Just Jackfruit

We met again with the teachers from the boys’ high school to flesh out more details of their plan to introduce computer literacy education to their students. They want to begin teaching the 10th and 12th grades when the new school year starts in April, because the 9th grade takes at least a month to settle into school and the 11th grade spends that much time picking their classes after passing their national board exams at the end of 10th grade. The problem with this plan, which occurred to us later, is that the students in the 10th and 12th grades will be so preoccupied with studying for their boards that they might not be too enthusiastic about taking time off to do something unrelated.

There are only ten computers, so the general consensus seems to be that the development of a small pilot project with three groups of ten students each would be best. The teachers are in favor of teaching all three groups at the same time, giving each two days a week. They’re also thinking about swapping out the students in the groups after three months. We still have to define what the students should know to be considered computer literate.

They can either dedicate 1-2 weeks at the beginning of the program to teaching typing skills in Hindi and English or spend a few minutes at the beginning of each period working on typing.

The ideal would be to have a dedicated teacher to teach computers as a separate subject, but there might not be room in the school’s budget for an additional faculty position until the government mandates a computer curriculum. The teachers are therefore considering taking five minutes out of each period to produce a 30-minute-long seventh period. The problem with this plan, which again occurred to us later, is that if a government inspector comes by, he may question why the students are losing a whole half-hour of school time since computer classes are not yet sanctioned by the government.

The teachers also want to ask the principal to hire a part-time IT person to maintain the computers. Whether or not there will be room in the budget for this additional expense remains to be seen.

The other issue, which we’re mostly ignoring right now, is that the teachers we’re working with are mostly ad hoc guest faculty who are given school postings for 10 months at a time. It’s possible (and really, more than likely) that they won’t be here after April.

We met with seven teachers, including Ashish, Salar, and Divya, at the boys’ high school today to brainstorm ideas about how to introduce computer literacy education to the students there. The following are my notes from the meeting:

• Class size
  • 9th – 340
  • 10th – 200
  • 11th – 100 (64 taking physics)
  • 12th – 150 (76 taking physics)

• 50% of 10th grade students will drop out after board exams

• English skills
  • Stats
    • In 9th & 10th grades, 25-30% have good English skills
    • Only 11th and 12th grade students know enough English to work a computer (?)
  • Students don’t know enough English to translate English-Hindi or Hindi-English
    • For homework, they memorize passages and sentences
    • For essays, they basically copy passages from their textbooks

• Subject structure
  • One textbook and workbook for each subject
  • One year is just right to get through all of that

• Teaching ideas
  • Who to teach?
    • First discussed teaching only 11th and 12th grades because they have better English skills
    • Typing skills can be taught to all grades
    • Can also type in Word in Hindi or English
  • New period
    • Take 5 minutes from each class (right now, periods are 40 minutes – make them 35)
    • Using that time, create new period for dedicated computer class
  • Research project
    • Pick small topic
    • Write 5-6 pages on it
    • Possibly pick the 10 most interested students
    • Prepare in style of Ashish’s thesis
  • Typing skills
    • English – software
    • Hindi
      • Typing book belonging to one of the teachers
      • There are teachers who are totally fluent in Hindi typing
    • Can be taught to all grades
  • Computer lab open hours
    • Future plans: network the computers and get all the students their own accounts
  • School website
    • Find way to learn HTML
  • Teach teachers first, then students
  • Get on the Internet!!
  • Can use to look up exam results, print admit cards, etc.

• Administrative ideas
  • Because it’s an Excellence school, a lot of the whole town’s school-related administrative work comes here
  • Knowing how to use email, scanner would be really helpful in sending documents to other places (right now they’re mailed)
    • Set up teachers with own email addresses
  • Keeping marks sheets in Excel, instead of by hand

We also visited the girls’ high school, to work with three male teachers. As with the women teachers and the girls’ high school students, we started off with basic formatting techniques in Word. The biggest piece of news that I’ve received all week was that apparently broadband was brought to Bijawar a few days ago; one of the teachers was planning on having the principal fill out the form to bring it to their school. This is something we should look into for the boys’ high school as well.

