Missing Women

Working so deeply in low-income communities over the past couple of years, I’ve been really lucky (probably not the best word choice) to witness and learn about development and social issues outside the realm of pure education and teaching. This exposure has led to a lot of revelations, and I think one of the most important is the crucial importance that women play in low-income communities.

It seems plausible that if not for women, there would have been almost no progress in development over the past several centuries. Surely the emancipation of women has led to more stable, less-testesterone-driven politics and governance.Michael Lewis mentioned in this interview a major cause of the Icelandic financial and economic crisis was male overconfidence. If nothing else, we’ve had this amazing woman achieve a great deal (and hopefully in 4.5 years, even more) and give us awesome quotes and websites.

In my previous school, out of my 37 student, more than 20 had out-of-work fathers, and the remaining often had unstable jobs or worked as day labourers. The mothers not only took care of all of the household chores (generally while their boozy partners drank and slept and played cards all day), but they generated the household income, primarily through sewing piecework.  They provided the only stability to the house, and were the ones mostly responsible for ensuring that their kids made it to school every day.

Nowhere more do you feel the importance of women in the community and in these households, is when they are not there. Nidhi is one of my current students. Incredibly precocious, she comes from a really difficult home. Her mother passed away and she lives with her father and elderly grandmother. I have yet to meet her father without him reeking of alcohol. A few days ago, he picked her up, proceeded to walk UP the stairs to the third floor to go outside, before coming down and falling down. Nidhi had to go home with another child’s parent.

I am not a child psychologist, so I can’t really say that Nidhi’s troubles in class are a direct result of her alcoholic father and the lack of a good influence, which her mother, as most mothers in the community are, could have been. But while she is incredibly bright, she is also pretty unstable. She is more violent than almost any other child, often reacts to the slightest infractions and accidents, by hitting the responsible (although often not) parties.

When I think about her, I often just think about what a difference her mother may have made in her life. And what a difference mothers make in these communities. It’s not anything new. The proliferation of microcredit probably would not have happened if women were not the ones receiving the loans. It’s pretty well known that women are more responsible financially with family income than men are.

I guess the big reflection I have is that economic progress and evolution in developing countries will have to coincide and happen in tandem with women’s empowerment. I am certain that as we see progress, it will come on the shoulders of the mothers and daughters who are making it happen in their own homes and communities.

Systems

One of my favourite reads of the past few years was The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande. Gawande is a surgeon, but has written a lot about systems, how we get better, and efficiency, especially within the health care sector.

On Wednesdays, we have a half-day of school and spend the second half on professional development. Yesterday, we watched this TED talk by Gawande, and talked and came up with a pre-school checklist.

So now, as we enter school, we have four items on our checklist.
1. Enter the hall and pick up photocopies for the day.
2. Write and prepare the blackboard for the day (agenda, date, attendance)
3. Prep materials required for the three slots
4. Prep tech for the day

As Gawande mentions, one of the most important functions checklists is to include some of the simpler things that are easily forgotten. Tech is a good example for our class. Every day we use laptops and speakers for songs and videos. It’s usually a short period of time, but on more than a few occasions, we’ve been running speakers during class between rooms, in a slightly haphazard and inefficient manner. Today, there was none of that.

A checklist is in essence a system. We need systems to help reduce decision fatigue and stress, so that we can be more successful and efficient. Today’s checklist was great because it forced me to develop even more systems.

As I was preparing my materials for the day, I organized my materials by the time slots (Math, Co-curricular, then English), and BAM, another system created.

I’ve always struggled with organization, but once you get started, it’s amazing how efficient you can really become. And the level of stress reduction is amazing. Every day for the first six months of my TFI fellowship, the last 10 minutes were a struggle because I hadn’t planned a way for my kids to leave class. One day, I drew a line and that became the system. Every day, students would sit in SMART position then leave on the line as they were called. One decision less to make, one system down, and a 10-15 minute exit procedure every day went down to just 3 minutes. 12 minutes of extra learning time for my kids!

That’s why we need systems.

Just a short note to close – It’s wonderful to be a small startup, to test and tweak and refine these systems easily, something I’m going to talk about more in the next few posts.

Tradeoffs

Today was a day that made me think about the tradeoffs we often have to make working in development, or in a startup.

