My Student Council might be jealous...

Day two of our visit to Navrachana School again began with an all school assembly.  This time the purpose was to induct this year's student leaders into their offices.  Normally, this ceremony occurs at the beginning of the school year, but because of our visit, the ceremony had been postponed until we were able to attend.  There was a great deal more formality and pomp than occurs when my new Student Council is installed each year.

The first group of students who were inducted were from what we would call the middle school.  Their offices included representatives for each of the houses--the school is divided into four houses, and each student is assigned to a house.  The second group of students were from grades 10-12 and included the school president, head boy and head girl, the sports captain, the cultural presidents, heads of student welfare, and the head of the creative cell.  The last four offices also had vice-heads who were inducted.  Prefects for each house were included too.  The first group did not have sashes, but all of the key officers received a sash for his/her office.  All of the new officers were sworn in with an oath of office.  In the first clip, notice the students standing on the balcony.  These are the primary grades, and most of the students were in their more informal uniforms of polos and shorts because it was Saturday.

The entire school is present to witness the induction of the Student Council.

During the swearing in of the new officers.  The student standing at the microphones on the left side of the stage was being sworn in as the school president.

Navrachana School's newly inducted Student Council.  Principal Baksi conducted the swearing in of the new officers.

The president and head boy/girl are the three highest offices in the Student Council.  These students had to complete an application and then a vetting process to be selected for these offices.

My Student Council's end of the year pizza party and election of new officers really pales in comparison to recognition that these students received from the staff and students at Navrachana.

Welcome to Navrachana...

The highlight of my trip was spending a week in Vadodara at Navrachana School, Sama Road.  The week was amazing from beginning to end, and the welcome dinner the night we arrived and the welcome assembly the next morning set the stage.

Navrachana School is a CBSE school, which means that the school's curriculum is determined by the Central Board (CB).  It is a private, unaided school and one of the best schools in Vadodara.  The principal Ms. Bijoya Baksi is clearly a visionary educational leader, and education staff are equally impressive.

On our first morning, we were welcomed with a garland of flowers and red paste and rice on our foreheads.  Then the whole school welcomed us.

This is the main courtyard where all school assemblies are held.  Most mornings, the morning assembly is divided between the primary grades and the secondary grades, but this was a special occasion.  The event was emceed by two students,

 

 

 

and included a welcome from Principal Baksi as well as a presention of music and dance from the students.  Each of the visitors were also asked to speak.  It is a little daunting to speak to 2000 students, but Carla, Ashley, and I all managed it.

 

  



We were also presented with student artwork as a welcome gift. 

This is Kalamkari art, created by a Standard IX student at Narachana School.

After the assembly, we were given a tour of the campus by the president of the student body and the head boy.  The classrooms are in two main buildings, each with three stories.  The buildings surround two large courtyards.  Behind one courtyard is additional space for vollyball and basketball courts, all outside.  The buildings around the first courtyard are for the primary students, and this courtyard includes the stage that can be seen in the pictures above.  The second courtyard, around which the secondary classes are grouped, does not have a stage.  A separate building houses the instrumental and vocal classes and some of the art classes.  The arts are clearly emphasized as we saw throughout our visit.  Like at Blossom School, the students remain in their classroom, and the teachers move from class to class.  Each of the departments has a lab where students can go to work on projects.  The school also has computer labs that teachers can use with their classes.

 

The second courtyard.

Library

Another view of the second courtyard.

Social Studies lab



Display in the Fashion classroom.

One of the science labs.

A computer lab.

 We got to sit in on a lesson this first day too.  The lesson took place in one of the technology classrooms, because the teacher was showing video clips and then used the interactive whiteboard for taking notes.  The teacher Ms. Esther Ravikumar was introducing a new unit on Nazism and the Holocaust.  In the discussion after the class, she indicated that the students had selected this topic for an in-depth study.  Their choices were decided based on the CBSE curriculum, but Esther had given the students some voice in their studies.  The unit was going to take a couple of months and at the end of the unit the students were going to put Adolf Hitler on trial for the Holocaust.  Several things stood out to me in this lesson.  Esther has excellent questioning skills.  She involved all of the students and she asked for them to think critically as well as to recall information.  While Esther was teaching, a technology staff member was dealing with all of the technology, playing the video and managing the notes from the interactive white board.  Esther's time was freed up to do what she does best, teach.  And lastly, I would love to be able to spend a couple of months on one topic.  In all the classrooms that I visited, including Blossom School, I never saw a textbook that was more than an inch thick.  Our textbooks could be considered weapons because they are so large and so heavy.  I certainly think it's criminal that anyone can think that we can get through that amount of material in 180 days and be able to go into any kind of depth.  I would loved to have seen more of Esther's unit, to see what she was able to do in those two months.