In the morning, we worked with the high school girls again. Maybe because it was New Year’s and they’d been partying the night before, they seemed a little distracted and unfocused, but we tried to work through it with an exercise in Word. Kalpana came by to help out with her students.

It might be a good idea for us to make a sort of review sheet for the teachers and students we’re working with, listing all of the concepts we’ve discussed so that they can make sure they’re totally clear on all of them.

From talking with some other Bijawar residents, we learned a lot about the different government schemes to give incentives to students to stay in school. Although the government has officially dissolved the caste system, they’ve been trying to remedy the institutional advantage that other castes have enjoyed (and continue to enjoy, for that matter). They’re also working with girls The government gives girls from the lowest (untouchable) class Rs. 150 per year while they’re in grades 1-5; these girls also get an extra Rs. 500 for passing the fifth grade. From grades 6-8, girls from all classes get Rs. 300 per year, and boys get Rs. 200 per year. After 6th grade, girls from the untouchable class receive a bike from the government if they live more than 3 km from the nearest middle school, and if they pass the 8th grade, they receive another Rs. 500.

Additionally, the government puts Rs. 1,000,000 in a trust for all firstborn girls born to families that make less than Rs. 10,000 per year (and are therefore below the poverty line). This money becomes available to the girls once they turn 18, but only if they’re unmarried; this is intended to be a disincentive for families to marry off their daughters at a young age.

The government also provides Rs. 10,000 per month to elementary and middle schools to provide free lunches for all of their students.

There are also parent-teacher associations at all the schools, and one parent is elected PTA president every two years. In title, the headmaster or principal is the secretary of the PTA and cannot do anything without the approval of this president. This setup was, I think, supposed to be about school accountability, but the position of president has probably become politicized and corruptible.

We started on Excel with the teachers today, and they were so excited! It was fun to watch them see how they could keep track of their grading so much more easily. Normally, they spend about a month summing up all of the students’ grades, calculating their percentage grade, and ranking them, but with Excel, all of these functions are basically trivial. Excel is also much easier to understand with limited English skills, I think, than Word. It’s interesting, because although the teachers are really interested in exploring Excel further, I think the students will get more use out of word processing (to write essays and things).

If the teachers are to keep their files updated as their school year progresses, they’re going to need regular access to a computer. This won’t be such a problem for teachers who work at schools that have or are expecting to get computers, but the other teachers will be left without. We should look into whether there are any computer kiosks, available to the public, in Bijawar, and if not, what kind of resources it would take to set one up.

This morning, we worked with five of Kalpana’s students from the girls’ high school as part of our effort to observe the ways in which people of different ages (elementary-school children, high schoolers, young teachers, and older teachers) approach and absorb computer education. The girls above, left to right, are Shivange (12th grade), Prachi (1th grade, though she’s 15), and Neha (12th grade). Some of the girls took a few classes at a local computer institute which taught them only the theory behind using a computer and provided no practical session; this approach, to me, seems fairly useless.

The girls above are Pooja and Rani, both of whom are in the 12th grade. All of them are interested in learning how to use computers to help them study for their upcoming state board exams. We started them on Word, showing them the same formatting techniques that we first took the teachers through. Tomorrow we’ll probably have them do an exercise to see how much they’ve retained and to solidify their skills.

Kalpana (above in an olive jacket and orange-and-white dupatta) naturally assumed the teacher role with these girls, helping them figure out things that we’d worked on with her. We do have to find some way to teach her separately, too, though, because she’s only a few days ahead of her students.

We also worked with two of the younger kids, Upasana and Shubham. I think they might be getting bored with the simple Solitaire, Word, and MS Paint skills we’re having them work on. If computer education ever becomes part of the elementary- and middle-school curriculum here, more kid-friendly software will have to be investigated (a thought which seems obvious in retrospect). This really isn’t going to turn into an issue until computers become available in these schools, because right now, the government is only providing them for high school students.

This thought process sort of begs another question, though: why are we working with teachers who currently teach elementary and middle schools? The theory is that government teachers here are so fluid that they’re liable to be transferred to another school at any time. Involving them in this process can only lead to additional insights, perspectives, and avenues of exploration.

