|  | Dear friends,
2022 was a fun year in school, as my smaller age classes dwelt on the pleasurable conundrums of the dates 2-2-2022, 22-1-22, 22-2-22, 22-12-22 and so on; you get the idea. The lesson to learn here is not about Calendars so much (though they are a wonderful topic) or even about Numbers (and we know the fun they are able to provide) but about something called Curriculum in Excess. |  | It’s when a teacher is so immersed in the levels of her students, she sees everything around her as potentially usable in teaching, from the dewdrops on her cold glass of water to the sounds of traffic. Whatever she sees around is all subsumable as History, Geography, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, and Languages. The world is like an exotic garden to explore, like an intricate machine that works at everything, like an Encyclopaedia that never ends.
There are many reasons why I love teaching, but two are: that you are working with people all the time, and people are so crazy and unpredictable they keep you laughing and full of joy; and second, that teaching allows you to explore the world afresh all the time. |
| |
|
|
|
|
| Only the other day I realised that the grammar ‘mistakes’ in certain songs such as “Jingle Bells” and “Heigh ho” were similar to the English mistakes my classes 2-3 make all the time. For a smaller class, I understood that the magic of shopping is unrelated to the actual object being exchanged, or the amount that is being transacted—it’s rather the magic inherent in the transaction process: give a piece of paper, get some metal back, pocket it, walk away with a trophy in a bag.
Instead of a list of our many projects, here are some musings on our work during 2022: |  | Covid has helped us divide our work into two streams. One is the larger work of redefining the curriculum to conceptualise how to use the arts at every step of academic work. The second is the smaller, equally challenging and important work of running a school in which we look after every child’s individual needs. The first work feeds into the second, and the second helps us to progress with the first. |
|  | However, not all our parents or supporters needs to be invested in both. This year has been fruitful in allowing us to strengthen our bonds with parents, as one by one, they came back from the isolation of the pandemic to the social world of the school. We have loved to work with parents all through, from Workshops to visits. We want to make the Family-School relations still stronger to do the best possible job for children. |
|
|
|
|
|
| After the loneliness of Covid we slowly took control of our school spaces: cleaning outdoors and indoors, in Nagwa and Betawar | | |  | Reapplying ourselves to reading and writing, and learning through cooking, theatre, elocution, and body work | | We loved it when our curricular and teaching culminated in a Varanasi Children’s Arts Festival on 4th December. Old artisan friends returned for a day of workshops: the potter, wooden toy-maker, embroiderer, basket-maker, cot-weaver, and wall painter. Performance artists joined us for their workshops in theatre, classical music, folk music, dance, flow arts, martial arts, and story-telling. A special draw were the many forms of painting: on paper, on the wall, sohrai painting, gond painting, and collage work. Then there was the recycled art of children, and of professionals such as the seamstress and the carpenter. There was a fashion show to highlight costumery and food stalls to show off our baking and savouries. Not least was our display of organic vegetables and seasonal flowers from our farms and gardens. Our children put up more stalls of games, sweets, fruits, bangles, and kites. | | It was a fully packed day with hundreds of children and their families from outside. It was roaring fun! This Festival was launched in 2019, disturbed for two years by Covid, and on track to be our annual event for ourselves and all the children of Banaras. | | A few words about its philosophy. Art and ‘Craft’ have become mechanical tools used unimaginatively. Our idea is to develop further our own teaching techniques to use music, dance, theatre, story-telling, book-making, sports and visual arts. At the same time, to bring the children of the city closer to the living arts of the city, from weaving to design. We want children to observe and listen more closely to what is around them, to learn an art or two themselves, and to benefit from the integration of the arts into academia.
| All this definitely strikes a chord in others. The warm, supportive responses from parents, friends, and well-wishers is lovely!THANK YOU!And keep up your appreciation, giving us the energy to conceptualize and actualize further. |  | | | | |
|
|
|