Today, for the first time since we started, I taught my class alone. We have three 1.5 hour blocks in the day, and for the first two, I taught my class alone.

It was wonderful. I co-taught with another teacher for the first half-year of my fellowship, and it was pretty disastrous. I had soured on the whole idea of co-teaching, and the final year and a half of my fellowship with Teach for India was definitely more successful as a result of having an independent class.

It was nice to do things just my way today, to manage, be me, etc. I missed it a bit. Then I reflected a bit, on how lucky I am to have wonderful teachers, Rohita Kilachand, Nikhat Aga, Lara Velho, and Aditi Agarwal to teach with. It eases a lot of pressure, it’s less tiring. While teaching independently was nice today, when I consider the progress we’ve made co-teaching  versus what I achieved independently, I’m quite lucky to be teaching in the system we are.

So I’ve traded some independence, some comfort, but gotten a lot less stress, and much better results.

We had an interesting conversation about tradeoffs after school, when talking about how we plan to use data going forward to inform our instruction. Our principal, Gaurav, queried over the past year or two, how much of our time using student data went into inputting, and how much into analysis. I answered that by the end of my last year, I was spending about 20% inputting, and 80% analyzing. Then the others answered, and I was amazed to hear that it was the complete opposite for them, including two who spent 100% inputting and 0% analyzing.

These are all teachers who are totally invested in the idea of data-driven instruction. But the level of data they needed to collect and input was so high and minute, that by the end, they had burnt out and just couldn’t spend the time to analyze it.

We came to a decision that we would be better off gathering less intensive data, so that we could actually analyze it. Another tradeoff. Surely, our data might not be quite as specific and granular as it was previously, but the fact that we’ll actually analyze it and use it to inform instruction will put us in a much stronger place.
So we have to make tradeoffs. One reason this work can be so hard is the absence of perfect solutions. But that’s another reason why it’s so rewarding to succeed.

Today was another great day.

A Nearly Perfect Day

Sorry for my prolonged absence! Fell ill a few weeks ago, so it was difficult to blog, but I’m back and hopefully this’ll be a good one.

Today was a great day. Sometimes, you need something to lift your spirits a bit, and today was one of those days. The kind of day that it takes some time to process, but when it hits you, you realize that progress is possible.

After some phenomenal work planning from my wonderful, dependable, and enigmatic team, we started to teach our most rigorous content yet today. We began to use a curriculum, Investigations, that we’ve taken from North Star Academy in Newark, one of the most successful charter schools in the world.

Today was a modest start, one routine where we counted attendance, and some time exploring manipulatives. But it’s the hope of what’s to come that’s really positive. They did so well with today’s start, that I can’t wait to see how things progress in the future. When you see low-income students engage with rigorous content, it makes you realize why teaching and trying to close the achievement gap can be so rewarding. Why we do what we do.

The day went on after math, our literacy block was really successful too. My highlight was certainly doing a read-aloud of a wonderful book aimed to teach children how to read books without destroying them. I wished I had had it for my kids the previous two years!

Then our co-curricular block included two fun activities, one for identifying the colour red, and the other to teach kids to start to understand themselves and use sentences like “I have eyes” and “I have a nose.”

The highlight of the last block though, was the visit of Ishaan and Navisha, two of my high-school aged volunteers from last year. They were with me for the first three months of last year, and without them, I don’t think I would’ve achieved much success with my students. What’s better, is that they plan to join Teach for India (in about 5 years when they graduate from college). And after that I’m sure they’ll join as teachers at 321, though they don’t know that plan yet.

Right now I’m just finishing a really delicious meal of quinoa taboulleh, salad, and yogurt and fruits, feeling pretty excited about pushing these kids even further.

Why is it a nearly perfect day? I’m not sure if any day can be perfect, in school, or in life. Something’s always missing, something that could make it even better. But for now I’ll take nearly perfect and hope to improve tomorrow.

Our Trajectory

We have been with our students for just over 20 hours now, so it's been enough time to give you an idea of the progress we've made.

First just a few thoughts about the last two days. Yesterday was the best day I had individually in my class, and the best day for our team as a whole. Engagement was high, systems worked, and accordingly, there were fewer behavioral challenges than previous days. Monday, the previous day was tough and a bit demoralizing, so it was really great to follow it up with a strong day. Then today happened... 

