The Place

The Place

It’s been an interesting few days and weeks at 3.2.1, enough to make me write a blog after a long time. I am feeling sentimental, energized, and most of all lucky.

As a lot of you might have heard, a few weeks ago, a building collapsed in the Dockyard area of Mumbai. This set off a chain of events that required our team to evacuate our school and move to another within a 24 hour period. Apparently, our building was one of the most dilapidated in Bombay (no small feat), and we were asked to relocate.

In some ways it has been a blessing to move from a loud building with crumbling infrastructure to a quieter building with strong foundation.

But a big part of me can’t stop thinking about the old school. There was a certain charm to having our first school in the “maachli (fish) market.” Coming to school in that chaos, and struggling each day to create a calm learning environment built character, for our team, and our kids.

It was the place where on June 15, 2012, we welcomed 70 kids and their parents to our school. Parents who gave us, a young team with almost no experience, a chance to help their kids. It was the place where Gaurav, our incredible leader, inspired us to rise up to challenges time and time again. The place where Seema and Nandita led our grade teams with grace and passion. The place where Lara, Nikhat, and Nihar showed us what excellence and commitment truly mean. The place where Nimmi, Harsh, and Rima have shown us how to continue learning, while teaching in the process. It’s also the place where Karishma and Sarika showed us what it means to really immerse yourself in the details and minutiae of your work.

The fish market is also where we were so lucky to have the support of others. From towering giants, to budding entrepreneurs, over 500 people came to visit 3.2.1 at the fish market. Most of all, it’s the place where our loved ones, our partners, our families came to see what we were trying to build for our kids. It was the place my father first visited, to see the work I’ve dedicated the past four years of my life to.

It was also the place that we left after so many challenging days. The place we left to go find solace at the gym, in a good book, or the embrace of a loving partner. It was the place that kept on hitting, but in the process, gave us the chance to come back for more. 

For me personally, it was the place where I learned more than I ever have. The place where I had countless examples from an incredible team.

Seema, Lara, Nikhat, Nimmi, Harsh, Nandita, Nihar, Rima, Sarika, Karishma, and Gaurav, I am humbled to learn from you, and grateful for all that you’ve taught me.

More than anything, it’s the place where I got to learn from and teach an amazing group of kids. The fish market is where I fell in love with Bharat and Pranay, the two people who have perhaps brought me more humour and joy than any over the past year and a half. Pranay, one of our tiniest kids, would walk up in the first days of school, slightly off-balance because his head was disproportionately large to the rest of his body. Bharat, had no proportion issues as such, but still found himself (and still does) constantly off-balance or upside down. I can’t describe how much happiness these two boys have brought me, but I owe it to the fish market.

It’s the place where I left school to spend the night with Sakshi and her family, on the street outside Metro Cinema, for one of the most memorable, challenging experiences of my life.

And now we’ve moved to a new place. A place I’m sure will give us many more memories to share and challenges to overcome. Right off the bat, we’re lucky to be teaching 80 kids for the first two hours of the day in a hallway.

I realized how lucky we were when I was asking my kids what they thought of the new school. Pranay said “I like it. It’s nice, and not loud.” These kids are so gritty, that in the mid-day heat, with no fans, they sat in a hallway and learned how to break patterns into units, how to subtract in a story problem, and how to differentiate between non-fiction and fiction books. And there wasn’t a single complaint. It was as if they were thinking “okay, slight change, but its school, so now I guess we just keep doing what we’ve been doing.”

Thank you to the fish market. You gave us a home, a place to grow, and a place to learn with our kids. 

My Night On The Street

In Harper Lee’s masterpiece “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the seminal character, Atticus Finch imparts the following advice to his daughter Scout, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” To me, it’s always meant that to understand someone’s behaviour and actions, you need to understand something about their life. This has become even more relevant to me over the past few years.

As teachers, we spend time in our communities to get a more detailed, nuanced perspective on what the lives of our students are like, in the hope that our deeper understanding can illuminate aspects of their behaviour in class, solve challenges, and ultimately result in a transformational education.

