Spare the rod

Disclaimer: I do not support corporal punishment! My opinions in this post are only about the result of not having it. 

While several studies have shown that corporal punishment is effective for behavior modification in humans and animals alike, I still believe in alternatives to corporal punishment in class room environment. 

However, the more I interact with students, teachers and principals in the traditional school system in the affordable private school setup; I question the need for it.  

If you are an 80’s or a 90’s born kid from India, I can bet you were spanked at least once in your life time and even remember the incident clearly after all these years. Even though I went to some of the best schools around India growing up, I remember there being at least two teachers every academic session who we dreaded because of their skills with the wooden stick or iron scale. But when I look back at school, the strictest teachers were also the best at their subject, attained best class results and were also few of my favorite teachers.  They were not my favorite because they got sadistic pleasure out of beating me up but because I know they did so because they genuinely cared. 

When I went to school to visit my old teachers recently, they told me about how our school’s no-corporal-punishment rule has changed the classroom set up and what a big adjustment it has been for them. Seeing the strictest teacher in school with no stick and narrating an incident of how she got into trouble with the management for “pressuring the student” for not doing his homework after a complaint by his parents, made me re-think my recent seminar on alternatives to corporal punishment in the affordable private school I am working at.

   

In the APS sector, it is disheartening to see over use of corporal punishment that still exists from nursery till 10th class with the same intensity and is shocking for my fellow non-Indian co-workers. I was outraged seeing the degree of abuse the students face, especially the tiny tots. After my presentation the school saw some changes like use of impositions or suspension instead of physical methods but also saw increase in verbal abuse. Teachers believe that no amount of counseling will help. Spare the rod, spoil the child.

The other day 5 android tablets donated to our school were grandly stolen through double locks and a 10th class student is being suspected for the theft. But in spite of having clear evidence he is not being sent for police interrogation since our school head feels it is too much pressure on him this close to the exams and shows me an article from the newspaper this morning about how a 12 year old killed himself over 20 rupees (front page The Hindu, dated 7th march 2013).    

I see the present generation’s arrogant teenagers with their I-know-better-than-you, don’t-give-a-damn attitude and it makes me wonder how my parents would have reacted to it twenty years ago. I feel old using “the present generation” in third person but it concerns me to see the way they are turning out. The kids today have weak minds emotionally and thus resolve to weak measures like ending their lives over petty fights, teenage love and being caught stealing instead of facing their problems.  

When I see this shift from when we as students were scared of teachers to how teachers are scared of students these days, it makes me believe it is indeed because we spared the rod.

Design for change- I can!

Design for change is the largest global inter school competition which was started by Kiran Bir Shethi in 2009 and today, it is huge! It is like the school level equivalent of CSR activities for corporate companies and I bet DFC creates more impact since it is completely self driven. For more info

http://www.ted.com/talks/kiran_bir_sethi_teaches_kids_to_take_charge.html

She is my hero! 

R.S.K. was one of the schools that took part in the competition this year. We sent in 6 entries! The students came up with solutions for issues they want to address in their community. We had absolute fun conducting and shooting the DFC events. Here are some projects we did and the links.

Adopt Tommy:

Class 7 students collected money to adopt our school dog Tommy by buying him a collar. They wanted to do this because the school already lost a dog to the municipality stray dog catchers and they did not want that to happen to Tommy. With the extra money they also got him a dog bowl with his name on it where he eats the leftover food from kids tiffins. This way no food in our school gets wasted. :)

Our Green Ganesha!

Children made clay Ganeshas on the occasion of Ganesh Chaturthi to save the environment. In our country a lot of people use plaster of paris (POP) Ganeshas and when they are immersed in the water it does not dissolve completely. When it does dissolve the toxic chemicals harm the fish, plants and people living around those water bodies, thus, harming the environment. RSK students took the initiative to make clay Ganeshas which are eco friendly and also painted it with haldi kumkum and other natural colors which do not harm the environment. The teachers helped too and they took back their handmade clay Ganeshas home.

                                         

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z404gCYgpHw

Say no to plastic: Yes to Paper bags!

For the no plastic drive the students of class four and six made 60 paper bags for old news papers they brought from home. The idea was to Redue– Reuse– Recycle and spread awareness about the 3 R’s. The students then took those papers bangs to the ‘Kirana’ shops in their locality and told the shopkeepers not to give plastic bags to the customers and urge them to bring their own paper or cloth bags.

It’s beautiful to see kids contribute to building a better future. It rebuilds your trust in humanity. What most people fail to understand is that, in life it is not the marks you scored in school that matter, but the incidents that shape you into the kind of person you are today. We will talk more about those people in the posts to come. 

Imagination, life is your creation!

The best part about childhood is you can spend countless number of hours doing just absolutely nothing. Go on endless missions with your dog, watch a spider build its web from scratch all day, play with the tea set all afternoon, pretend shoot G.I.Joe Vs Superman, climb trees, run wild in the playground…. 

