The School Tool

The Government College of Teacher Education, Thiruvananthapuram, where I teach, draws the cream of talent  from across Kerala State,  South India. The second semester of the academic year 2009-10, commenced  on 01 June 2010. The Second Spell of Practice Teaching of twenty day duration  started on  05 July 2010.

On Saturday,  17 July 2010,  all the trainees of the English Optional, assembled in the Department to provide their impressions  about the experience they gained and to narrate  the difficulties they experienced  thither to during class room  transaction. This particular session was eagerly awaited by both the teacher educator and the trainees because a new Course Book for Standard IX had been introduced by the State Council of Educational Research and Training  (SCERT) of the Government of Kerala.

 Given below are a few notable comments:

• The non-availability of the newly introduced Course Book for teaching for a whole division in some schools, even though the classes  commenced for the new academic year in the first week of June, did create problems for some trainees.
• In most schools trainees found that at the secondary level, there are  categories of students: Ones eager to learn; Ones that like to be taught English only through the mother tongue, namely Malayalam; Ones with widely different linguistic ability- those who cannot speak or write a single sentence correctly in English.
• To enable the pupils to grasp the theme, many trainees confessed that they had to translate  into Malayalam, the content in the Course Book.
• In many schools, trainees found that there were several pupils studying in Standard IX  who did not even know all the  English alphabets.
• It was particularly difficult for the pupils to follow the class  when the trainees attempted to teach English only through English!
• Even during the sixth period (ie; the last  period  of a school day) allotted for English,  in one school, the students were distracted and did not seem to be really interested in learning English.
• It was very difficult  to engage classes as per the Teaching Manual prepared  based on SCERT guidelines.
• Many trainees found that engaging the pupils in group work simply resulted in difficulty  of  managing the class. It also consumed a lot of time often ending in the trainees requesting the school authorities to provide extra teaching period to complete the class.

 It was found that pupils invariably carried to class, Bazaar guides such as 'Labour India' which has translations in Malayalam of the reading passages along with worked out answers  of exercises of the English Course book. This kind of dependency  on guide books may be a reflection of the inability of pupils to follow the newly introduced Course Book! Perhaps this is the right time to conduct a  minor research to find how exactly the newly introduced Course Book is being received by students, teachers and teacher trainees through out the state.

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