Year in review

It's been another year in my India, my beautiful, haunting, needy, laughing India.

After last year's revolutionary-sized changes, this one has seemed far less dramatic. I no longer needed to hold back a quarter of the students or replace most of the teachers. The library was now already in good working condition. Kids are reading, slowly but surely. Students in grades 2-4 are a year ahead in math. Second-graders blurt out their times tables with rapid-fire delivery, everyone.

Other than that, recent growth comes in more subtle forms. The children are writing unassisted, letters to their American sponsors, in daily journals, in summaries of what they've read. There is far less fighting, fewer enmeshed fists for me to disentangle. This surely has much to do with the school cosmos making more sense to them, and having a purpose (as opposed to the previous mindless repetition). 

Repeated visitors tell me that the children's spoken English has improved over the course of the year. I see the kids far too frequently (=always) to notice a difference, but let's add that to our list. (Incidentally, I have long since stopped hearing any trace of an accent when the kids speak. Then I'll listen to a recording and suddenly realize how thick their little accents actually are.)

Many of them love books. I would be happy even if that were our only accomplishment. There's not much of a reading culture in rural southern India; I'm pretty sure we possess the only children's library south of Chennai. Children will sometimes check out books that are far too hard for them to read, just for fun. They like to hold them and admire all the pages and all the words. None of them have any books at home, and it awes them that anyone could read one as thick as Harry Potter.

And then we are developing discipline, inch by inch by inch. My third-standard kids have been doing between forty and sixty minutes of math homework a day. They do it at school, and are not permitted to leave before it's done and done correctly. Almost everyone has cried at some point, and many have suffered through a bad day when it took two hours. But they are much better than much older kids at accepting the mistakes and trying it all again.

To quote my nephew, who was quoting someone else, we're headed towards infinity and beyond.