Shishur Sevay

Growing up in the United States, I do not recall tension over exams in primary or middle school.  But here in Kolkata, the examination is the single marker of success or failure.  In the US, we had papers, class participation, extra-credit, homework evaluation, projects, all of which became factors in final marks.  But here we live from exam to exam.  I'm not sure if I wrote of the year we had Chicken Pox during exam time.  We were told to bring the three affected girls wrapped in sheets, covering their full bodies.  They sat in the office with other sick children and took the exams.  There are no "make up" exams.  If you are sick one day you could be held back for the year. 

Our system here, in the Bengali Medium schools, is broken into primary (K-IV), secondary (V-X) and higher secondary (XI-XII).  Six of our girls will complete Class IV this year.  We are preparing them for entrance exams to some higher-ranked Bengali Medium Schools.  It is an incredible achievement of theirs to even be able to meet the basic qualifications and sit for these exams.  They are psyched.  Their first exams are end of November, which is also when their final school exams begin.  When teachers aren't here, they study in groups and on their own.

The ubiquitous scratching of the head, looking for answers.

For the first entrance exam, points will be distributed as 100 for Bengali, 100 for Math, 50 for English.  What they are to expect:

English: word meaning, spelling, make sentences, jumbled words and sentences, fill in the blanks, translation, parts of speech, articles, prepositions, paragraphs, and reading comprehension.

Bengali: spelling, fill in the blanks, opposite words, similar words with different meanings, convert sentence into one word, reading comprehension, gender, numbers, synonym, breaking words into syllables, paragraphs, parts of speech, make sentences.

Math (Bengali): written words and numbers, ascending and descending order, prime factor, common multiples, lowest common factor, highest common factor, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, decimals, fractions, averages, weights, money, time, simplification, geometry.

We had a visitor earlier in the week who was concerned that the girls did not have enough "play" time, so here is a picture of them playing before class this morning.  The teacher arrived as I was taking this picture, so upstairs to the classroom they went… without protest, and even if there had been protest, they still would have had to go.

We play lots of mind games, the girls and I.  One day a while ago they complained that there was too much work, that all they did was study.  Usually this happens when teachers sympathize with them, sometimes around their being "poor orphans."  By the way that's a term we all joke about…  Well anyway, I said to them, "It's not my fault you are here.  The government could have sent you anywhere, but they sent you to an education home!"  The girls are smart.  They got it.

We are on holiday.  School is closed for another two weeks.  Friday is a Puja.  The girls decided to celebrate the Puja in the morning and to study all afternoon.  I'm proud of them.

First, there is no way to make up the gap of time of blogging, so I’ll just give a quick summary, and over time go back over some of the events of the last 2 months.  I went to the US for the birth of Victoria, my first grandchild.  
Victoria decided she was comfortable where she was and not eager to get born so soon, so my trip was longer than planned.  It was my first/only extended trip back to the US since I started Shishur Sevay.  It was beautiful as we waited, and all had time together we’d not had before, especially that intimate mother/daughter time framed in the expectation of birth.  Then Victoria arrived, with a few more complications and fanfare than planned… I, as Grandma, sang Bengali songs to her, walked her, soothed her, and handed her back to Heather and Andrei, who morphed beautifully into parents.  

 Cici became an aunt and bonded in the style of “instant-glue.”  

Each day I talked to my children here in India.  I posted to Facebook for them, and also sent pictures through an email we set up just for this time. For a few days we had video conferencing, but the internet didn’t function well enough.  For Ganga and Bornali, each day I repeated to them, “G A N G A — Ganga!, and then B O N O — Bono” and they squealed.  Rani was thrilled seeing me on the video conference call but couldn’t connect by phone.  She slept a lot, and sprung alive when I returned.  She was joyous, as I was.

Today I post “When a Girl Learns her Name”, because it appears that one of our older girls has learned her family name, and for the first time in her life, has seen a thumbnail xeroxed picture of her (deceased) mother. I cannot write the details, for obvious reasons, but this discovery has had a profound effect on her as well as the others.    She beams.  She has a name, a place of birth, people she comes from… all hidden from her in the past.  One day she wants to change her name.  First though there are many questions to be answered, including veracity. The government is managing that well, and in the interest of our girl.  This will be a long, careful, and protected process.

