You’ve really got to admire the Indian teachers. Today was spent going through the feedback on the GE materials and they’d really thought about it and really gone into a lot of detail. The good points the teachers and administrators were surprised by were:

1) The kids are really enjoying it.
2) The parents and people nearby are seeing something is different in the school and want to know more.
3) Kids are actually responding when asked their name or about the weather etc. etc.

This last one they seemed particularly amazed to see from younger kids.

A few problems were:

1) Parents want homework
2) The timing of a couple of the songs
3) Teachers who have been skipping the games and just doing the songs.

These were actually a lot less than I thought. I guess the biggest problem is number 3) in that the songs are where you learn the English, but it’s the games where you learn to speak the English. So I think we’re going to change the timetable to be “Listening” and “Speaking” with reviews and new song in the former and reviews and the game in the latter.

They were also wanting to know what comes next. They were amazed by the projects, and how easy they are going to be, especially the international part.

The next thing they were wanting is more training which I’ll have to try and fit in next week.

Plus of course there were lots of other little problems and also big problems with teachers who are still teaching rote style etc. and at the end of the day they were saying they had lots of things to contend with. So I talked about some of the schools I worked with in Thailand whose biggest problems were landmines around the playgrounds. Often teachers just shrug at that. But the head teacher today, with some of the poorest and under privileged students you’ll ever meet, nodded and quoted:

“I felt sorry I had no shoes. Until I met a man who had no feet.”.

“We’ll make this work,” she said.