In that spirit, I recently did something different than anything I have ever experienced in terms of community immersion. I was awarded a research fellowship with Teach for All, and the second project was to present on “a day in the life of your student.”

The student I picked to profile was Sakshi, one of our most challenging, but also one who has grown more than most over the past seven months. I decided to spend around 19 hours with her. This meant being in school, and staying with her family overnight.

To add some context to this, Sakshi doesn't have a home. She lives on the street, and sleeps on the sidewalk at  Metro Cinema, near the southernmost tip of Bombay. Seema (one of my co-teachers) and I went to visit her parents and discuss the possibility of me staying with them for an evening.

This is the first part that was uncomfortable for me, because while they seemed open to the idea, and even though we do have a strong relationship with them, I didn't want them to feel obliged and say yes even if they were uncomfortable. I can just hope now that they believed my intentions were, as we told them, to learn more about Sakshi’s life in the hope that it would help her in class.

So a few nights later, I left school and walked over to the Metro subway. I had spoken to her father originally, who speaks crisp, fluent English (something I’ll get to a bit later), but when I arrived, he wasn't there, so I played with Sakshi and spoke to her mother. I had brought some blocks and games from school, we practiced counting, writing, and I spoke to her mother and watched her cook.

You only get to see some things when you truly immerse yourself in an experience like this. Anyone could have a cursory understanding or expectation of what it feels like to live and sleep on the street. You can imagine hard pavement, loud noises, but there are some things that you can only know by really doing it. I still get amazed by the certain little details that you notice. Three things that stuck out to me were:

1. The way Sakshi’s mother cooked. They had taken scrap plywood from around the area, and she broke it down with a brick, threw it into a fire, and cooked using that. I have yet to see cooking without some kind of gas fuel, but they were just using wood to heat and cook their food.
2. There is always a water tanker pulled up outside their sidewalk, and it leaks out the back. That’s their running water. They wash their hands, and sometimes bathe in the leak water from that water tanker.
3. Before we went to sleep, Sakshi’s mother put small pieces of cloth into each child’s ears, and when I inquired why, she said it was to keep bugs from crawling in.

These things might seem inconsequential, but to me they really stuck out, a sign of just how different the lives of the world’s poor are from mine. Maybe to some extent you can understand what it feels like to be able to buy less, or see others with more. But having to do little things like put cloth in your child’s ears to keep insects from crawling in when they sleep, these are the little things that are a daily part of life for families like Sakshi’s, that I never really could fathom or understand.

I could write a lot of these little observations, but I’m going to move on to what I’ve learned about Sakshi. I already knew that her father was an alcoholic. He often picks her up, reeking of booze. And our team was already curious about how someone who spoke English fluently enough to get a well-paying job, ended up living on the street.

But something I won’t forget is the look her mother had, every ten minutes, as she looked in the direction she expected her husband to come from. It was a mix of despair, and hope. I know that the direction she was looking at has a country liquor bar, a place for low-income people to get drunk off cheap, dangerous liquor. So I arrived in the evening at about 7 and for two and a half hours, Sakshi’s mother glanced and looked towards that country liquor bar, waiting for her husband to come home. Throughout this time, several other drunken uncles came to visit, play with Sakshi and her sister Sonal, and naturally inquire about who I was and what I was doing there.

Finally he came, smelling of booze, with two friends, ready to eat. We talked, he asked how it had been so far, and then played with Sakshi. I had eaten with the children earlier, but had a few bites with them as well, and we started to talk a bit more about their lives. It turns out, they had lived at that spot for over 10 years, although for two they were transiting around and also staying in another place. Originally they had lived off the sidewalk in a fenced off area, but 10 years ago, the government had kicked them out of that spot and onto the street. Sakshi, all of 5 years old, had spent her entire life living in that very spot on the sidewalk. The income they earned was from the father’s job washing cars at the nearby petrol pump.

