2nd July 2016
2nd July 2016
Representing DEVISE, we made our first official visit to the two government schools (Bommarasipet and Shameerpet).
We started off with teaching at the primary school in Bommarasipet, which is around 9km away from NALSAR. Though we intended to limit ourselves to class one students so as to begin teaching from the very basics, the fact that there is no considerable difference in the standards of spoken English between classes one to three, made us merge and teach all the three classes. Initially, we were under an impression that all of them were well versed with the alphabets and hence went on to teach them how to write capital and small letters. Later, when we proceeded to have an individual examination, we realised that out of the thirty students being taught only fourteen were able to remember and pronounce all the alphabets. Of the other sixteen, most of them were unable to go beyond the first five or six alphabets.
We then went to the Government high school, shameerpet where we dealt with class six students. Though all of them were well versed with alphabets and rudimentary words, they could not understand the meaning of some basic sentences (This is my class). We gave them some sentences and helped them understand the meaning of the words used therein. We could not conform to any predetermined course structure as we were not aware of what they already knew. We then tried analysing it by giving 1 word to a group of 3 students, with which they had to form a sentence. Apart from a couple of students, no one was able to form the sentences properly.
We requested the school administration to provide us their 5th and 6th standard English text books so as to have an understanding of what these students are supposed to know by now.
We thank Benjamin Vanlalvena and Upasana Manoj for helping us in teaching these students.
– Ananye Krishna and Avinash Reddy