January 23 meeting: the details: by Vipul

From Cmi Spark

Revision as of 14:32, 23 January 2007

This meeting was based on an agenda decided by Vipul Naik (the article writer) available at Agenda for January 23 meeting: by Vipul.

Venue and other sundry details

• Venue: Seminar hall
• Date: January 23, 2007
• Starting time: 5:10 p.m. (approx)
• Ending time: 6:25 p.m. (scheduled departure time of the Tempo Traveller from CMI)
• Open to: all interested students

Attendance

The meeting was attended by: Vipul, Kshitij, Arnab, Shreevatsa, Ramprasad, Ravitej, Anirbit, Padmavathi, Jayanth, Arpith, Swarnava, Bodhayan and Anshul.

The stage was taken by me (Vipul) and Kshitij played the role of documenting important points on the black board.

Progress on agenda points

Whom to teach

The following were to be decided

• Whether to go ahead with the CCCL Hexaware project: There was a unanimous yes
• Whether to parallely attempt to contact a local school (as Bodhayan was making efforts for): It was decided that Bodhayan will go to the Navalur Panchayat Office and collect information about local schools. It is possible that we might pursue this line if the CCCL Hexaware line doesn't work out.
• Whether to continue gathering information about corporation schools in the city (as Ramprasad is currently supposed to do): This has been shelved for now, and will be picked up if the current lines of effort don't pan out.

What to teach

Before beginning, I made it clear that all further discussion would be in the context of Spark's proposed activities When the topic of what to teach was raised, Anirbit said that the matter had already been discussed and decided upon in the January 11 meeting. I pointed out to him that while it was true that the matter had been extensively debated and that he may personally have decided what to teach, no consensus had been reached. Further, we did not at the time have an idea of who our target audience would be, whereas we now had a clearer picture.

Modulo the assumption that we are teaching people in the CCCL Hexaware construction site, we decided on the following:

• The student's mother-tongue would be used as the medium of instruction: There was unanimous agreement upon this point
• Primary focus would be given to teaching the student arithmetic, as well as rudimentary skills such as reading clocks, counting money, and other applications of arithmetic: On this point also, there was unanimous agreement
• The student should be given practice in basic drawing skills and other hand-motor skills, which will, among other things, help the student learn to write: The suggestion of teaching the kids drawing was first made by Arpith. Arpith, one of CMI's budding artists, naturally felt this was the best way he could contribute to the education of the children. Vipul and some others took up Arpith's suggestion, though there were dissenters (Anshul and Shreevatsa) who felt that learning how to draw straight lines would not be much use in writing. Jayanth, however, said that his own experience indicated that the ability to draw straight lines was helpful in good letter formation.
• The student should be taught basic hygiene, sanitation, and health-related issues: the suggestion was made by Nivedita. She initially made the suggestion, then tried backing out, but by that time, there were others who had taken up the suggestion.
• The student could also be taught reading and writing in English, and in the mother-tongue

Some other side-currents that came up were:

• After somebody suggested that we teach the kids first-aid, we realized that most of us don't have formal training in first-aid ourselves. So it was decided that Spark members would undergo training in first-aid. We also realized that the safety engineers would anyway be training the workers in first-aid because CCCL is a very safety-conscious company (as most reputed construction companies are)
• Anshul said that there was recently a movement in Chennai to teach people Hindi, and he was of the opinion that many of the workers in the construction site would be keen for their children to learn Hindi. He said that if this were the case, he (Anshul) would best be able to teach.
• There was a cross-current between Arpith and Anirbit on how to teach people drawing. Arpith took serious exception to Anirbit's style of teaching Bhavani how to draw a leaf.
• There was some debate and confusion on whether the kids should be given a sense of art and aesthetics or whether drawing should be restricted to imparting skills. Anirbit reiterated that it was important to teach kids the aesthetic beauty in things. Most people, however, didn't see it as something very important.

How to organize the teaching

• Where to teach: Should we teach in the construction site or get the people to CMI? It was decided that we will initially start operations at the construction site and we may later get the children over to CMI, once we have gained their confidence.