Our last session of the day was with one of the art teachers Mr. Sarang Fadnis.  We spent a wonderful hour and a half learning about and then trying Worli and Rangoli art.

 

 

The above video shows how we prepared the paper.

 

This is my unfinished Worli painting.

 

The Rangoli was a group project, which began by selecting colors of powders and sifting the powders onto our 'doorway.'

The second step was to add designs to the powder with our fingers, but these designs had no connection to the patterns of color that we had just applied.

 The final steps were to place small plates of glass of various shapes and sizes on top of the powder.  And lastly, placing faux gems around the design as well.

Our first day at school ended with the first of several wonderful lunches in the conference room.  During our tour, the students had raved about the school lunches, and we found that they were not wrong.  Each day we ate in the school conference room with Principal Baksi and our host teachers Mamta and Archana.  It was a great opportunity to talk about what we had done that day and for us to ask any questions while they were still fresh in our minds.

Some thoughts on security...

After our three days of orientation in Bangalore, we all split up to go to our assigned schools.  Carla, Ashley, and I traveled to Vadodara (Baroda) in Gujarat.  We would spend the next week at Navrachana School.

This was our first experience of traveling inside India and our first experience of India's security measures.  Security concerns was the biggest difference I saw between my first visit in 1996 and my second in 2012.  To get into the airport building, we had to have a photo id and proof of a ticket.  Thankfully, I had an itinerary, something I do not do when traveling in the U.S. because my boarding passes tell me all the information I need once I get to the airport.  All luggage must have tags, including carry bags.  The carry on bags need the tags because they are stamped at security to show that they have been through security.  In Bangalore, one of my carry-on bags had to be manually searched because my fruit snacks and granola bars registered a problem when the bag was x-rayed.  After the bag was searched, it was sent back through the x-ray again, and then it was stamped.  An armed security guard was present at every boarding gate, and after the boarding pass was scanned by the airline personnel, this guard examined the boarding pass and all the carry-on bags for the security stamp.  The boarding passes were torn by airline personnel just before entering the plane.

We flew from Bangalore to Mumbai and had to get a connecting flight to Vadodara.  We de-planed on the tarmac and rode a bus to the terminal in Mumbai.  When we got off of the bus we had to show the airline representative our boarding pass from the Bangalore flight to get into the terminal.  Once in the terminal, we had to go through security again and receive another stamp on our luggage tags.  At this check, my bags were fine, but Carla had too many electronic cords in hers, so her bag was searched and re-x-rayed.

At each of these security checks, the men and the women are in separate lines.  Everyone passes through a metal detector, but it is almost a moot point because everyone gets a pat down and wanded with a metal detector.  The women get a curtain, a cubicle, and a female security guard.  The men get a platform for everyone to see.  The two most thorough pat downs I got on my trip were at the Taj Mahal and at the entrance to the waiting area for my flight from Delhi to Newark.

This concern with security was not just at the airport.  At every hotel that we stayed, the guests entered through a metal detector.  I never was asked to take anything off when I went through the metal detector, but I went through the metal detector every time.  At our hotel in Vadodara, my bags were also x-rayed every time I entered the hotel.  At every mall I entered in Vadodara and Mumbai, I went through a metal detector.  Every time that someone dropped us at our hotel in Vadodara, that person's car was checked over, with a mirror to look under the car and a visual check of the trunk.  The more high-end the location, the more strict the security was.

For my flight from Delhi to Newark, I was questioned about my luggage and any electronics that I had with me before I could check in.  To get to my gate, I went through the normal routine of passing through Customs/Immigration and then through security.  To get into the waiting area for my flight, I was again questioned about my control of my carry-on bags.  I had to take my shoes off to go through the metal detector and then I was patted down also.  My bags were x-rayed for a second time, also.