Today was incredibly challenging from start to finish. I think miraculously, for the first time, before a single student entered, I had my whole class set up, with materials planned and organized in different places so that distribution would be smooth and dead time would be minimized. The day started off decently enough, I reintroduced my name and we started an art activity around rain-related vocabulary. It was good. Then sweet little Aaditi, caused a bit of a scene. My teacher radar missed her fooling around with her beaded necklace, which promptly exploded into 30 tiny red balls flying all over the place. Students got up, ran around, trying to catch these bouncing little things. Calming that down, then moving on was a challenge. Honestly, it was difficult to get control back after that episode.

On a day like today, it feels like I've made no progress. But teaching, and starting a school, is often like this. You have ups and downs, but the trajectory is often positive. Hopefully tomorrow will go better than today, but until then, let me tell you a bit about what our school is like after 20 hours.

-Since our first day when many students were crying entering school, and throughout the day, we now have smiling faces throughout the day on all of them.

-We have improved our bathroom and recess procedures (lining up to go to use the toilet, hand washing, returning to class to eat lunch, and lining up again to wash hands and returning to class) from around 48 minutes to 25 minutes.

-Over 90% of students know the expectations of how they sit

-Students are comprehending in English

-Ambran has kept his pants on every day since the first...

These are just a few of our highlights of progress after 20 hours. I am really looking forward to seeing what happens over the next 20.

After the first week

Our first week is over! We have taught our students for 11.5 hours (and followed it with 25 hours of debriefing!) and it's gone pretty well. It's been tough. Teaching in a low-income school is always a roller-coaster of emotions, and early on, highlighted by periods of extreme difficulty and a few small success to celebrate. This week was just that.

Everyone teaching from our team is a Teach for India fellow, and accordingly, none of us have taught kindergarten-aged children before. Our first day featured a large number of students crying and screaming their eyes out. As the week went on, that number decreased, and I am proud to say that on Friday, every student was in their class and dry for most of the day!

I've spent most of the week thinking about my struggles with teaching in the classroom, but also the challenge of now building a school and organization.

One big challenge for me has been managing personal priorities with our bigger goal. An experience on Friday really illustrated this challenge. I've had some issues getting my students to line up and exit the classroom to go to the bathroom, and eventually out the door at the end of the day. Procedures and systems like this require a lot of planning, setting clear expectations, and a high level of execution. I didn't feel I was in a good place in my own class on Friday, as I was leaving our students to go.

As the day ended, I told my students that they would not be allowed to leave until they were seated and ALERT. I was ready to follow through on my commitment, but the challenge was that we had spent a week planning a school-wide procedure for exiting, and so every classroom's actions were dependent on me leaving my class by a certain time. In the end, I let them go without following through on my consequence, because it was necessary for the rest of our team.

It was a tough decision, and I know that it could hurt my classroom when I return on Monday. But I think that it was the right choice because unlike my fellowship with Teach for India, we are trying to build an excellent school and not just achieve excellence in individual classrooms.

One challenge that we, along with any startup, will have is managing that balance of individual priorities and priorities to our team, especially when they are conflicting, as in this situation.

I think my biggest learning was that the situation could have been avoided had I set up my own individual lineup procedure better. Creating organizational systems requires individual excellence as well as team excellence. In this situation, I think I brought it down a bit with a weak lineup procedure, but I'm excited to go in on Monday and improve.

In the grand scheme of things, we've made a lot of progress. Most of our kids know their behavioral expectations for sitting in class, they are comprehending us in English, and they are producing amazing work working with Clay and Lego! Future artists and architects!

First Day

Note - Hi everyone. Our first day teaching was yesterday, but the internet wasn't working so I couldn't post this. Apologies. - Arnab

Today was our first day with the kids. We opened our school last friday, and held an orientation with the students and their parents. But today, we officially started teaching in our new school.

There are so many things I could talk about. I could tell funny stories, like the firecracker ambran who had a proclivity for taking his pants off. Or vishal who sunk his teeth into the necks of our teachers, including mine.