In the evening we asked Divya, Neha, Menka, and Neeta to write a letter in Word, using a template, to their school principal, asking for classroom supplies. This exercise revealed something that I probably should have realized earlier – namely, that most of the women have trouble with writing in English. (This realization is again kind of obvious in retrospect. Despite seven years of Spanish class, I can’t express myself fluently in Spanish. Why should learning English be any different?) Divya, with her MA in English, seemed to be the only one who could think in complete English sentences. There is, I suppose, a difference between being able to read and understand enough English to navigate a computer and being able to think and write in English. The former is likely enough to transmit computer skills to their students.

Another thing I’m realizing is that women teachers here literally have no free time. Between their expected responsibilities at home (cooking, cleaning, caretaking), their government jobs, and the tutoring jobs they all take to bring in a living wage, even the hour that some of them are taking out to work with us is with extreme difficulty. This sort of schedule makes learning a new skill and transmitting it to their classroom a huge challenge. And until the government mandates computer literacy, principals and headmasters will be loathe to free up their teachers’ time to teach something that’s not even expected of their students.

All of the people that we’re working with are having issues with their typing. We should remember to build some sort of typing skills practice (any software recommendations? I have no idea what we used in junior high) into any future plans.

One final note: the writing on this blog has been pretty bad lately. I’m totally aware of this, and I’m not happy with it, but my focus right now is on getting my thoughts out in timely entries every day. Unfortunately, I barely even have time to read over an entry after writing it, much less to edit it, as much as I would love to be publishing more polished writing.

We worked with Kalpana by herself in the morning; since she was sick on Sunday, we reviewed some basic Word and Windows concepts to solidify the fundamentals. She’s planning on bringing some girls from her class tomorrow. My goal was never to teach students directly, because it’s a fairly unsustainable model, but I think it’s necessary to work with a few students to learn their concerns, strengths, and weaknesses, and to try to figure out the best method of teaching them.

In the afternoon, we visited the boys’ high school and met with the principal (above in blue).

The school has ten computers, but for some unknown reason, Microsoft Office has only been installed on two of them. The computers sit in the above room, mostly gathering dust; everyone seems to be waiting for the new computer lab to be finished, but no one really knows when that’s going to happen. At one time, they had landline Internet access, but their service was cut off when they stopped paying the bill.

The two teachers on the left above are Salar (social science) and Ashish (physics), both of whom seem to have good computer skills. Although we didn’t spend a lot of time with them, they were able to speak knowledgably about Windows, Office, and the Internet. They also know how to code in HTML and wanted to learn C++. It was disheartening to see the neglected state of these brand-new computers and to hear that no efforts were being made at teaching the students, despite the fact that two of the teachers know a lot. There just doesn’t seem to be any plan, or guidance with which to make a plan, geared towards using these (or any) computers for the students’ benefit. There is also a disconnect at the governmental level between providing computers and providing the teachers, lesson plans, and other resources necessary to effectively teach computer skills to the students. As far as I can tell, computer literacy isn’t a priority for the school.

One of the major challenges that we’re running into is one that, except for English, all of the classes in these Hindi-medium schools are obviously taught in Hindi. The teachers’ lesson plans and class materials, therefore, are all planned and written in Hindi – and Hindi computing is no easy task. Even typing in Devanagari within Word, though possible, is time-intensive; it is often easier to simply write out things longhand than to deal with the unwieldy keyboard mapping.

It may turn out that the teachers will find little use for computers in preparing materials for their classes. This is a problem to be solved another day. Although unfortunate, this fact doesn’t stop teachers from learning computer skills in order to teach their students. My goal is still to bring computer literacy into the mainstream village education institution.

I’d like to work with these two boys’ high school teachers, plus Divya – who also works there – to develop a plan to teach computers to the high school students and integrate computer use into their existing curriculum. Many of the administrators and teachers we’ve spoken to get stuck on the idea that, in order to teach computer skills, there needs to be a dedicated period and teacher set aside every day, both of which cost money and resources that government schools often don’t have.

