Day seventeen
This is the really cute little boy whose family rents out the upstairs part of my grandmother’s house. Onto the actual news. Today was a much-needed counterpoint to yesterday’s frustrations. We accomplished all the nitpicky little details that were left to finish in the morning to get the computers in the boys’ high school ready...
Days fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen
We got broadband in Bijawar yesterday! The boys’ high school was the first broadband connection that BSNL installed in Bijawar, which was super exciting. Since the computers don’t have WiFi, the school can only use broadband on two computers at a time (without a switch, anyway, which they don’t have), but we made sure that...
Day thirteen
Something that I forgot to mention in yesterday’s entry was that we ran around like crazy for a couple of hours, trying to set up the process of bringing broadband to the boys’ high school. We managed to get the principal to cut the phone company a check for the required amount, and we turned...
Days eleven and twelve
We went to the boys’ high school in the morning yesterday, to work on setting up their computers while there was still electricity to run all of the computers at the same time. The boys’ high school is a middle school before noon. When we got there, the boys were doing yoga out in the...
Day ten
Kalpana came by for the first time in three or four days this morning. Because we’re not working with the high school girls anymore, we finally had time to introduce her to Excel. We’d spent the last couple of days making a foolproof Excel template to replace the individual student report cards (called marks sheets...
Day nine
We had a meeting today with Neha, Divya, Neeta, Menka, and Sonali to discuss our project at a higher, more village-wide level. We’ve been working with the teachers for a week now, and we’d like them to be more involved in the planning process. They know Bijawar, their schools, and their students better than we...
Day eight
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...
Day seven
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...
Day six
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...
Day five
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...
Day four
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...
Day three
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....