While in Vadodara, I commented on the level of security, and Mamta confirmed that it was due to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008, but it wasn't until I visited Naina in Mumbai and listened to her recount the attacks while we drove past the places where they occurred that I had some understanding of how those attacks had changed India.  Hearing about parents who went out to dinner for the evening and never came back or the police officer who gave his life to capture the only one of the terrorists who was not killed put all of the security in perspective. 

Snapshots of Indian education...

Our morning started with bus ride across the city to Blossom Public School.  The name is a little misleading since the school is a privated-aided school, which means all the students pay tuition, but the government of Karnatka also contributes funds to the school.  Interestingly, this sign does not identify the school as English-medium, which it is. 

The school occupies this building and the upper floors of a building a couple of doors down the street.  This entry way was used as storage, and there was a room off of it that was used to prepare the lunches.  Lunch is often one of the most important aspects for these schools as it is a meal the families did not need to provide. 

The information that the Teacher Foundation gave to us prior to our visit indicated that this school served a predominantly Muslim student body.  When asked about something connected to the beliefs of the students, the director/principal suggested that the majority of student body was not Muslim.  All the evidence, however, suggested that our original information had been correct.  When we arrived, almost all of the mothers who were dropping off students for school were dressed like the woman above on the right.  In addition, on Fridays the boys were excused from classes to attend mosque. 

We had a brief introduction from the director/principal and had the opportunity to ask questions.  This is the first school that Ayub Pasha has opened.  He trained as a journalist, but he opened this school because education was his passion.  The school began seven years ago and has been adding grades each year.  Next year, for the first time, the school will have students take the Standard 10 exam, which is the national exam that marks the end of high school.  (Some students continue on to Standard 11 and 12 to prepare for university.)  The school serves 1100 students (45-50 students per class) and has 34 teachers.  Sixty percent of the teachers are trained.  The other 40% are promising graduates who have trained on the job.  Student fees are 300 Rupees (about $5.55) a month, which is a significant investment for these families.  Pasha said the school's biggest challenge was the high expectations of the parents even though many of the parents could not provide appropriate educational support at home.  Earlier, he had said that only 30% of the parents are educated themselves.



Ashley Snell, IREX, presenting Ayub Pasha with a gift.

 While we were waiting for our tours to start, I noticed a TV monitor in the school office that was scrolling through the different classrooms in the school.  I admit that I was taken aback by this.  Our new high school has security cameras inside and outside the building, but absolutely none in the classroom.  My first thought when I saw the monitor is that U.S. teachers would never allow that sort of "Big Brother" in our classrooms.  Later during our visits to the classrooms, I got to witness the camera in action.  Three of our group were observing a geography lesson, but only two of sat down in the seats that we were offered, mostly because these were not seats made for adult-size people.  Just a few minutes into our observation, the principal came on the intercome and told the teacher to offer all of us a seat.

This is the class we observed.  It was Standard VII, and this is their classroom.  The students stay in the same classroom, while the teachers move from classroom to classroom.  This was a similar to what I knew about Chinese and Turkish classrooms.  The posters on the walls were from a science project. 

We watched part of a geography lesson on Europe.  The teacher was reading aloud from the textbook about the physical features of Europe, and the students were following along.  The lesson was entirely in English, from the text in the book to the review of the material.  The students were taking notes in their books and were asked recall questions of the material at the end of each section.  The teacher emphasized important information through a call and repeat process.  Interestingly, on the pages I saw of the textbook. the lesson did not include a map or an image of any of the physcial features that were being explained.  I know that I am fortunate with the technology I have available to me in my classroom and the ability I have to show students about what I describing.  As I sat in a desk no 6' person should ever have to sit in, I tried to imagine teaching students about something with which they have no experience and in language which is a second language and with no visual images to help with the explanation.  I admired this teacher very much for what she was trying to do.

This was the second lesson I observed.  This is a Standard II class, and the students are receiving a lesson in Hindi.  The teacher was using a call and repeat strategy, and then having the students write in their notebooks.  At this point, she was walking down the center aisle to check what the students had written and to make corrections as needed.  Keep in mind that the students are so crowded together because a couple of large adults had taken their seats in the back (us).  This classroom was in the second building.  It was on the second and third floors of this building.  The first floor was used by another business.

