One of the computers has gone missing, which is unfortunate, but not entirely unexpected. Expensive things have a tendency of disappearing in the village environment. Another one of the computers isn’t currently working, but the teacher is looking into it.

The students apparently spent the first day setting everything up, because someone had unplugged everything, and all the wires were in total disarray. Again, that’s not entirely unexpected, but at least the students had the chance to see how everything gets put together.

More details soon about how things are progressing.

We finally met with all three government officials a few days ago: the DEO, the CEO, and the Collector. They were all super positive about the work that we’re doing and the plans that we have for the future. The DEO wants a copy of my curriculum, and the Collector had some good suggestions about how to focus our work to proceed more effectively, including dedicating more time to teacher training, which is something we’re pretty committed to already.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’ll have time to actually train teachers and implement our plan at the girls’ HS school (above). That process will have to wait until next year.

We’re thinking of leaving a couple of donated laptops at a middle school, however, because they have a teacher who was trained through Microsoft’s Project Shiksha program in 2006.  We’re still trying to decide what exactly we want the school to use them for – whether to teach students or simply watch educational English DVDs that we can provide them. We’ve been working with three eighth graders from this school for the last few days, and they seem to be picking things up just as well as the ninth graders I’ve worked with in the past.

The last – and best – piece of news is that the UPS units finally arrived at the boys’ HS school! Everything is now hooked up and in place for computer classes to begin again. All the government schools are closed from today through the 15th because of the crazy cold snap here in Madhya Pradesh, but as soon as they open again, I think the teacher will begin classes. We might run into the problem of final and board exams that are due to start soon, so it may well be that classes won’t begin in earnest until July, when the new school year begins. We’re trying to press the school to get the computers thoroughly cleaned with a special vacuum to get rid of all the dust that accumulates everywhere; the computers are getting really slow, and the dust is a big part of that.

Look at this boy! He’s grown up so much since I first photographed him a year and a half ago.

And here’s another cute little girl, wrapped in her mother’s shawl.

Here are all the teachers gathered around a computer watching the Thriller video.

The boys’ school was recently repainted in this great cotton candy shade of pink. It used to be a really dingy shade of yellow. The stairs in the picture above lead to what will eventually be a permanent computer lab that has been “almost finished” for more than two years now.

And here are some cute girls from my family. The first and third in the picture above are twins, and the middle one is their little sister. The last one is their cousin, who’s been on this blog before.

Our other plans haven’t been going quite so well. The UPS that arrived at the beginning of December was in fact delivered by mistake. It was intended for a middle school in Bijawar. We’re back to square one, essentially. We now have to buy individual UPS units for each computer at the school, which is a long process – we started thinking about this in July. I hope we can get the equipment and set it all up before we leave. I think the teacher is itching to start classes (and get paid for it!) again.

We’re also trying to set up a similar computer literacy program at the Girls’ HS School, but the principal has asked us to get permission from the District Collector and/or the District Education Officer (DEO) in Chhatarpur. We tried to meet with the Collector last Thursday, but he was out meeting with other people. We finally managed to get a few minutes with the district’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), who seems pretty nice and friendly. She gave us an appointment to speak with her again tomorrow (Monday). Since we’ll be in Chhatarpur anyway, we’ll try to meet with the Collector as well.

Our other plan is to try a computer education program at one of the co-ed middle schools in Bijawar, where the administration and teachers seem really into it – something which we haven’t always found to be the case in government schools. My main concern was English language skills; if the high school students struggle with the English required to run a computer, then middle school kids will be even less able to manage it. Eighth graders students, however, are at basically the same level as ninth graders, so we might be able to start there. We’re also thinking of recruiting an English teacher to co-teach with a computer teacher, so that the kids can get good explanations of words they don’t understand.

…which brings me to the next item. We’re thinking again about ways to supplement the English education here, which suffers from a lack of teacher expertise. We met with the English teacher at the Girls’ HS School yesterday to brainstorm areas which he thinks he needs help with, and we’re hoping to meet with a group of middle and high school English teachers today to continue that planning.

