As I entered the classroom, I got a few ‘good mornings’; while others simply smiled shyly at me. Some of them asked me loads of questions. 3-year old Ansh was using a chalk to draw lines on his small chalkboard like the other children; except that he would start the chalk line from up his arm and continue right on to the chalkboard. The few, short, white strokes of the chalk on his little dark arm reminded me of a Zebra! The teacher of course told him that was not the thing to be done and he promptly wiped off all the chalk marks from his arm. There goes my Zebra, I thought!
Another little boy, ‘Anuj’ who is just about two years old had his own small chalkboard on which to write. But being rather more creative he decided the chalkboard was grand to sit on – nice and cool!
A 5-year old girl was already showing nurturing instincts. As I watched, she handed a chalkboard to a 4-year old boy, helped him wipe it clean and then sat with him to guide him in writing ‘A – B – C’.
Then, one child wanted to go to the restroom. Soon a number of other children thought that was a good idea and one by one twelve children were being led by the teacher in a queue to the restroom; leaving just a handful in the classroom! With the teacher attending to the children in the ‘spontaneous restroom break’ the ones left in the classroom went about doing their own thing in the classroom. It was educating for me to see just how they spontaneously would break up into small groups to chatter, shout, jump around, holding hands – just playing their own games with their own rules!
I started thinking that it would be great if these children had some more toys around to play with.
The teacher and the children held hands and played the local language version of the nursery rhyme ‘ring-a-ring-a-roses’. As they sang, the children formed a human train – standing behind each other and holding on to the shirt of the child in front. This curious train of little children looped round and round the classroom with the children hooting and chugging and generally having a great time.
As I watched that I thought, “No, they are not really lacking in toys. These creative games by the teachers help these children to play games together – hold hands, jump around, run, hop and skip around together, laugh together, do activities together. With toys like a ball or a doll they would play all by themselves. Like how we as adults play all by ourselves alone with our laptops and fancy phones.”
The teacher asked the class if anyone wanted to sing a song. A number of children volunteered and sang at the top if their voices. I liked the fact that it was voluntary and that they were not compelled to sing. It was fun to watch the children volunteering to sing and more to watch them volunteering others to sing!
The end of that school day left me humbled by the experience. In this obscure corner of the city were these two simple individuals – a teacher and an assistant – helping these children from some of the poorest sections of our society, by teaching them to walk on the right path of education and building their worldview. Here in this little classroom were teachers with a genuine love for needy children and here too in this little classroom were bright happy children – learning, playing and having a great time.
(by Nirmal Mirpuri, Pune, India)