In this classroom, the students were receiving a lesson in Kannada, which is the language of the state of Karnataka where Bangalore is located.  This classroom had two teachers present, one teacher who stayed with these students all day and another teacher who was giving the lesson in Kanada.  We mostly just interupted this class.

The woman in yellow is the teacher who stays with the students because their age.  She could speak English, and we were able to ask her some questions.  The woman on the left was the Kanada instructor who did not speak English.  She was very gracious, even though we badly interrupted her lesson.

 

 

One of the questions that was asked at the beginning of our visit was the availability of technology.  The principal said that the school had computers that the students could use and the school had projectors that the teachers could use for a lesson.  The computers are in a separate lab, and as this picture shows the projectors were in separate rooms also.  This is a room next door to the Kannada lesson and across the hall from the Standard II Hindi lesson, but there were no desks or chairs set up in this room.  I have identical projector in my classroom, but I think that I use mine more.  Also every teacher in my building has the same projector in their classroom.  None of the classrooms in which I saw children had more than a chalk board.

 

The woman in the chador works in the office and was helping to conduct the tour.  She put on the chador because to go from the first building to this one, she had to walk on the street.  She had brought us into this room to show us the available technology, but then engaged us in a conversation about education.

 

After lunch at the hotel, we traveled to the other primary school.  This school is a government school, and the language of instruction is Kannada.  Both Hindi and English are also taught, but the lessons are conducted in Kannada.

 

 

 



 



These are the houses that are directly across from the school.  These are clearly homes of well-to-do families, and none of their children attend the school just across the street.  The children from these families attend private schools, probably private unaided schools.  The students that attend this school are from the families that cannot afford to send their children to a private school.  During our interview with the principal, she said that many of the students came from the slum area.

We arrived just as lunch was concluding, so the preschool children were down for their nap in the room off the entry way.  The school provides instruction in Standards 1-7, serves 200 students, and has 7 teachers.  All of the staff are assigned to this school by the central office, including the principal.  The principal had been at this school for eight years, and she was clearly dedicated to what she was doing.  She had arranged with a donor for the students to get fruit with their meal twice a week.  She also had arranged donors to help with the school uniforms and to provide health screenings for the students and their families.  The day we visited about half of the students and staff were gone, preparing for a presentation, because the school was being recognized as the best school in the area.

  

 

This school was laid out more how I would have expected.  The day started in the courtyard at left, with the students singing the national anthem and participating in other group activities.  The principal also said that the students read the newspaper first thing in the morning, but I was not clear about whether the students read the paper (I doubted this) or the teachers read the papers to them (I thought more likely).  The school day began at 9:10 with the assembly and concluded at 3:30.  Students attended school Monday-Saturday, with six classes per day on Monday through Friday.  Saturday was used for co-curricular and computer classes.  The hours and the days were very similar to the first school (Blossom), but Blossom could not start with an all school assembly because it did not have the space.

 



The students were singing a song for us.

This classroom was strikingly different from every other classroom that I saw all day.  This classroom looks much more like what I expect an elementary classroom to be.  The students were grouped around round tables, and a variety of visuals and student work decorated the entire room.  This is a style of instruction based on principles similar to the Montessori schools, but it is not the norm for most of India's students.

The principal was also proud of the fact that she had arranged for the school to have a computer lab, so the students could be instructed how to use computers.  The computers were arranged through donor also.

My lesson for the day?  These women (and except for Ayun Pasha, they were all women) care very strongly about they are doing, and they are doing the very best for their students, within the limits of their situations.  I think this is a universal trait of almost all teachers.

A Walk About Bangalore...

A Walk about Bangalore…

 Our introduction to Bangalore and India continued with a walking tour of the city.  I found the morning to be a lesson in perspectives. 

Day 2 in Bangalore.  Arun is standing in the center of our group.

