primary school teachers the twists and turns of everyday practice

Version 20 Oct 08, edited final
II
She becomes a teacher!
Meet Malati, just appointed as a regular school teacher in a rural two-teacher
school:
Malati is 20 years old. She comes from a middle class family and lives in a small
town. She completed Class 12 two years ago with 58 per cent marks and then
enrolled for a primary teacher-training course, which lasted one year. She decided to
become a teacher because the salary is good and she likes being with children. Also,
she wants to get married soon and feels that the hours are convenient—she will be
able to look after her household duties also.
Malati is among the lucky few to get a job as a regular teacher. She had hoped for a
school within her town, but is appointed to a rural district school about an hour
away by bus. On her first day of school, Malati leaves home early to take a bus to
the village where her school is located, then walks from the bus stand to the school.
As she nears the school her heart sinks. In front of her is a dilapidated two-room
structure with broken windows. A few children playing in the playground strewn
with bricks, stones and garbage greet her and when she asks them where the teacher
is, they tell her that he comes by the 10 am bus. She goes into the building, where
there are no benches for children, the rooms are dusty and unkempt, and two chairs
lie in the far corner of the verandah. There is no water in the pot, no toilet anywhere
in sight and no sign of charts or books.
Eventually, her co-teacher arrives. A middle-aged man who has worked in this
school for three years, he has nothing much to say to her about how she should go
about her work, how she should manage a group of children from different classes in
the same room and, most importantly, what it is that is expected of her as a teacher.
She is just asked to handle Classes 1-3: more than 60 children crammed into a dark,
airless, colourless room. Nothing she had learnt in her teacher-training programme
helps her understand how to deal with this reality.
She decides that she should get to know her students and tries to ask them some
questions. But only those sitting in the first few rows are paying attention. The
children at the back are talking among themselves and she worries that they are
making too much noise. Confused, she decides that she ought to try to teach them
something. So she leads them through a recitation of the alphabet, interrupted many
times by her telling first one child then another to keep quiet, pay attention and sit
down. Somehow she gets through the day.
Within a week of joining, Malati is informed that the textbooks have to be collected
from the local cluster office. She makes the journey hoping to meet other teachers
like her. When she reaches the cluster school she is handed a number of forms to fill
before she can collect the books. Since she did not bring the data with her, she
trudges back to her school and returns four hours later with the registers. As she
fills out the forms she notices that the official enrolment is far higher that what she
has seen so far. Brushing it aside, she picks up the books and notices that the one on
Environmental Studies (EVS) is missing. The cluster resource centre (CRC)
resource person tells her that he will inform her when the EVS books arrive.
9