaking each individual student's hand and ask them how old they were. We talked about how many brothers and sisters each student had, how old they were, what their names were, simple things like that. The language skills they possessed were very basic. I got the impression I was there primarily to practice English with them. They could read and write well and like the students I worked with in Andrah Pradesh their handwriting was great. They had serious issues speaking, probably a result of not having people to practice with.
Math proved a little more challenging. Most of the students were good at doing math problems but miserable at applying the math to "real life" situations. For example: Lunch costs 100 rupees. I have 45 Rupees. How many more rupees do I need before I can buy lunch? All the students could do 100-45=55, but it was very hard to get them to understand that the answer to the problem required finding the difference between the number of rupees
you have and the cost of lunch and that requires subtraction. Most of them thought that because I was using words it was an English lesson and seemed confused as to how math and words could be used at the same time. My response that there was no clear cut difference between math and english and science and social studies, that they were just made up labels that describe different aspects of the same thing got me some very strange looks, not least of all from the teacher in the back of the room (I could see him thinking "What rubbish is this crazy fool sputtering about?") Fortunately I had an infinite amount of time to work through this stuff. Eventually we were able to add in "I make 11 rupees an hour, how many hours do i have to work before I can buy lunch." The real breakthrough came when we started using Cricket examples. By the end of the second day they were getting pretty involved: India averages 24 balls per Wicket and 4 runs per Over, how many runs does India score? It took them a while to figure out how to set this up, though it
was entertaining watching them puzzle through it.
Somehow I managed to come up with things to talk about for four hours each morning the whole week. Because the age range of the kids in the class was 9-11 it was really difficult coming up with things to teach that everyone could do. A lot of the time was spent giving a simple question for the younger kids and a more involved question for the older ones. Any time I gave a student more than thirty seconds of individual attention the rest of the class would devolve into chaos and violence, so that got old pretty quick. I was worried that they were going to get bored but most of them seemed very interested and I think (hope) they got a genuine sense of satisfaction at figuring the answers out and really thinking as opposed to just memorizing.
I spent most of the evenings drinking tea and talking with Babu and his family. Thursday night I was invited to dinner with Babu's nephew's (Abrar) maternal family. I had assumed there might be five or ten people there for a nice relaxing evening. I quickly discovered that this family has
45 people under the same roof!!!! There were close to a hundred people who joined us for dinner. The building was five stories in the Chandpol district right along the ancient wall the marks the old city. It was one of the more interesting nights of the entire trip. In the house are Abrar's grandparents, their six sons, and the sons' wives and children. It was crowded and loud, though they seemed to love it. People in India and Egypt have very different concepts of personal space and privacy than Americans. Many expressed shock that i was travelling alone, the idea of not being surrounded by family and loved ones struck them as a horrible life. The only negative, according to Abrar, was that there are conflicts between the ancient matriarch and the six daughter in law's, which I imagine has to be pretty intense. They spent the whole night laughing and joking and everyone seemed very happy; I think they do a good job finding a medium between domestic bliss and total chaos.
At one point in the evening a woman was holding a baby over her shoulder. The baby was very tired, his eyes were just barely
open and glazed over. As his field of vision passed over me his eyes suddenly opened very wide and he began shrieking in terror! The entire party burst into laughter, apparently I am the first white person the baby had ever seen. Not a good first encounter...
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