 

Our tour guide Arun started with a short history lesson on the significance of Bangalore, beginning with a list of dates--1776, 1789, 1798, 1805, and 1815.  Recognize any?  I recognized four of the five dates from U.S. and French history but could not explain the dates' significance to India's or Bangalore's history.  Although I did know that Lord Cornwallis resurrected his military career by defeating the French in India, I had not known that he had accomplished this by defeating the King of Mysore, roughly where Bangalore is located today.

Teaching World History, I have become somewhat better at looking at events from different perspectives, but even so, too often those perspectives are still limited by the immediate actors in an event due to limited knowledge and/or the time constraints of a 180-day school year.  For example, U.S. history books rarely explain the financial problems that the British East India Company was encountering due to the start of the Industrial Revolution and the loss of the Indian cotton cloth trade or that Parliament was trying to bail out the East India Company when it granted a monopoly on importing tea into the North American colonies.  U.S. history books almost always cast Parliament’s actions as another example of Britain’s tyranny over those colonies as an explanation of the Boston Tea Party, and India is never mentioned.  In World History textbooks, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain is typically described as if the British were not part of a global network of commerce that was becoming more and more interdependent.

So I greatly appreciated our mini history lesson because it squarely placed Indian events in a global context and not in splendid isolation, and here are the explanations of the dates with which Arun started the tour:  

1776—The war for U. S. independence can also be understood in the context of the on-going conflict between France and Britain over colonial possessions, both in the Americas and in Asia.  After Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, ending the war in North America, the focus of this conflict shifted to India.  Ironically, the same man who surrendered at Yorktown was able to revive his reputation by defeating the King of Mysore and claiming India for Britain.  In addition, Mysore was one of the first governments to recognize the United States as an independent nation, in part because of Mysore’s ongoing problems with the British.

1789—Like the Americans, the King of Mysore asked the King of France for assistance in fighting the British, but due to the start of the French Revolution, King Louis XVI was unable to help the King of Mysore.

 1798—Napoleon’s defeat in Egypt also prevented him from sending assistance to the King of Mysore.

 1805—The loss at the Battle of Trafalgar further limited France’s ability to assist the King of Mysore.

 1815—Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo came at the hands of the Duke of Wellington who had served under Cornwallis in the war with Mysore.

 After this brief background on Bangalore’s past, we began with the colonial portion of the city. 

   

 Bangalore served as an administrative and military center for the British in India.  The facilities used by the British military (above) continue in use by the Indian military today.

At the center of the colonial city is a large park, which people use for recreation and exercise. We arrived after most of the morning activities. We did see one woman meditating, however, with her seven Golden Retrievers. A statue of Queen Victoria stands at one end of the park. One section of the park is specifically for children with a small train, while other areas provide gathering places for concerts and other activities.
 

Queen Victoria

A stage used for concerts and other events

The children's play area

 

The British colonial government was housed in this building. The picture shows only the central portion of this enormous building. As Arun pointed out, a large edifice can be used to inspire awe and hopefully (?) respect. Today the building houses the state of Karnataka’s High Court.

 After independence, Karnataka built an even larger building to house the state government. The construction in front of the building is for the new metro line. Bangalore, like several Indian cities, is working on constructing a rapid transit system. Bangalore's first line had opened six months before our arrival.

 

The lions at the top of the building are from the reign of Ashoka during the Mauryan empire (261-239 BCE).  Ashoka's conversion to Buddhism helped the spread of Buddhism behond India's borders.  Ashoka's edicts encouraged vegetarianism and expected religious tolerance of all religions, not just his own. 

 

On our way through the park, we stopped at this well-known juice stand. The woman has an amazing variety of juices, which she blends together for various health properties.

 

 

 A common feature of India are the dogs that live on the street. We saw a number of them as we walked through the park. The gentleman with the bike came with a bag of bread to feed the dogs, and the brown and white dog picked us up, following us around the park in hopes that we would feed it. He followed us for at least half of our circuit of the park, and did not give up on us until we got back on the bus.  

 

 

 

 Our bus picked us up at the other end of the park, where this statue of King George, Victoria’s son, stands.  His statue faces hers across the park. 

Our last stop in the colonial portion of the city was Trinity Church. The church is in regular use, as evidenced by the electronic display board for which hymns will be sung. The colonial past is also ever present with the plaques and memorials that hang on the walls around the church.

