CMS are doing their best to get as much out of me as they can while I am here, and if it weren’t for the fact that I am absolutely loving just about every aspect of the work here, I might feel a tad put upon. The latest manifestation of this are a series of workshops I have been asked to provide at four separate campuses. This is not four workshops, but three days of two hour sessions at each. Which is a bit more demanding, except of course I can simply repeat each one.
The first of these began today: an early morning start at the Cambridge section of Gomti Nagar 2, my main venue. This is a separate section, following Cambridge exam syllabuses, which are certainly more universally accepted, and therefore, I guess, probably more expensive, and with smaller classes. I had been told that I would be teaching a mixed group of teachers and students – something of a challenge in itself – up to a maximum of thirty students(!)
As it happened, there were only about seventeen or so of them – seven or eight (female) teachers, and the rest students, just two of them boys. I told them all that I was going to treat them all as an ordinary class, with no distinction between them, and warned them they would all be working together. Plus I told them that I had never taught such a group before.
Lver the next two hours, the transformation was extraordinary. With the exception of the boys, the students were pretty much up for it; at least some of the teachers were clearly far less certain. And there were the usual signs that people felt far from confident about performing. But by the end, they were in mixed groups, all with their hands up, asking to be able to show their work. Wonderful, of course, and that sort of experience is the reason I love my job.
But actually this was even more amazing, and brought about by the quite extraordinary change that has occurred in my teaching in the past two weeks or so. The second half of the session in particular was an introduction to mime, and it is a lesson I have taught… well, I suppose thousands of times. And all pretty much the same way, the same progression, from ball to glass to rope to… whatever, depending upon the time. And this was different.
I taught the teachers in the class that it was far better to let the students, the children come up with their own ideas, that every time you listed the possibilities, or gave an example, you were robbing them of the opportunity to come up with that idea themselves. When they started the ball improvisation, normally I give them a range of things to do with the ball: catching, bouncing, throwing…
But this time, I just said, “What do you do with a ball?” and there were some remarkable results. Some were the sort of things I have always told them in the past – there is, after all, a fairly limited range – but when one of them threw a ball across the circle to another, and that one spontaneously made the ball bigger as she caught it, I could have cheered.
Same with drinking – leave them alone and you get responses you have never seen before, like the woman feeding her crying baby. Even more so with rope. There were the usual range: a tightrope, a tug of war, a lasso… but all with that extra spark of originality. But when the teacher and student performed an astonishing mime about a pair of mountaineers, one up, one down, and the girl gave a remarkably effective rendition of that particularly difficult skill, indicating you are actually climbing… well I could have cheered. Or wept. Or something. Culturally, my favourite moment, was when I asked them, working as one group, to give me a tableau of an Indian wedding, and then an English one… It was the presence of the dog in the latter that really tickled me.