Now, as grownups, when was the last time you took time off to do just nothing at all?

I miss staring at the starry night sky, trying to spot constellations and sometimes making up some of my own or watch cloud fluffs turn from a rabbit into a crocodile to a pony to a teddy bear head to a heart and on, till dusk. I can’t remember the last time I did either but I feel the reason that we can’t really create something new as grownups is our lack of imagination. Now before you laugh at me for quoting Barbie in my title, I want you to take a second and think about what Barbie said (more like what AQUA said, *you can brush my hair and dress me anywhere. Imagination, life is your creation*). Now Barbie is no Plato, but that was some deep s***. In life, unless you use imagination, you can’t really create something that you can call your own. A better person to quote at this point would be Sir Albert Einstein who said “Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.” 

There is nothing that we do in our daily lives that triggers our imagination any more. In the beginning of the academic session, when there weren’t too many projects lined up, I came up with the silliest most fun way to keep a class occupied in their free period. Remember ink blot? You’d know this if you spent your school life using ink pens because your teacher insisted your hand writing gets better with it(even if it make you the slowest writer in the world). Class 7 Math, Chapter 11 –a lesson about symmetry.  What better way to teach it than with just a drop of ink? Drop some ink, fold the paper, smudge it in different angles and you have a… Bird! (or a bell?) The way one perceives a picture is not necessarily how some else would see it. The Rorschach’s ink blot test uses this very property to analyze psychological interpretation and detect underlying thought disorders.  But we used it purely for fun.

Next time you are at your work desk and have an ink pot lying around, trigger your imagination!

Farmville- It is not child labor if they are having fun doing it!

This is my first blog post, EVER! A little late, I know, but better late than never, right? For my first post I thought I’d share with you some of the exciting work I do. Presently, I am in an international fellowship program in social enterprise in India. I am placed with a low cost private school since the past 10 months and my role aims to provide quality education to the children from the Bottom Of the Pyramid(BOP), implementing capacity building projects and programs for schools which include anything from marketing strategies, computer aided learning, teacher training, curriculum development, career awareness workshops to art and craft modules, to name a few.

One such project, the organic vegetable market or ‘Farmville’ as the kids fondly call it, is an extension of ‘the roof top garden program’ started by last year’s fellow, Jessica Frank in R.S.K high school. I believe this project beautifully integrates last year’s project with this year’s and makes it sustainable. The Idea behind this project was to make the students empathize with a framer’s life and the process of growing crops right from tilling the soil and sowing the seeds to watering and reaping it, so that they appreciate the labor and effort that goes into bringing food to the table. I might sound like a MOM saying this but I feel kids these days are so cut off from nature and so engrossed with their television and video games, I bet they think the food grows on super market shelves.

The organic vegetable market was a competition between groups of students from classes VI, VII, VII, IX to see who grows the maximum produce and earns the most selling it. The costs involved in this project were minimal. The only expenditure since we already had a roof top garden (which does not cost much to set up if you are innovative) was for the seed packets which cost 15 rupees each. We have 8 soil beds on our roof so it only cost us 120 rupees for 8 seed packets. The best part was that it involved the parents on the final day and showed them all that their kids are learning at school, which is a big plus for any school.

In the first phase the students cleared the soil beds threw away stones and weeds, tilled the soil, leveled the ground and sowed the seeds and watered it. This barely took 2 periods on the first day.

Phase two lasted almost a month where two students each took turns to water the plants roll number wise. This way the whole class got to see their vegetables through the entire process of germination. Within 4 days the seeds sprouted out and man, the excitement that followed! This was a first for me too.

And after a month…. Ta-Dah! 

We had a lush green roof top garden with a variety of produce ranging from Spinach, Meethi, Dhaniya to tothakura and chukkakura.  

Finally on the last day the students cut, stacked, cleaned and bundled their produce. This part was important as it taught them why one should wash the vegetables before cooking them. They saw the amount of dirt that came out from just rinsing them in a bucket and what we grew did not even have insecticides or pesticides sprayed on it.

 

When the market opened the students were all set at their counters ready to make the sell, grabbing the attention of parents walking in by shouting out attractive offers. They used every trick in the book, selling the key points from how they were absolutely fresh and grown with no chemicals to using their ‘cuteness’ quotient.

The biggest learning’s for the students from this project were budgeting, marketing skills, bargaining, team work, making a pitch and understanding how mere 15 rupees can earn 170 rupees with time, effort and labor invested. There was no supervision needed during the duration of the project; they were responsible for their own patch and it was amazing to see the discipline that came through in the end.

This is how we did it in our school but you can replicate this project anywhere and change it according to your need, be it your school, your community, your colony or your city. It is also a better alternative if your kid is pestering you for a puppy! While I am going to be busy spreading this in my colony over the next month, I urge you to do the same in your neighborhood for a greener tomorrow. Stay tuned for updates on how that goes.