I believe the teacher has started classes up again, which makes me very happy, since my original plan of having the school sustain this program on its own, without my help, looks like it might be working. I’ll have more details for you soon.

Instead, the school is going to buy individual UPS units for each computer. They already bought one Intex model for Rs. 1450, and the teacher has verified that it can support one computer during the time when the school has electricity. The store in Bhopal has agreed to sell the school ten more units for Rs. 1200 each, which is still a little steep for the school’s limited budget, especially since they’ll have to shell out money again for new UPS batteries in a couple of years. We’re hoping, however, that this purchase will allow them to restart the computer literacy classes. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

Here’s a close-up.

See the rock? The one tied to the wire to provide enough tension to keep everything in contact in all the right places?

Yeah.

Board exams started at the school at the beginning of March and will continue until April (when the new school year starts), at which point the teachers will be busy grading and preparing exam results until the beginning of May. Everything is done by hand, so the process is time-consuming. We’re planning to restart the computer program once this process is over.

Computer maintenance

We talked to the people at two computer shops in Chhatarpur – Microworld Computers, whom we were referred to by an acquaintance who runs a cyber cafe, and Computer Care & Ware. We stopped by Microworld Computers, but there was no one in the shop to talk to, so we didn’t pursue it. Computer Care & Ware sent someone to the high school to look over the setup and give us a quote on how much they would charge for a regular monthly service contract, which includes cleaning, antivirus updates and scans, checking internet connectivity, and reinstalling any buggy software. Their quote came to Rs. 1000 per month.

This whole exercise propelled the assistant principal into taking more interest in the maintenance and upkeep of the computer lab for what seems to us the first time. He thought the quote was too high and started calling people he knew to find a better price. The same evening, we decided to go to Chhatarpur to meet with one of his new contacts at Bundelkhand Computers to see if we could get the broken UPS fixed. We met with Subhash Tiwari, who told us about other computer work he does around Chhatarpur at different academic institutions. Although no one there knew about UPS systems, we did get the name of the LG service engineer I mentioned in my last post; he eventually came to the school, but he was mostly unable to diagnose the problem. Subhash also visited us eventually and cut the ethernet cables that the assistant principal had bought last March to the right sizes and connected all of the computers to hubs. We measured the distances in the new computer lab that has been under construction for at least eighteen months to make sure that the cables were long enough to work there. We also strung a 50-foot cable to the next room so that the babus (administrative assistants) would have a dedicated internet connection. Until now, they’d been moving the DSL modem between the two rooms, creating lots of frayed and tangled wires.

The UPS still isn’t working, so the classes are at a standstill. We measured the voltage across the batteries, and they seem to be holding a charge just fine, so we’re kind of at a loss as to why the UPS is unable to funnel that power to the computers. We’re still working on getting this issue resolved. The next step is to get in contact with a store that sells and services Amaron batteries (the kind that are in the school) and have their service technician check the batteries one more time. If he says they’re okay, then we know the UPS is the problem, and we’ll have to find a way to get that fixed. We have yet to find someone in Chhatarpur who can do that kind of work, so we might have to look in Jhansi (four hours away) or Gwalior (eight hours away, with two bus changes).

Textbooks

As far as printed material goes, we picked up a book called Dynamic Memory Computer Course (ISBN: 818419255X) at the Jain Book Agency in Delhi (here’s the book on their site, but there’s no picture or good description). It’s in Hindi, and it seems to be a really good reference for the teacher and kids in Bijawar. I think the teacher also found the books that the school already had, but I’m not totally sure where they are or what happened to them.

Former students

We spoke with some of the students from the first batch, and they’re really interested in being able to use the computers on their own time. Once we get the UPS fixed and the classes running again, we’re going to see if the teacher can open up the lab on Sundays to allow students who’ve already taken the computer class access to the computers.

Girls’ HS School

At the Girls’ HS School, we’re working with a passionate, young woman teacher to see if there is some way that we can get them computers so that they can implement a program similar to that at the boys’ school. I’ll keep you updated on this as we get further along in the process.