We want to counter that assumption with the introduction of an integrated scheme, in which teachers might be able to require that students, for example, submit one typed essay a month in their English classes. At such a small scale, the requirement wouldn’t be a burden for students who don’t have access to computers outside at home, because they could use the ones at school before, after, or during scheduled class time (these details would have to be worked out with the teachers and administration). At the same time, they would be using the computers in a constructive and productive way, finishing schoolwork while learning a new skill.

The other issue that we’re running up against is that there are simply too many students for the number of computers and teachers available. Finding a solution to this problem will require more thought and brainstorming.

We also visited with the principal of the girls’ high school. There are four male teachers interested in learning computer skills, two of whom have computers at their homes in Chaatarpur. Starting January 2nd, we’ll be meeting with them on a daily basis to first assess the quality of their existing knowledge and then bring the other two teachers up to speed.

From talking to some locals, we learned that the primary school in Bijawar received computers about seven or eight years ago, and she had even begun teaching the students how to use them. The computers were slowly pilfered by various people who took them home to their families, and nothing was left at the school.

These little kids showed up again in the evening to learn how to use computers. The girl on the left is Ashi. I’ve talked about the boys (Gagan and Sagar) before. They played some Solitaire, typed in Word, and drew in Paint. We’re mostly teaching these kids because they’re so persistent – they drop by before school, after school, before going to tutoring, and after they’re done with tutoring. It’s hard to say no to them.

Later, we worked with Neha, Divya, and Menka again. We asked them to make a formatted grocery list, with all the things they need to buy for their household, in different categories. We also asked them to put prices and quantities next to their items, which caused them to run into a limitation of Word – it has issues putting things into neat columns. The effect is achievable with a table, set to have invisible borders, but such work is much better suited to Excel. The teachers saw for themselves what kind of task is better performed by alternative software, so it provides a great place to segue into teaching Excel skills tomorrow or the day after. We also want to start on the Internet soon.

We also started working with another woman, Neeta, who teaches at the government school in an even smaller village, Jasgowl. She’s been a teacher for eleven years. Her family just bought a new laptop, and she wanted to learn to use it. We’re trying to catch her up to the other women, and she seems to be doing well.

Today we visited the girls’ high school (above), which used to be the boys’ middle school that my dad attended. We met with some teachers and administrators who again mentioned that the school will be receiving 15-25 computers (the exact number seems to vary depending on who we talk to) from the government in April. There doesn’t seem to be much of a plan in place to bring new computer teachers or train existing ones. As far as the government goes, the actions of providing the computers and providing the teachers aren’t as connected as they should be. If the government manages to supply the funds, some people think that the teachers might be sent to Gwalior for some training. I’m worried that the computers will arrive, ready to be used, and there won’t be anyone to teach the students. This concern seems to be shared by many other people we’ve talked to in Bijawar.

There is one computer, connected to the Internet through a landline, in the principal’s office being used for administrative purposes. Theoretically, this landline will also provide connectivity to the other computers expected in April. The school received more computers about five or six years ago from a nearby university, but they were never used. At one point, the school hired someone to fix something that had gone wrong, but the supposed repairmen stole all of the good computer parts and replaced them with things that didn’t work. The computers have since been discarded.

One of the teachers mentioned that many of the other teachers are simply not interested in using their positions to help the village or the children past what they absolutely have to do. This attitude isn’t particularly special to Bijawar, or to small towns, or even to India – schools and students everywhere have a hard time finding and keeping engaged teachers.

In the evening, we worked with the four government school teachers: Divya, Kalpana, Menka, and Neha. It’s gratifying to see that they’re starting to understand how to effectively use the mouse to select blocks of text and apply some formatting, which means that they’re picking things up pretty quickly! We asked them to bring some of their lesson plans, notes, gradebooks, and things like that tomorrow, so that we can get a sense of how we can relate the skills they’re learning to their work.

Asha Rani was recently elected to the Madhya Pradesh Legislative Assembly from the Bijawar District, and she’s been making the rounds through the village. She came here today.

This truck has been coming around once or twice a day, playing Hindi music and blasting announcements to publicize her visit.

The street was totally filled by the people preceding her procession.

The politician, Asha Rani, and her father sit atop a Jeep, decorated with flower garlands.

