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