Aashayein-Foundation

I’m out here seated in the balcony of my house with the lappy streaming out Yanni’s ‘Keys to imagination’. It’s not yet December, yet the chill is in the air already. Been a while that I visited my own blog so decided to keep things at bay and record things happening in my life. Work’s been a bit demanding of late. Not really hectic but these late night client calls with atypical and unrelenting requests all in a short time span is sort of draining. I’m just hoping against hope that the next three days slice through comfortably. ...

An assortment of about fifteen kids are seated in front of me. All supposedly fifth and sixth graders. The syllabus mandates me to read out to them a story and ask them questions based on it. Something akin to the reading comprehension questions that we solve. I set off in my task in reading out a para and asking the one in the third row a very simple question. His poker faced response immediately states he’s not got a word of what I’ve been talking. Same applies almost every other kid out here. I break up the sentences now to see if that helps them. Still the same response. I finally check to see if they at least know the individual words in the sentence. Turns out that NONE of them are even able to appreciate the presence of a ’the’ in the sentence! Besides, when asked to translate a statement like - ‘This is my uncle Kishan’ to telugu, I get the weirdest responses imaginable! They do not know the difference between ‘Buying’ and ‘Going’! Teaching them to decipher paragraphs is way too optimistic. ...