‘N Now For Some S.T., MADiac style…
Ice-breakers, baseline assessments and most recently, syllabus training…the MADiacs of Trivandrum have been busy these past two-three weeks. After spending what seemed like ages in overcoming the force of friction opposing us (please forgive that little allusion to Physics, but ‘force of friction’ seemed less dramatic than the ‘forces of darkness’ 
), we, the MADdies of Tvm, were caught in a flurry of activity.
Ice-breakers familiarised us with the kids and I’m glad to say all of us established
‘the beginnings of beautiful friendships’ with them 
. The girls at the Sacred Hearts Home even invited us to stay with them. No kidding 
. Although the MADiacs assigned to the Poojapura Divine Childrens’ Home find their little charges a wee bit more than they can handle individually, it’s safe to say that all of them are besotted with the children and are looking forward to rising up to the challenge. 
icebreaking at SH...don't ask...
The Baseline Assessments proved we’ve got a loooooooooonnnnnnnnnnngggggg way to go. The girls at Sacred Hearts have been taught English through their vernacular i.e. Malayalam and as a teacher of mine used to say, learning one language through another is absolutely the worst possible way to learn it. So we’re gonna teach using gestures. The students are familiar with the alphabets but are shaky on their spellings and vocabulary. And speaking is an absolute nightmare. But the thing is, they do make a sincere effort and are very, very eager to learn. The younger ones are, perhaps more confident than the older students.
told u they were eager beavers...Can u believe they enjoy taking the test? 
can you identify the volunteer?
all part of the assessment
As for our Syllabus Training held just yesterday…as one of the other MADiacs put it, it was more of an interactive rally. Hats off to our mentor Arun, really, for being able to get in a word edgewise. He put forward our golden rule, ”KNOW THY KIDS” and passed around these blank sheets of paper so we would each write of what we’d learnt from the baseline assessment and what difficulties we were likely to face and so on. Some of the volunteers who were actually capable of holding their tongues for a few minutes, started writing at top speed and had covered half the page before the rest of us mortals had even picked up our pens. . Then there were some, who after an initial writers’ block, found that one-and-a-half pages were inadequate. Well…all
I have to say is that the folks in Chennai have, in all likelihood, their work cut out for them answering our numerous queries . When our mentor proceeded to the lesson plan , most of us realized with horror that we didn’t remember what possessive adjectives were! Personally, I don’t think it’s really all that necessary to scare our students (or ourselves, for that matter) with fancy words like that, do you? But we’re getting those old grammar books out from dusty attics and spider-infested basements.
Just in case.
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