If you didn't read the previous post on Make a Difference - Introduction, I would encourage you to ...
The help of Lal Singh was enlisted to help in identifying the group of children that we would test for inclusion into the program. Lal was himself raised in the Vivekand Camp, just across the street from the American Embassy School, and is now employed AT the school in the technology department.
Lal is absolutely amazing ... and his eyes light up whenever he talks about how much this opportunity means to him, and to these children.
In short order, he identified 32 children who were in the right age group to be tested using the existing MAD assessment process. These children all attend school every day until about 2:00 pm, but the schools they attend are government schools where English is either not taught, or taught for a very brief period of time and not very consistently.
The help of Lal Singh was enlisted to help in identifying the group of children that we would test for inclusion into the program. Lal was himself raised in the Vivekand Camp, just across the street from the American Embassy School, and is now employed AT the school in the technology department.
Lal is absolutely amazing ... and his eyes light up whenever he talks about how much this opportunity means to him, and to these children.
In short order, he identified 32 children who were in the right age group to be tested using the existing MAD assessment process. These children all attend school every day until about 2:00 pm, but the schools they attend are government schools where English is either not taught, or taught for a very brief period of time and not very consistently.
They came to the AES campus gate at the right time and filtered into the testing room. They were so excited, happy, thankful and appreciative.
They were anxious to prove themselves, anxious to tell us what their hopes and dreams were, and excited to practice the English that they already knew on us.
"Hello, my name is Sanjana."
"I am fine, thank you."
"I want to be a doctor."
"I want to own a big company and be the big boss."
After the children were finished with their testing, the crew of volunteers set out to grade and place the children in the appropriate classes.
The MAD curriculum is created for three separate groups, Starters, Movers and Flyers. It was our expectation that most children would qualify for the Starters (beginners) and maybe SOME would be placed into the Movers curriculum.
Imagine our surprise and disappointment when we realized that quite a bit of these children tested would not be eligible for the MAD curriculum at ALL, based on their existing and current knowledge of the English language.
Only 11 children tested with high enough scores to be placed in the Starters program, leaving a large chunk of little sweethearts that would have to be told no.
The tests administered were difficult, at best and required quite a vast understanding of fairly difficult concepts, sight words, long sentences and pretty hard vocabulary words. It was almost painful to grade the tests, especially as we went further and further into the pile, realizing that so many of the children would have be told that they could not participate.
Stay tuned to find out what happens when you have a group of women that refuse to tell a child -- who has all the motivation and capabilities in the world -- that they will not be learning how to speak English as they had planned.
Stay tuned to learn what happens when this same group of women decides in a matter of 5 minutes that they will NOT tell any of these children that they cannot participate ... same time, same place (I'll be blogging about this project and process every Monday for the next couple of months).
