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| Hard at work with her aunt and then-facilitator Sowmya |
So much of our learning is invisible to us.
Take for instance, learning to copy something from the black board. Its not an educational target, just a means to it. I don’t
know if anyone quite remembers how he or she learnt to do it. And it wouldn’t
count among the noteworthy accomplishments in our lives, it certainly doesn’t
in mine. but not for Damini. For her, it became a learning target.
Facilitating Damini’s learning of this
seemingly simple process however completely changed my perception of it. This
is what the process looks like completely deconstructed:
·
I need to observe the teacher
when she is writing something on the board.
·
What she is writing is
connected to what she has been talking about.
·
Words are not randomly written.
There is a pattern.
·
I have to start with the first
word on the top left, move right along the row until it ends. Then I move down
to the next line below and do the same for each row thereafter until I reach
the last word at the bottom right.
·
I need to copy the first word
on the top left corner of my book, and then look back at the board for the
second word. Now I need to have marked my space while I looked down or I could
lose track and write the wrong ‘next word’. [There are any numbers of opportunities
for this to happen]
·
When I copy the second word down,
I need to put it next to the first one and not anywhere else.
·
The space between two words
needs to be copied down as well.
·
Then there are punctuation
marks that make no sense at the moment and are easily ignorable.
·
There are margins to contend
with.
Wow! Who would have thought we had accomplished
something so complicated? All I remember of it is Aunty Diana, my kindergarten
teacher, telling us to write down what was on the board, and all of us doing
just that.
It took Damini a good year before she was
able to do this independently.
Watching her learning process is like
watching a movie frame by frame. And even after she has achieved some mastery
over the task, it may be a while before she understands the objective of it
all.
We would play hide and seek every day when
she was younger and through this she got the hang of counting and looking for
people. When it came to the hiding
part though, it took her a while to grasp the concept of remaining hidden in
order to win, and that winning was the objective in the first place. She would instead
hide and promptly yell, “I am here!”
Over the years, I’ve discovered that these
three rules really help me to facilitate her learning:
1.
Several steps: break the task down to
all the elements that need to be mastered. Make explicit all the hidden
steps.And they are there! Make visible and focus on each and everyone of them.
2.
Give it time: be prepared for a long
learning curve. It took Damini 6 years to get a decent grasp of time. Can’t say
she’s mastered it just yet.
3.
Give it a rest: introduce a skill, give
it a bit of practice and then let it breathe for a while.
We got Damini her first bicycle when she was
7 years old. She would push with her feet to move around rather than pedal. Her
grandfather was charged with the task of getting her to pedal and at the end of
two months she did pedal… backwards. We tried everything from pushing the pedal
to physically moving her feet forward. It was really frustrating as you can
imagine! Then she had a break from all the torture when went on a holiday
shortly after. When we came back, lo and behold! She was pedaling forward. Something
had fallen into place when we stopped forcing it on her. Ever since, we have
made this a part of the facilitation. We wait for her brain to absorb and make
sense of everything.
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