More Than Just Grammar (III)

Part III: Transformation of the Teacher and the Student

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While popular methods focus on memory, rigor, and a certain level of “do as you are told,” integral education hopes that each child knows who they are and what they want to make of their life. “Karm ko chunnna,”(choosing your own work), “khud ka soch le aana,” (bringing in your own understanding), as Sulochana didi calls it, is not an easy task. To make students initiators in their learning process takes years of deliberation, practice, and patience. More importantly, most of the progress is invisible in the initial stages, especially for those who don’t know what to look for. Rather than in deliberate, rehearsed moments, growth in their consciousness occurs through everyday, spontaneous actions and responses.

This series is incomplete if I don’t honestly pen down my own growth, along with the children I worked with in the sacred space of Mirambika under Sulochana didi.

Here I go!

In integral classrooms, children still sit on the floor with a straight back!

It is important to note that the class I worked with does not assign homework, but the children take work from school to do at home out of their own interest.

Every classroom has three types of children:

1. The ones who come ready to focus in school and bring work they completed at home the previous day. For most of them, their home environment mirrors the school’s values. For some, they are born with a certain level of maturity that is not greatly affected by those around them. They take on challenging work, don’t waste time doing what they are already good at, and are reasonably independent.
2. There are a few others who love to learn, but psychological fears, other barriers, and everyday habits keep them from performing to the fullest. In these cases, there is an attempt in the home environment to implement the school’s philosophy, but because parents do not fully understand it, there is often a mismatch. The second category of children needs some form of handholding, and with parental cooperation, significant progress can be made.
3. The last of three are those whose parents have utter disregard for the methods of integral education, and they insist on sending their children to tuitions and pack them with after-school classes. The last category comes tired from all the classes they attend outside, not having enough time to integrate their learnings and want to finish the task given without much “khud ka soch.” Without much energy for deep connection and understanding, if they do work at all, it is done half-heartedly.

As adults, we have all observed that we spend a lot of time on things that interest us. In states of deep connection, beautiful thoughts and connections arise, allowing us to see the work we do from a totally different perspective. This depth is often observed in the first category of children who come to school fresh and can connect deeply for a long time. They are free in their minds, ready to roll with the day’s work, and often make incredible progress in a short time. The challenge in the classroom is also how to take everyone along.

Smaller moments

Cheering for others

“Your hand-work is stunning. Good job, Beta.”

“Thank you, Didi. You must see my friend’s work. His work is even better than mine.”

I’ve been lucky to have great friends who are incredibly kind, hardworking, and competent in their own lives. But I was not such a great cheerleader for them as these kids are for their friends. It is important to learn to do well, but also to see and appreciate the good in others. Each of us is put on earth to do our sadhana. Others can inspire us, but competition and comparison are vicious cycles that sow grief.

Caring for each other

“I’m coming to play with you.”

“No, you will first finish your work before you play.”

This was a conversation between two kids. The first had not finished his work, while the second had completed his. This level of care for friends to also do well and demand a certain level of commitment from your fellow mates is indeed special!

Working as a team

At the annual Thanksgiving ceremony, two children chose to sing their 30-stanza “Ram-Chopai” fully and serve as an anchor for the rest of their classmates’ acting. This involves high-level memorization, greater awareness, and coordination among themselves and with the group. After the function was over, the diyas suggested that they should all reverse roles. The two children played all the roles, and the 12 others sang for them. The spontaneity and understanding with which they switched roles to perform the play are examples of how, with a higher level of understanding, children know when to lead, when to follow, and when to do their own thing. This level of self-direction and harmony with oneself and others is often a dream of all educationalists.

My own experience

“A teacher is the one who learns the most in the class,” summarises my own learning in the integral classroom. I understood in my first week that here, development is more important than simply delivering the content. Unless connections are made and synthesis occurs in children’s minds, undigested knowledge is just a bunch of terms, and wisdom is nonexistent.

With generating “interest” as the prerequisite and by engaging the general umbrella of facilitation through faculties of observation, judgment, reasoning, and comparison as laid out by Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, I set out on my quest. Three places challenged me to grow.

Children’s on-the-spot requests

Since this space is child-led, I always overprepared for these classes. I had a good idea of the range of technicalities, given my background in teaching scientific writing. I kept a copy of my two-page grammar notes while I took class. But even with my preparations, I was stumped a couple of times about how to make exercises available to students at different levels.

There are primarily 4 types of students in an English class in the Indian context: Ones who have learnt to use the language at a certain level of refinement; ones whose language misses subtle rules of the language “Me and my cousins..,” primarily because the language in the family is more colloquial and not textbookish; ones who are figuring out what order to put the words with experimentations; ones who are still afraid to try because are afraid of attempting.

Once, I distinctly remember a couple of children calling out that the range of activities I provided was boring for them and that they would like to try something harder. Another time, the opposite happened! A child was disappointed when I omitted a fun activity for her because I thought it would be too easy. She asked me to send the instructions to her mother so that she can try at home! And dutifully brought completed work on the next day.

One day, I even got a request to teach parts of a story. Though I had time only to talk about Dan’s story circle, I was very impressed by how far the children have come in such a short time! It is a testament to the observation that we can learn a single subject more thoroughly than learning several subjects poorly over many years.

This is also a space where the children ask if we can teach kolam and mudras in their free time! I had to brush up on my other skills and learn some sketching, as their curious, loving eyes are scrutinizing everything I do. I loved how they were mirrors to me!

A kolam by the author. An attempt at perfection through persistent practice!

What stories mean to children

At the beginning of every year, children choose a certain set of values to work on throughout the year. Though I dabbled in story writing over the years, it wasn’t until Sulochana didi asked me to write stories on these values that I began to understand the art of storytelling. With initial help from my friend Anuj, who is himself a story writer, I understood some of the principles and continue to learn through the children’s eyes. But one thing that stayed with me through all these exercises was how the children’s innocence made them absorb the whole. Adults have filters that make us reject certain ideas while accepting others. I saw none of that in children. This exercise made me understand the importance of choosing the right, uplifting literature for stories that are an integral part of their education, the anchors of their value system.

Shining light on my growth

“Making them (children) feel free and unlimited in your presence” is the job of an integral teacher. This type of presence involves making oneself feel unlimited as well. Throughout the year, as I navigated the complex pen-exchanging rules in the classroom, learning about new types of cars and knowing the names of a handful of footballers, I have become significantly more active, more organized, and more receptive to the world around me. Most of the time, we think our children are great and better than everyone else. But it is often the teacher who can see the shortcomings and the strengths the children displayed in overcoming them and charting their own course. In this rare opportunity to be a part of the growth of children that even their parents are not privy to, I must admit that I, too, found parts of the map to becoming unlimited.

As the adage goes, “The proof is in the puliogarai”… errr… I mean, “the pudding.” Here, in the three-part series, I hope you got a taste of Integral education pedagogy and my observations on the children’s and my own transformation of consciousness.

Thank you so much for riding the roller-coaster with me!

If you are interested in the the material I developed for the Samskrutam class, do look here.

I would also like to thank dear Sulochana didi for her patient hand-holding, the principal, Dr. Jayanthy Ramachandran, for the opportunity, and diyas, Ms. Minati Pradhan, Ms. Pratyasha Jena and Dr. Shilpa Asopa-Jain, for their pointers during the course of the year.

पुनर्मिलामः (We shall meet again!)

श्रीकृष्णार्पनमस्तु 🙏🏾