I am an adoptive mother;  My daughter Cici was born in Kolkata, and came home to me at two months of age, much smaller than Victoria was at birth.    I wish so much she knew her name, her people, her place of birth. Years ago in Inda we walked many roads, some village areas, and she felt the ground, wondering if she came from here, or there, if the people around her were her people… She looked at faces.  Did anyone resemble her?  “Are you my mother, sister, brother, father?”  Where am I connected?  Where is my anchor to this Earth?

Cici is a drummer in New York, Last month while I was there, she played with a new band.  They played in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in a place on Ludlow Street.    My people, those who survived, came from Ludlow Street and the streets around.  My father’s father was a peddler, only a few blocks from there.  He sold pickles from a cart.  When he wasn’t selling pickles he was driving a taxi, or a limo.  Now Cici, my Calcutta born daughter was playing drums there, and I was in the audience, so proud of her.  When Cici first started Bengali lessons, her teacher was teaching in the high school where my mother and father first met.  Her Bengali teacher was being funded by Grand Street Settlement, where my grandmother was a social worker, and where I was in daycare at 2 years of age.  My family “came up” through education.  This is the only way I know.  This is part of my drive with my children here in India. 

In one of our trips to India, Cici and I visited an area north of Calcutta, a small deer reserve (We saw one deer).  This place had a special feel to her though.  She described it as her “spirit forest” and imagined she was from there — an image that gives her comfort.   After our visit she wrote to me, “When I am alone on the subway listening to my Indian music I think about West Bengal and that day we went to the spirit forest… I feel this sense of pride about where I come from… I think about who my parents might’ve been… I am Indian, and I am Asian-American, and I have a sense of pride and connection to a geographical, spiritual, ancestral place.” Cici (2004).

In our current lives, I walk the roads of her forbearers; she walks and drums the streets of mine.

There are so many reasons I started Shishur Sevay, but one was to have a home where I could imagine my daughter could have been raised if she had not been adopted.  Adopted children live with so many “if’s”, so many alternative or parallel realities.  Most of my girls here will not know their “real” names.  In their families, father was Baba, if he was there, mother was Ma, if she was there, and the children didn’t really know their formal names, or family names — title — or caste, or the village they came from.  Our girls talk about what train stations they were from, where they “lived” until police brought them into the government’s protective services.

A wise psychiatrist friend of mine used to ask her patients two key questions:  “Where do you come from?” and, “What is it like being you?” For the adopted child, the roots are missing from the answers to the first question.

 My family in the US, with Victoria at two weeks of age.

Twenty eight hours later, my family of Shishur Sevay, with a poster of Victoria they put up to welcome me home.

I am blessed.

So, now I am a principal too.  I have tried and tried to find someone to run the school aspect of Shishur Sevay but it isn't happening.  We are in May and the school year will end in Dec. or Jan this year.  So, first of all, I am Principal of a school with 12 children and 11 teachers, at the moment.  They come different overlapping days and hours.  We have some variety of teaching going on seven days a week. The obvious question is why so many teachers?  The simplest way to answer that is with pictures. 

The children with disabilities:

Four children are in this category:  Sonali, Bornali (Bono), Ganga, and Rani. For the children to learn requires one-on-one teaching, as they are at such indredibly different stages.  Ganga and Bornali are the closest to each other so often they can be taught together, but as they have little use of their hands, a teacher has to work closely to understand what they know, what they are trying to point to — requiring a high level of attentiveness.  Three teachers seems like an ideal number as one child is usually out for feeding or toileting.  As the four girls represent three distinctively different groups and levels, two teachers is an insufficient number.

The girls all used to nap after lunch, but Ganga and Bornali no longer want to.  So, it's play time.  Bornali loves action.  Ganga was more interested in posing.

 
Computer time often comes next.  This is the area where I feel most frustrated in finding help.  I am determined to use high tech communication appliances because I believe these children want to communicate, and can communicate with assistance.  The holes in the back or the orange chair represent where we had head switches mounted on a board for Ganga.  We may go back to that.  I also want to evaluate her for toe switches.  I spend hours going through catalogs, communicating with people online, trying to find some guidance.  But we have started at least and Ganga and Bornali love it.  Bornali is pouting because it is Ganga's turn.  I need to set up a two switch system and that just requires some time.  I'm the IT department here too.  

