Make A Difference

M.A.D - short for Make A Difference; and they really do because they believe in bringing the young out of their vicious cycle of poverty by helping them score higher in school and in entrance exams. But it’s not only about helping them reach their dreams; it’s also about making them have dreams to start with. Six years ago, if you had visited the Aloysian Boys Home (ABH) center and asked all the kids what they wanted to be, you would hear such innocent and na?ve replies, like “Bus Driver”, that you wouldn’t know what to say.  How do you make kids have dreams? How did your parents make you have dreams when you were a kid?

Well many of these kids did not have access to newspapers, television, sometimes their parents’ advice, or any real adult advice. So MAD started a program called Discover, where they chose volunteers to become friends with the kids, about 3-7 kids each, and find out their hobbies and interests and introduce one career to them every week using props, skits, and videos, and sometimes by bringing in people from the same career and more. So, if you visit ABH now you will, thankfully, find better responses viz. Soldier, Dancer, Teacher, Doctor etc.

EdSupport (Education Support) Mangalore volunteers, on the other hand, conduct weekly tuition classes in three subjects as of now- English, Mathematics and Science. We have also had many suggestions in our monthly volunteer meetings about adding subjects like Computer Science. However, as with many organizations, funds and shortage of volunteers are the challenges MAD addresses every year, with great sincerity, so as to add such new features to its program.

As a volunteer in MAD’s EdSupport classrooms, you are at the other side of the desk and my first session with eight sixth grade girls of Prajna Home Shelter was pretty disastrous. The Head of my center could see my hopeless efforts in trying to explain the meaning of each word from the poem – ‘The Bee’ (using my Kannada dictionary app). Every time I went back to the previous word, I would find that they had forgotten the meaning. As 4 out of the eight girls of my class could not read the poem, learning new words and spellings would have required photographic memory or else the skill of rote learning, the latter being what they had probably used to reach 6th grade (MAD tuitions begin from the 5th grade at the Prajna Centre). (Also, we’ve heard that local school teachers mark a few questions before hand itself so as to ask for the exams and also adjust marks in the end to let maximum students pass. This makes it easy for a student of 10th grade to not know 80% of what he was taught.)

They listened quietly to my blabber for as long as 20 minutes, after which 2 of them ran away laughing, making an excuse for the loo, and teasing the rest of the girls. The other girls kept requesting that we play games and said to me “Bore, Akka”, the one word whose essence they understood.  I played games with them for 2 hours that day because I couldn’t instantaneously think of ways to direct their attention towards English. Quite clearly, they didn’t like the language, the text books. Writing bored them. They loved speaking in Kannada (which I didn’t know), playing games, and they had no ambition.  Also, the Discover program starts from the 7th grade at Prajna. Every time I spoke in English that day, they stared at me with their adorable blank faces and I laughed, felt silly and resumed playing.

After a few sessions, every volunteer finds his/her own way of grabbing their kids’ attention and settles with what works best with her views of ideal teaching and her kids’ personalities. Since I didn’t know Kannada, I stuck to reading out a summary of a chapter (translated to Kannada using Google translate and often with the help of other volunteers), showing them multiple pictures to convey the essence of the meaning of a new word, showing them (decent) English cartoon videos; playing games for the revision of words, making sentences from the words they knew, making words from letters (the board game Crossword); and singing Barney songs.

Through the sessions, I realized that it’s easy to get stuck while teaching if you don’t know how to explain the same thing differently every time the kids ask a doubt. You would think you can explain ‘this’ vs. ‘that’ without preparation, but wait till they ask you their most innocent questions. But teaching English really helps you get back to the basics of English grammar, which will make comprehending RCs in your GRE easier.

Knowing a subject in depth is really only the first half of knowing how to teach. What makes teaching kids fun is trying to understand what’s going on in their minds as each minute passes by and blowing their mind using what you know. Many volunteers are great story tellers and they don’t need Google translation to blow their kids’ minds. Apart from sharing knowledge, MAD is about not sharing your views on sanskaar and teaching the kids what the home shelter wants them to know.

 I think that if you want to eliminate rote learning, teaching in a place like this is a great way to start. You will have to challenge your kids to question the books and challenge yourself to answer those out-of –the-world questions. Also, if you want to eliminate gender inequality, this is a good place to start because you can encourage the girls of Prajna Center to be more expressive, less polite and more firm and the boys of ABH to be more sensitive, polite and calm so that as their thoughts are running from one thing to another, they know when to stop letting the whole world know about them.

 MAD’s multi-feedback structure has set the routes of fast growth. We discuss about our plans before starting the class and check its effectiveness after the class is over. We have center circle meetings and city circle meetings to interact with other volunteers and share our challenges, solutions, ideas, and reviews on any matter. We note down the improvements in our students every month. We send a yearly feedback to the heads of MAD on our thoughts about its effectiveness as an organization..

I wish to see every kid at MAD grow up as a happy, good, smart and successful person. May they be ever passionate about something and make a difference in their own lives and help others too. I hope MAD grows as a family of volunteers and as an administration and that they inspire more and more people to lend a helping hand to others. I hope to grow up, have a great job and find one of my kids as a colleague or even as my boss. I am sure MAD is already working towards such possibilities, I know because I read the blogs on their stories. One of those was about a student named Austin Paul, who put so much effort into his school education and college preparation that he got an admission in US through their CCIP program. I hope we all learn from Austin and break through the boundaries and limitations in our head to compete only with ourselves and grow to work for our society like a cell works for the body.