These three middle-school children (somehow related to me – don’t ask me how) showed up this morning around 11 am to learn how to use computers. In this small village, everyone knows everything, and people have been dropping by to sate their curiosity about what we’re doing for the past couple of days. The two kids on the left, Upasana and Gagan, are siblings. Upasana is in the 8th grade, and Gagan is in the 6th grade. Sagar, the boy on the right, is in the 7th grade. He must have used computers somewhere before, because his typing and mousing skills were pretty good! We started all of them with playing Solitaire, to get them familiar and comfortable with the mouse, but Sagar had been watching as Shubham had learned some basic Excel skills yesterday, and he wanted to learn the same thing. He picked it up really quickly.

Yesterday, we asked the ten women to come at the same times today. At the first session, neither of the two sisters who were here yesterday showed up; later, we learned that they had gone to the vegetable market that’s open in Bijawar on Sundays.

In the second session, we worked with four of the women who were here yesterday – Kalpana was ill, so she didn’t come. Priya is on the right above, while Sonali, who came by to help us, is on the left. Neha and Megha came by for the third session, but we didn’t see Roopanjali.

I formatted a document with some words bolded, underlined, italicized, and/or centered, along with some paragraphs placed in bullet points and numbered lists. We gave the women a clean copy of the document and asked them to copy the formatting from the example, working through any problems with them. This exercise took the better part of two hours, and we found that this structured review helped them understand these basic formatting commands. We then explained more fully some fundamental concepts (click, double-click, font face, font size, menus, scrollbars, toolbars, select/highlight, paragraph) in Windows and Word, which they were better able to understand because they now had some context in which to place these ideas.

We didn’t get through any of the new material that we had wanted to, but I think I’m okay with that, because they seemed to learn a lot today anyway. I can’t tell whether they’re understanding the concept of formatting, and I’m having trouble finding a way to explain the concept more clearly. I think they just haven’t seen enough documents formatted in different ways to fully grasp the utility of various formatting controls. I’m going to go through some of my own schoolwork and find examples of how to use the things they’ve learned to effectively communicate ideas. Maybe one of my biochemistry lab reports, which has section headings, numbered lists, figures with borders, and numbered pages would work.

A lot of people are having problems using the mouse. Accidentally clicking something and then not knowing how to get out of whatever was just clicked is a big issue, as is the click-and-drag action of highlighting passages in Word. We might teach them how to use Shift + arrow keys to highlight words tomorrow. I suppose they just need a lot of practice.

Now that the weekend is over and the teachers have a very limited amount of time in the evening, we’re going to focus on helping the teachers and the schools. I’d like to talk with the principals of the girls’ and boys’ high schools tomorrow to get a sense of what their plans are, if any, to teach computer skills to their students, so that we can structure our goals around theirs. We’ll likely be working with four of the teachers – Divya, Kalpana, Menka, and Neha tomorrow evening.

Yesterday, we asked people to sign up for two-hour time slots over the next two days – Saturday and Sunday – during which they could come here to my grandmother’s house and start exploring the laptops we brought with us. Unfortunately, one of the laptops wasn’t working (due to an inexplicably missing .dll file), but we managed to fix it by the end of the day.

We got through some basic skills: turning on a laptop; logging in; opening up Microsoft Word; typing some text; copy/paste; bold, italics, and underlining; changing the text color, font, and size; changing the margins on a document; creating a table; saving a file; creating, renaming, and deleting a folder; and dragging and dropping files and folders. We’ll need to reinforce these skills tomorrow, but it was a good start.

We had three sessions. The first was with two sisters, one who was a teacher in another, smaller village, and one who worked with an NGO. Our first teaching experience was a little rocky. My shaky Hindi skills were something of a barrier for the woman I was working with, but I did improve as the day progressed, so hopefully it’ll work out better tomorrow.

Five women came to the second session, three of whom you can see above in our sitting room. The laptops are at a coffee table off to the right of the picture. The woman on the left, Divya, is interested in learning to use Excel to keep track of her students’ grades and easily finding class and student averages, something I think all of the teachers will find useful. Kalpana, the woman in the middle, teaches at the girls’ high school, which is expecting to receive new computers in April. She and another teacher, Rakesh, hope to teach the students to use them. We also asked her to identify four girls from her school who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford computer literacy classes, so that we could talk to and work with them as well. The woman on the right is Deepti.