Recently the girls received their disability examinations by government doctors.  The four little ones each were rated as 90% disabled.  One of the older girls received a 75% disability rating due to her learning and behavior difficulties.  So yes, I need a teacher for her too because everyone here has to learn, at whatever level it is.  She often assists the special educators with the little ones, thus developing her own level of skills with them.  If she can really grow in this role, then she can eventually find employment helping with children who have disabilities.  She is very good with the little ones.  We still continue some academic work with her, partly because she loves it and feels successful in figuring out very simple numbers.  Her alphabet chart is the same as the one we use for Ganga and Bornali.  She also helps them with their homework.  Ganga and Bornali go out to the government school from 6:30 to 8:15 and return with homework in Bengali.  The teachers also review the work in English, so the girls get both.

Well, back to upstairs… here are some pictures of what the classroom looked like on a recent afternoon.

For this math class, the teacher on the right is teaching, and the teacher on the left is doing "back-up."  She is helping the girls who disruptive and having a hard time understanding.  She is a Learning Disability Specialist, trained abroad, and central to how the educational program is structured.   She is giving them the attention they require in order to work.
 

What does that mean, "the attention they need in order to work?"  This is really a critical question I ask myself every day.  I'm often faced with an attitude from outsiders that if the girls can't study and behave, let them stay uneducated, let them have regrets one day.  But that is not what we do with our own kids when they don't study.  I've been through lots of stages, including anger, punishing them, taking away TV, time out — but if a child really is resistant those things will not work.  So I go to a "need" basis, rather than a bad behavior basis.  I still discipline.  The rules are that you can't stay in the room if you are disruptive — when only one teacher is there, because you are not allowed to interfere in the learning of others.  If a second teacher is there she will help in the room, or take you out of the room.  But the teaching doesn't end.  "I will fight with you forever!" is what I tell them.  But punishment?  How do you punish children who already lost everything, who see themselves as unworthy, who have been beaten and punished in all sorts of ways….?  They care about what I think, and what others think, but this only goes so far in overcoming their difficult behavior.  And fundamentally they need the help because it is human attention that translates into caring, commitment, really a crutch to help them stand as they try to solve math problems that frighten them.  They are afraid of making mistakes.  Emotionally they feel like the world will end if they get it wrong.  It's easier to rip up the paper, or create distraction.  So back up teacher does a lot of, "You can do it."  She breaks down tasks to doable pieces and then the work seems almost easy.

Another teacher has come and she will do back up for a while and then start Bengali class.  The teacher doing math will then do back up as well as the LDS.  Without this support this girl will fall behind.  Her confidence will drop more.  She will hate herself and everyone around her.  She is probably our smartest math student.

On another day the LDS is working on math with two girls who have some trouble with basic concepts of quantity.  So even though the girls are doing high math numbers and functions, she is having them use the red blocks to show the functions of multiplication and addition.  One of the girls has trouble with concepts and abstract thinking.  She is also easily distracted.  But her behavior also had improved tremendously.  The other girl though is very smart, but is just settling in after three years and putting energy into study.  She used to just give up.  Now she tries, and asks for help with her work.  She wishes that when we have previous lifetimes we could keep the multiplication tables with us so we wouldn't have to work so hard to learn them in this lifetime.

While all this is going on upstairs, there is yet another teacher downstairs working with one girl who is a year behind the others.  She technically passed Class I but I wanted her held back because I knew she had no idea what she was doing, and I wanted her to have a good foundation.  She is doing well, but also needs constant reassurance.  Sometimes she just stops working.  That's it!!!!  Then I'm called and I pretend to wind her up like a clock and then I push a "button" on her back and she goes back to work.

So, the afternoon all this was going on, there were three teachers upstairs with the six, one teacher downstairs with the girl who is a year behind, and then the girl with dyslexia working along side them.  In the big room were two teachers with the little ones.  That's six teachers for 12 girls.  That's what it takes.  I don't see how to do it without the support of many teachers.  The girls still struggle with "how to learn."  They often work in groups now. 
   

They read newspapers:

They do homework:
 

They learn computer.

So, what's the problem?  The problem is when they are in a classroom and MUST perform, must do the problem, must confront what they know and do not know.  It's the necessity of work, the lack of free choice, the expectations.  Sometimes they freeze. like deer in the headlight.  And then it takes a human voice or touch to put them at ease to face the task given to them.  They are very tough kids, and very scared kids.  At some level they know they have been given an extraordinary chance at life, and they must worry that it will disappear, Poof!!! and they will be alone, again.