English language education

During this visit, we also wanted to explore the possibility of teaching English language conversational skills, reading, and comprehension to ninth and tenth graders. We first needed to assess their English skills grade level as compared to American standards in order to establish a baseline from which we could work, so we took some copies of short stories from the magazine Highlights for Children (aimed at US kids, ages 6-9). We asked Divya, the English teacher at the Boys’ HS School, to send us five girls and five boys from the ninth and tenth grades who might be interested in helping us with this two-week project. Not surprisingly, there was a huge response, and we were inundated with requests from students and their parents. I’m still not sure if this response was because they genuinely wanted to learn English or just because the classes were free.

We started the project with a group of five each of ninth grade girls and tenth grade boys. Most of these kids were the best students in their classes, with parents who had the most resources, but it very quickly became evident the students had absolutely no conversational skills. They could read at approximately an American 2^nd grade level, but their reading comprehension was very poor. Their theoretical grammar knowledge was pretty good – unsurprising, as this is something that can be written and memorized – but their ability to apply that knowledge was limited to nonexistent. Along the same lines, the students are being taught to memorize English. The teacher reads short passages from their textbook aloud and either dictates or writes down the answers to all the questions in that lesson, and the kids memorize those answers word-for-word. We went through a couple of the lessons from their textbook, and each one of the students just spit out the same rote answers.

In general, though, the students were very enthusiastic, showed up on time, and were ready to learn. They usually did conversational role-playing for the first half of the hour and then reading comprehension from the Highlights short stories for the second half. This pattern seemed to hit all of the points we wanted to emphasize, but our limited time in Bijawar made it difficult to assess if they were really retaining information and skills. When we left, they all wanted to know how they could keep learning – something which we’re still struggling to figure out.

I finally got Wipro to fix the broken CPU with a new hard drive (they’d previously replaced the monitor), which we still have to test to make sure it actually works. I’m not sure whether it’s got Windows installed on it, so we might have to do that as well. This whole endeavor required harassing the people at the Wipro call center a number of times, until they finally conferenced us in with the person who’s in charge of the Gwalior area of service. He sent a service engineer from Jhansi, which is about four hours from Bijawar by car. Getting to Bijawar is such an ordeal that the qualified IT personnel in bigger cities like Jhansi and Sagar refuse to make regular trips to service the computers here.

Two new batches of students were started at the Boys’ HS School on November 3, but the UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply) in the computer lab stopped working less than a week later. The UPS allows the power from the mains to supply the computers until a voltage fluctuation or the power going out forces it to switch over to ten 12V external, rechargeable batteries, maintaining a steady supply of power. This turn of events has left the teacher and students (and us!) very frustrated.

We’ve been checking out a couple of places in Chhatarpur who claim to be able to identify and fix the problem, but none of them seemed willing to send technicians to Bijawar. We’ve had a hard time trying to tell which stores have people who know what they’re doing. I have a feeling that they can do some basic computer maintenance, but that they’re just saying yes to anything we ask, in the hopes that they’ll find someone to actually do the work later. As a side note, it was great to see the teacher taking initiative to try to get the UPS fixed while we were still in the US – he wasn’t successful, but then, neither were we.

The assistant principal at the school finally managed to get in touch with a service engineer who works for LG but who repairs UPS units and other electronics and appliances. He came to Bijawar today on another call (to fix a microwave, I think), and so he took a look at our UPS as well. The life of the batteries is apparently only about 18 months, less if they’re not power cycled regularly – which they weren’t for the first year or so, because they just sat in a room, gathering dust. Someone recharged these batteries yesterday with some other machine, but they need to be replaced very soon if the computers are to be run. We’re going to test the batteries tomorrow to see how long they can hold a charge, but I doubt it’s going to be very long.

We’ve also been working with some ninth and tenth grade students on conversational English and reading comprehension, but it’s late, so I’ll write about that tomorrow.