It’s pathetic how we cannot recognise the power of English.
I announced evening classes in English in the village. Some sixteen children between the ages of 11 and 18 started coming, riding their bikes and swishing their colourful tails. They are smiling, rosy-cheeked, and eager.
I, their teacher, am equally eager. To have students in front of me is a treat I still do not take for granted. I am always excited when I begin a new class.
So for the first six or seven sessions we’ve done random things, all in the direction of increasing vocabulary and understanding the structure of the English language. We have done acting, played games, watched a movie and learnt two songs.
Today I got really serious and they felt the pressure.
I gave them a dual, maybe a triple, or even a quadruple, task.
First, it was a set of Multiple Choice questions and they had to grasp the concept of only one correct answer among four seemingly correct ones.
Second, it was phrased in the Jeopardy! Way. I taught them to ask the correct question for each wrong answer in order to understand why it was wrong—for the answer provided.
Third, it was all about verbs, their tenses, their agreement, and about other grammatical niceties of different kinds. But it was disguised as everyday chatter.
And fourth, there was always the continuous requirement of the plural, the articles, the punctuation marks, the capitals.
Ah, English.
How would a village child ever learn? I mean, they can’t, all the village children of India, or even U.P., or even Varanasi district, or even this village—spend their evenings with me?!
Then I look at someone like Prema. Brought up in a one-room home with one bed to be shared with four siblings, with one meal per day and one starvation time, used to wearing hand-me-downs and owning almost nothing fancy of her own…Prema became fluent in English over her eight or so years in our school, learnt to read English stories for pleasure, to write journals, to love poetry, to make and laugh at jokes, to do that extra, relaxed thing that marks a certain kind of English speaker. Her parents were illiterate and working class. Prema teaches English with techniques such as games, rhymes, story-telling and phonetics. When I observe her classes, I am awash with wonder.
Prema just got it.
Recently her class showcased a set of books made by them on assorted topics. This is kindergarten class. Prema did it matter-of-factly with no great bombastic declarations of the creativity and uniqueness of her work, as some teachers like to make. Her children’s books, I noted, were truly child-like, creative, unique, fun.
Not only as a person, but as a teacher, she had just got it.
Now, if English is indeed power, I have to find a way to translate this power she has acquired, to money. Prema desperately needs to earn much better, and to help herself and her family out of their rut.
Because she still lives in that one room home, now with only one sibling, but still with a father who coughs as if his lungs would crack and a mother already shuffling and going to age before her time.
Prema’s books…. Prema herself…. somehow I have to bring them to the attention of the world. The attention of a compensating world.
Imagination, Pain, Anger, and Love. 