Shivaji and me

Last month I had the chance of meeting and spending a little time with Shivaji - a little fellow who was in my place to spend his summer holidays. He is an orphan who has his only relative in my housekeeper, who has managed to put the boy and his older brother and sister in residential schools for orphans. I have no idea as to the age of this puny boy. He thought he was 14 but he didn't look older than 10 to me. (Probably he was taught to say that he was 14 to outsiders. I do not know.) He is now in the seventh standard.
After a day or two of being a little shy, Shivaji started getting a little more comfortable around me. I wanted to try to teach him somethings that I was sure wouldn't be taught at his school. It proved quite a task for me to get him out of his cocoon and get interested in learning small English words. I started off by making him look through a picture dictionary and tried to tell him what each picture was all about.
He knew the alphabet only partially and kept writing "N" as its mirror image, and went blank after "P". I taught him the alphabet again. I had to make him write it 4 to 5 times before he got the hang of it. I noticed that he could chant the entire alphabet but could not identify one when I pointed at something in the middle of the list. He had to say the entire thing over to find out what that particular one was.
He soon learnt it well, though it took some time for him to learn the alphabet "L". He did not seem to like it and kept saying "N" for it. But he did pick up. Then it was time for some words. I wrote out some similar sounding 3 letter words and made him learn by rote, just so that he could get some pronunciation. The next day he had learnt some 40 words and was very proud of his achievement. I tried making him learn words with their meanings. But he rarely could follow and I would often find him blank and distracted when I tried going over it again with him.
I think the major trouble was my lack of Tamil skills that did not allow me to communicate completely with him. I would take a winding route to make him understand what I was trying to tell him - not knowing the exact Tamil equivalent of what ever we discussed. For example - the Tamil equivalent of Geography I did not know and it was a disaster talking about maps and volcanoes and India. He knew a lot about Tamilnadu but hardly anything about India.
Finally I found that it was comparatively easier to teach him Math and went over some division (though this also took some time, I didn't know the Tamil equivalent of division)
Shivaji kept surprising me with some questions and drawings and creativity. I was not fully able to answer him - bad language skills. But I realised that I was not the only one at fault. The child had absolutely no exposure to the real world. He hardly used any English words that other children (even if they studied in Tamil medium schools) normally picked up from conversations. He had no exposure to people and things that rich kids or kids in cities and towns take for granted. For example - TV cartoons were fascinating to him, he had never seen them before.

Lessons learnt -

• Language : Kids need to be taught in languages that they know well and the teacher must be very comfortable in that language
• Active involvement: Shivaji learnt much better and faster when I involved him actively. He liked drawing. If I wanted him to learn the word "cat" I would ask him to draw one. He learnt the word perfectly and never forgot it.
• The child's interest: Pictures, cartoons, bright colours never fail to attract and interest children. Textbooks hardly give them this and that puts children off. The interest of the child is more important than the lesson itself.
• What to teach: What ever we tell these children, who live in villages and rarely get to interact with people from other places, is news to them. Everything is information and important. So we must rarely take things that other children know for granted with these children. They are different from kids who live with families at home.
• Infinite patience and acceptance: These children rarely get to interact with many grownups other than their teachers. They have short attention spans. They usually have had emotionally difficult and traumatic childhoods - loss of parents and/or siblings, coping with many other kids, bad influences at school/orphanage. They need to be given enough space and need to be helped more than ever if they are slow or difficult to teach.

I will be working with a group of people to help some children who live in orphanages in and around where I live. So I think these lessons might come in useful.
As always, ideas and criticism - welcome. Since I might be presented with the opportunity of working with children in another month or so, I would be glad if I got some working ideas from people. You might do a world of good to some sweet, little 8 year old. So write to me with your ideas - ruling[dot]world[at]gmail[dot]com or leave a comment here.