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.

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.

We did a little bit more Word with the first batch of kids, then we skipped straight to Excel. I figure that the teacher can handle Word and more basic Windows stuff on his own, but he’s a little weak on Excel, so I wanted to give the kids a good grounding in that myself. They’re picking it up pretty fast.

My car didn’t show up this morning because the driver had gone to Jatashankar in the morning instead of coming here, so I got something of an unexpected day off.

The teacher has been coming over regularly in the evenings to go over the next day’s lesson plans, which is nice, but hasn’t totally fixed my frustrations with the different style of teaching. There seems to be a lot less long-term (or, really, even short-term) planning involved, and the teacher just covers whatever seems to strike his fancy any particular day. The concept of making lesson plans for the day or week or month, to make sure that all the material gets covered, and nothing is accidentally skipped over or repeated, is absent. While I understand that this is just sort of the way the schools in rural villages work, it’s frustrating at a personal level, because I’d like to give the kids a higher quality education than that (and also because the lack of order bothers me).

I tried to get Wipro to fix the CPU and monitor that don’t work, but no dice. They say the parts aren’t covered by any existing service contract. The school’s only options might be to a) write it off as a loss or b) hire an outside repairperson. Wipro has to have the worst customer service ever – just finding the right number to call took me three hours of Internet searching and cold calling.

I got mehndi done on my hands today (I’ll try to post some pictures tomorrow) because Rakhi is on Wednesday. The girl, Priyanka (above), who drew it on talked to me about how she’d love to learn English and computers. I’d really like to explore options for teaching students conversational English – not even reading and writing, which some can manage on their own, but actually speaking it, which is just as important in the job market.

I’m writing this in bed, and the house next door has live music and prayers blasting through loudspeakers mounted on their roof; the speakers have been on non-stop since Saturday afternoon, starting with the reading of the Ramayana and moving on to aarti. There has been other stuff, too, but I don’t really understand most of it, so I’m not sure what exactly. The house was recently built/renovated, so I think this is a housewarming of sorts. It’s a big community event – people have been in and out of the house all weekend to read, visit, and pray.

The mosquitoes are eating me alive. One actually bit my lip the other night, and it swelled up and made me look like I’d been punched in the face for a good 12 hours. I’ve been trying to keep them at bay with a combination of Odomas and some Repel Lemon Eucalyptus stuff that doesn’t have DEET in it, but that only goes so far. The super-carcinogenic mosquito coils available here work pretty well, but they make my eyes water and give me a headache (as well as mutating my DNA, I’m sure).

While I do some prep work for the next day’s class, the teacher’s lack thereof is a bit frustrating – although understandable, as he’s got a lot on his plate at the moment. He’s very good with the kids and at handling a classroom, but as far as the actual material goes, he mostly just follows my lead, or teaches the kids whatever pops into his head. The concept of planning has gotten a bit lost. As the material gets more complicated, I think this is going to turn into an actual problem, as my Hindi skills are probably not going to be up to the task, and the teacher is going to have to do more of the actual explaining. Hopefully we can work out a regular time to go over what we want to teach the next day.

I also went back to the school in the afternoon and fixed up some small things that were inconsistent or broken. We still don’t have enough power strips to run all ten computers at the same time (which is kind of moot at this point, since one is totally broken and one doesn’t have some important – and unobtainable – software installed on it). It would nice to have the option, though.

While I was typing that, a really cute (but stupid) frog just bounced across the room and tried to hop onto a door, obviously failing to gain any foothold on a surface perpendicular to the floor. A mouse just also ran across the room. Ah, the rainy season. Also, an apparently very distressed cow yelped and mooed a few times, very loudly, just outside the open window.

The schools were all closed today for Muharram, so we didn’t go anywhere. We had wanted to work with the computers at the boys’ high school, but people felt it wasn’t safe for women to be wandering around an otherwise isolated area of the village while large groups of young men would be marching in processions past us. This concern reflected the classic attitude that women bear the responsibility for ensuring that men do not harass or assault them, which of course strikes me as unfair victim-blaming. What made it worse was the implication that Muslim men somehow can’t be trusted not to assault any Hindu women who they come across. At some level, I might be able to understand the general sense that large groups of men in this country have a history of violence towards women (although don’t get me wrong – it still rankles), but the addition of religion into the mix made this attitude completely unbearable. The constant sniping at anyone who is Muslim has been bothering me from the day we came here. I understand the tense history of Hindu-Muslim relations in this country, but it still frustrates me at a fundamental level to hear otherwise mostly reasonable people speak with disgust about Muslims as a group.

Although I wanted to do the work that we came here to do, I think it would have been foolish to openly disregard the advice of people who live here, even if I believe much of what they were saying amounts to little more than fearmongering. We decided not to take an unnecessary chance (typing that still feels like a copout), so we didn’t go to the boys’ high school.

Instead, we worked on the report card and grading sheet templates for the various pieces of paperwork that all of the teachers and administrators spend hours and hours filling out by hand. Above is one example – these sheets report each student in the school and their grades in every subject, which they use to calculate class rank. If we automate this sort of thing in Excel, the tedious data entry will become much faster.

In the evening, after working with the women teachers on Excel and the Internet, we talked for a couple of hours about our plans for the next four days.

The feeling that we’ve been unfocused for the last few days came to a head last night, and during the subsequent six-hour discussion that stretched until 4am, we realized that our nightly routine of debriefing (about what we’d accomplished that day, any new issues that had developed, and what our plan for the next day was) had fallen by the wayside. As a result, we hadn’t had a concrete plan when we went into the schools or when we worked with the teachers, resulting in frustration, so I’m glad that we resumed this debriefing and analyzing process.

(As an aside, I really wish you could find chikoo in the US. Mmmm.)

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 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.