Three women came to the third session. The two in the above picture are sisters, and the one on the right, Neha, is a teacher. The other’s name is Megha.

This woman in this picture, Roopanjali, was also at the third session and works as a teacher at an English-medium school.

The boy in the above picture, Shubham, is in the eighth grade and came back later in the evening to learn how to use Excel. We went through some basic addition and sum functions using a spreadsheet that Jessamyn sent me in response to an email about teaching Word and Excel to beginners. It’s hard to refuse school-aged children, although we would prefer to focus on training teachers.

Tomorrow we’re hoping to review the concepts we went over today by asking the women to perform a set of tasks and to copy the formatting of an example Word document. The concepts we hope to emphasize include the two-step process of selection and action in Word, as well as the idea that there are many ways of doing the same thing – using the ctrl key keyboard shortcuts, the toolbar icons, or the menus. We’ll also talk about the power of the Undo function and the ¶ toggle to show hidden formatting. Some people were having trouble with the difference between the pointer and the different cursors, as well as the difference between save and save as.

We’ll try to go over some more Word and Windows functions: search and replace, landscape v. portrait, numbering pages, the header and footer, using file-specific password protection, and creating shortcuts.

Prabha and her daughter Sonali are the two women from Bijawar with whom we have been talking since the inception of this project, both to gauge the interest of people in computer education and to have someone on the ground who could communicate with other people, such as the principals of the high schools. Prabha is a high school teacher, and Sonali is a tutor at a girls’ hostel who is also paying for computer lessons through a local school. We had asked for them to arrange local women teachers and other interested, engaged women to meet with us on the evening of December 26.

Ten women, plus Prabha and Sonali, showed up, with varying levels of computer experience. Some had never touched a computer before, while others had taken a few hours of classes but never used the skills they learned. Three are teachers in Bijawar and two teach in even smaller villages. One woman works at an NGO, helping to build latrines.

We learned that there a reasonable amount of computers in Bijawar households – estimates put the percentage at anywhere between 30-60%, although that number seems very high to me and probably reflects the higher social class in which these women socialize. Some households have internet connectivity, which they mostly use to run small businesses, charging people for downloading and filling out government job application forms and getting test results posted online. Computers are being used quite a lot for official business, including banking (through the State Bank of India), the village panchayat (government), and the court. The Indian government has provided computers for the boys’ high school, and the girls’ high school is expected to receive some in April. In fact, the girls’ high school already has computers that are several years old and seem to be unusable. I’m planning on visiting both schools in the next few days to see for myself what the condition of the computers is.

The teachers don’t use computers, even if they are available at their schools, due to a lack of training and free time, and there have been very few attempts to teach computer literacy to the teachers at these school. The schemes have all failed due to four factors: they cost too much money, they were offered during inconvenient times (such as during the school day, while teachers are busy at their jobs!), the strange electricity schedule in Bijawar (more on this later), and finally, the dearth of opportunities to use the knowledge learned.

It’s important for a sustainable system that these teachers see the value in passing on the computer literacy they might learn. Teachers could be incentivized to learn and then teach computer skills with if someone subsidized the purchase of a laptop for their personal and work use, on the promise that they would teach in a government school. The model that might work is the same model that most other teachers use, in which they teach everyone at government schools and then tutor their most promising students (who must also have the money to afford private tutoring) in order to supplement their income. It might be possible to subsidize low-income students for such private tutoring as well.

To ensure that students and teachers are getting the opportunity to exercise their computer skills on a daily basis, the curriculum must incorporate them, the same way as is expected in the US. Papers and problem sets and essays must be written on the computer, so that students get a chance to practice their typing and computer skills. I understand that most government school students don’t have access to computers at home, so time must be made in the school day for them to finish typed assignments. Perhaps teachers could require one assignment a month to involve computer use. The utility of computers for students is the power of easy revision – when papers and assignments are written in longhand, it is difficult to write more than one draft or to fix mistakes; on a computer, such actions are trivial.