• How to organize the students and teachers: Should we segregate students based on age, language and other factors and have separate teaching sessions (with different volunteers) or should we teach them all in one big bunch with 6-7 teachers hovering over them?

Small groups of students all with the same language and within the same age group could mean more focus, less distraction.

There was general consensus that age and language could form bases for segregation but it was decided that the details could be discussed only once we actually started out our educational programme.

Teaching aids/tools

• Teaching kit: Belliappa mentioned something, and Arpith said that K. S. Balaji's friend could help us in the matter. We decided that Arpith would follow up with this person to determine more about the availability, affordability and utility of the teaching kits. Actually, Arpith himself didn't commit to anything but gave what could be construed as agreement to the suggestion that he find out about the teaching kits.
• Slate, crayons, stationery etc.: Anshul preempted me on this issue by asking me earlier how we would get blackboards to teach the children. I informed him (and others who had newly joined Spark) that we had taught the children at CMI's construction site using slates, chalks, crayons and papers. So we could use the same package again. Some people were quick to point out that all the crayons had been finished/broken/misplaced and that this would pose a challenge to our activities. I felt that crayons could always be bought again and we simply needed to replenish our stocks. There was general agreement on the fact that we could always buy a new set of crayons and that lack of crayons should not hold Spark back.
• Books for the children: These include basic math and basic language books. A question of funds was again raised. I brushed this question aside saying that if Spark actually managed to do something, funds would be the least of the problem. There wasn't general consensus on whether funds would be major issue, but nobody seemed interested in it.
• Books for the teachers to decide how to go about the teaching: Apart from books for the children, there may be books/resources that will help the volunteers decide on a more effective teaching programme. Some time around this point, Padma suggested that if sufficiently many CMI students were interested, we could ask the friend of Dr. K. S. Balaji (the same one to whom Arpith had alluded) to address the interested CMI students. More on this later.
• Other aids that we haven't thought of: We still didn't think of them.

Padma suggested that if we wanted guidance on how to go about teaching the students, we could consult Balaji Sampath (a friend of Dr. K. S. Balaji), who was actively working in the area (Arpith opined that this person was a senior person in Aid-India or some equivalent social work organization). There was discussion on how and where we could get a briefing session in how to teach little kids from this person. Possible places include P. S. Senior Secondary School (Mylapore) and Institute of Mathematical Sciences. There were a lot of questions on what locations would be convenient for us or him but we finally decided that location was not a factor to be taken into consideration at least from our end.

When to teach

The project office people said that Sundays were the only days when they could help us because they (as well as the workers) were busy for the rest of the days. We decided to start our activities on Sundays and later move to the weekdays after having gained the trust of the children and their parents.

Allurement policy

This involves questions like:

• Should we offer any sops to the kids for coming and listening to us?
• How should we convince the children and their parents to trust us and see value in the services we are providing?

Addressing the workers

The project office people suggested that, on the coming Sunday, somebody from CMI address all the workers describing our plans and enlisting the support of the workers. The project office people assured us of logistic support but said that it was up to us to convince the workers of the worth of our services. We need to decide:

• Whether to address the workers
• What to say in our address
• What language(s) to address in: presumably Telugu and Oriya
• Who will address: currently, Bhanukiran and Anirbit are the likely candidates

Possible action points

Collecting more information

Questions raised in the meeting can help us survey the CCCL Hexaware site better and collect more information that can help us take more informed decisions on how to educate the children.

This may involve getting an idea of the kind of economic and social profile, finding out more about who knows which languages and how much, and so on.

Decisions on addressing the workers

The meeting must decide details on addressing the workers so that people who are supposed to give the sppeches can prepare them, and so that we can contact Rajesh (the safety engineer who said he'll spread the word about us) indicating that we want to give the address this Sunday.

Collecting a list of volunteers and their constraints

We would like to use the meeting to get a clear idea of how many people are willing to volunteer for Spark, including Spark's teaching activities (as of now, on Sunday) at the CCCL Hexaware site. We will also try to get an idea of whether there will be enough volunteers to parallely carry on other activities such as helping out the local school.