Instead I'm going to write about what went into this day, and making it a success. At least a success in the sense that kids laughed and loved their first day of school, and nobody peed or pooped their pants.

About six weeks ago, we started our full time training and preparation. We did everything from selecting the values of our organization to designing the correct procedure to go to the toilet. And all of that work led to today, our first day.

My biggest reflection on the whole day is how important it is to have a structure in place, but to not be too wedded to that structure. We planned enough to know where we needed to be, what the kids should be doing, what to do when potential problems arose (like crying children, going to the toilet, etc), but had enough flexibility to change things on the fly.

The best feeling I had today, aside from some great moments with some students, was being able to identify the things we needed to change for the next day. I doubt we'll ever design a perfect day, but achieving success and identifying clear next steps was extremely rewarding. Can't wait till tomorrow to improve and try it again.

A New Start

Today was an exciting day. For the first time, I stepped into our new community, and met several of our new students. Two things really hit me, first of all, the fact that this whole thing is actually happening!
Over the past few months, and especially the last five weeks, we’ve been simultaneously trying to prepare opening a school and building our foundation.  A lot of work has gone into this process, from big picture things like what the values of our organization will be, to extremely detailed decisions like how we would track behaviour in classrooms and assess our students over time.

All of this work is really important, but it also pushed the day-to-day school experience out of my head a bit. Today, as I was walking into the community, it hit me. We are starting a school in less than a day and a half. Starting on Friday, I’ll be walking the same way, into the first 321 school. It was a bit surreal, and a daunting thought at least.

Our goal for the day was to invite all of our students and their parents to opening day. It was exciting to go and meet them for the first time. Turns out, kindergarten students are tiny and adorable. I played with a few, mostly teaching them to high-five. The second thing that hit me was that I was going to be starting anew. On the train ride from Bandra to VT, I passed Mahim station, where I got off almost every day for the past two years to teach at my old school. It felt strange not getting off there today, especially since it was the first day of school for my old class.

As I met with parents and children, I realized that I was going to have to build new relationships with students, with my parents. This whole time, I’ve been thinking, “this is my third year teaching!” But this is going to be totally different, which is scary and exciting (funny how that dichotomy keeps reoccurring). One thing I was really proud of over the course of my fellowship with Teach for India was the strong relationship I built with my students’ parents, and the effect that had on my impact. I’m excited to start that again on Friday.

Just a quick note – I am going to try to write something every day, to keep this running. I will likely just write in one go and post, so please let me know of any grammatical errors. And subscribe so you can get updates to your email. Thanks!

Last Day Off

Today is essentially my last day off before we start a school. For the next three days, our team will work to finalize and iron out all of the big and small details to make our first day, and first few weeks, as high-quality as possible.

I am going to give an overview of our school, our vision, and our mission in a post soon, but I am going to use this opportunity to talk a bit about my state of mind going into tomorrow. Mostly in the hopes that it provides some sort of catharsis for me (and is interesting for you).

Tomorrow, after a three-day break, I'll start work again with my wonderful 321 team. For three days, we will continue to set up and prepare for our first few days of school. On Friday we will welcome students and parents into our school for the first time (yikes!).

I am really excited, but also slightly anxious. Scratch that. I go through periods of intense excitement, followed by periods of intense anxiety.

I keep coming back to one thing though, and that's our students. I have been thinking a lot about the students I taught over the past two years, and how in a couple of days, they too will start school, the fourth standard, with a new teacher. It breaks my heart a little bit that I won't be starting with them. In the past two years, I think I've spent more time with them then anyone else in my life, and that's a hard void to fill.

I feel better knowing that they will in all likelihood have a stronger teacher than me, and also knowing that in just a few days, I'll be welcoming a new group of students into my classroom. Kindergarten babies at that!

So the prospect of meeting a new set of students, the excitement that will come from pushing them towards higher expectations, provides some sense of ease or solace for right now. I'm excited, and scared, and nervous, and happy to take on this journey.

Pretty sentimental right?

Welcome!

Hi everyone, welcome to Arnab321. This is a blog I've created to document our effort to start a high-quality school for low-income children in Bombay.

I'm going to use this blog to write my day-to-day reflections and thoughts on the work we're doing. I hope you enjoy it!

-Arnab