 

 

One of numerous plaques and memorials that hang on the
walls of Trinity Church, in memory of British soldiers.

 To continue our tour, we needed to cross this street of traffic.  In China, my group called it the zen of traffic (although zen is Japanese), but there is a definite mindset needed to negotiate street traffic in India.  Our group had not yet achieved that mindset at this point in the trip.  And I never achieved the fearlessness of Indian pedestrians.

 

 The structure above the street is Bangalore’s first metro line, which we used to return to our hotel.

 The rest of the tour took us through a typical neighborhood, and our second lesson in perspective.  Before we entered the neighborhood, Arun asked if we’d seen “Slumdog Millionaire,” to emphasize the point that what we were going to see was not a slum.  He was reminding us to check our preconceived ideas and to see a neighborhood of houses where families lived, where people went to work each day in offices and hotels and shops, and where children went to school.  It was still incredibly helpful to have Arun with us because of his knowledge of the neighborhood and the people who lived there.

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The streets were very narrow through this neighborhood, and while we had
several motorbikes pass us, I do not remember seeing a car in these streets.

 

Several of the homes had these geometric designs outside of the front door.  While on special holidays, the decorations would be more elaborate.  Arun said the designs themselves are merely decorative, a way to make the neighborhood more beautiful.  This was one of the more elaborate designs that we saw on our walk.

Some of the exterior doorways were more elaborate, like this one.  The red paste is applied as part of a personal regligious observance.  We saw similar applications of paste to carvings in the Hindu temple that we visited. 

Cows were another common feature of India.  I was surprised that most of the cows I saw in Bangalore were Holsteins, which are a common site in the upper midwest's dairylands.  Bangalore's temperatures were in the low to mid-80s F while we were there, which would explain why people are able to keep Holsteins there.  The garbage in this image is also a very typical sight in India.  Both Arun and Maya (the Teacher Foundation) emphasized the importance of keeping one's own home clean, but that an area like this would have been outside the boundaries of what any one householder was responsible, and so personal interests trumps what we would include under civic-mindedness.

 

Here is an example of where Arun's knowledge and understanding of this neighborhood were invaluable.  As we walked past this site, Arun stopped to talk to a woman whose family owns this property and these cows.  The family had recently torn down their old house were preparing to build a new three or four story house.  The family consisted of three bothers and their wives and children.  Each brother would have a floor in the new house and the lowest level of the house would be for parking the vehicles and as stabling for the cows.  Arun reminded us that all of the cows we saw belonged to someone, and many did have a sort of halter like the cow on the left.

We passed this Hindu temple on our way through the neighborhood.  At the end of the tour we visited another, much older, Hindu temple.  We also saw a mosque in the neighborhood, and several streets over we saw a gathering of Jains.  So while most Indians would identify themselves as Hindus, peoples of other faiths are present also.

As places like Bangalore have grown increasingly urbanized, the common grazing locations upon which cows and their owners depended have disappeared.  So now the cows 'graze' on the garbage that is thrown out.  This cow is eating the refuse from a community market that is in the next couple of streets.  One of the women from the Teacher Foundation said that they had seen cows trying to eat greens that someone was trying to sell and the cows had to be shooed away.

Some of the vegetables available in the market.

 

Another example of the diversity of the neighborhood.  This is a beef market, where Muslims can purchase beef.

And another example--which religious image best suits your personal religious beliefs--Lord Ganesh or Lord Jesus?

This was a small primary school tucked into a building just off the street.  We just walked in and were given a very brief tour of the building while the classes were going on.  Note that this is an English-medium school and included students up through Standard (or grade) 4.  Next door to the school, workmen were repairing a mosque, and half a block the other way was the Hindu temple that we visited next.

 

This is the exterior of the temple which Arun took us through.  It is a temple which has been here for centuries and continues to serve Hindu worshippers.  No pictures are allowed inside the temple, and we were allowed in because we wer with Arun.  While I would love to have pictures to show what the ceremony that we witnessed was like, I greatly appreciate the ban on photography.  I have always felt awkward touring a religious site which is a fully functioning center of worship.

Our walking tour of Bangalore was a truly amazing experience that helped give us some perspectives of India which served me well on the rest of my journey.