I suspect that they live on the street because of Sakshi’s father’s alcoholism. It’s a sad situation, although quite extraordinary that Sakshi now comes to school regularly. One of the highlights of the evening was when I showed her father and mother a video of Sakshi from my phone. A new student had come in that day, Anam, and when Anam entered the door, Sakshi jumped up and showed her the routines of our class. Throughout the day, she helped her, and the video I took was of Sakshi teaching Anam the ABC song. The look of pride on the parents was pretty remarkable. Sakshi’s father jumped up, woke up his friends to show them the video, and gloat about how well his daughter was doing in class.

We chatted a bit more, and then at about 10:30, it was time to sleep. Sakshi’s mother laid out a large political sign, and a blanket underneath. I had brought a mat from school, and her mother also laid out a blanket on top of the mat for me. They gave me the blanket to sleep with as well, and mentioned that in the morning the wind came and it got very cold.

Sakshi sleeping. She was in between her sister and mother, and I slept on this sidewalk on the edge, next to her father.

And there began my night sleeping on the street, or to be more accurate, the sidewalk. To some extent, I’m still processing what it felt like that night, but I can share some things. First, a quick disclaimer. By way of this post, I’m trying to share what it felt like to spend one night with a student’s family on the street. To absolutely no extent do I think this gives me an understanding of what it’s like to be Sakshi, or to understand what it’s like to spend a life living that way.

To use an analogy, sometimes people travelling to Bombay take a ride on the local trains to get the full “Bombay experience.” The truth is though, until you travel on the Bombay local trains day in and day out, until you feel that sweaty, claustrophobic grind for hours a day for years, you haven’t fully ‘experienced’ anything.

That’s how I feel about that night. I am lucky. After I woke up, I went to school, and then at the end of the day, I got to go home and eventually sleep in a comfortable, warm bed. I don’t know what it’s like to live on the street.

That said, I can illuminate some of the things that I felt. As I laid to bed under the blanket, I looked up, and saw the dark night sky. There was a street lamp almost directly above us, and falling asleep was difficult. There were physical factors that drove how difficult the experience was. Bugs crawling on you, mosquitoes around your ears. Then there’s the pain that comes from sleeping on hard pavement, sloping, with bricks coming out in different places. And the cold. Even in Bombay, at night, early in the morning, you shiver in that cold. The wind comes, and you feel it, biting you.

Then there are the psychological factors. As I was struggling to fall asleep, I looked up at the night sky, and could just hear things. We were on the ground, low, but you could hear things around you. Rats scurrying about, cars coming and going, people screaming, fighting and arguing around. At one point I looked up, and police were coming around and harassing some of the people sleeping on the street. It seemed almost random, who they chose to harass, and who they let stay. Sakshi’s father had warned me about this, that sometimes the cops come around, and usually it’s pretty random who they decide to kick off the street to another location. What’s crazier to me is that cops spend their time picking on those who are the most vulnerable, in a country and society with a LOT of vulnerable people. But that’s another blog post.

It was pretty numbing, and frightening. I can’t even imagine the psychological toll that spending 10 years sleeping like that would have. The lights, the noises. You hear people fighting, shouting, screaming, nearby, but you can’t see it. There is no privacy, no sense of safety.

I only slept when total and complete utter exhaustion set in. I woke up at one point with Sakshi’s father on my stomach and at another point with their pet street dog sleeping at my legs. I was a mess the next day, feeling sick, a cold, and my back aching. That was after just one fairly easy night. Again, I just can’t imagine what that experience would be like day in and day out, for a lifetime.

At the end, I was awake from about 4-6, chatted with her father a bit before he went off to work to wash cars at the nearby petrol pump. Then at 7 I went off to school. Sakshi woke up crying, as apparently she often does (and does after naptime), and then I met her later at school that day. She walked into school, beaming as usual, and that was it.

I’m still processing what that experience was for me. I hope that they saw it as a genuine attempt to understand Sakshi. As I see her in class, I think there’s maybe some deeper understanding of what it’s like to be her, but nothing more than a cursory experience.

I’m happy to share the experience, that maybe I’ve learned a little bit more about the life of someone near the bottom of the world’s poor. I feel very lucky to have experienced, and to have grown up and lived the life I have. I hope that Sakshi can one day feel that lucky too.

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.