back to school

Today was our first real school day (as in not a craft day) in two weeks. I thought we would have really good attendance after the break, but I guess the kids weren't feelin the whole wake up early thing, so in fact only three of my students were there. No intermediate students came, so I watched while Trina taught English for an hour, and then she watched while I did my hour of math. Man am I glad that I'm doing math and not English. Grammar is probably the most boring subject in existence.
Before we went back to school, I looked over the syllabus that Bobby showed me when I first got here. Order of Operations is in fact not on the syllabus, but that's what she said they had been working on when I arrived, so that's where we started. Its crazy that we spent 5 weeks on Order of Operations alone, but that's how long it took for the kids to get it. My teaching skills drastically improved over the first five weeks too; the first two or three were probably not effective at all. I guess it isn't quite as bad when you consider that we only have three real school days a week. So anyway, I looked over the syllabus and figured that they'd probably already covered everything that was supposed to be taught from July to October in their real school. This included factors, multiples, and multiplying and dividing fractions and decimals. I had them do a few problems of each, and it was obvious that they knew how to do it already.
I did have difficulty explaining factors to them though, because they didn't have the English vocabulary for it. Subhamita happened to be there today, so she explained it to them in Bengali. Bobby, the school teacher, is a wonderful woman, but her English isn't good enough to be able to do this. CRAWL really needs an instructor who is fluent in both English and Bengali.
I asked Piya to show me what math she was working on in her Bengali school, and it involved simplifying fractions with radicals. This is something that I worked on when I was in 7th grade (which makes sense because Piya is in 7th grade) What's on the syllabus is work that I did in 4th grade. Some of the kids are just so far beyond what's on the syllabus. I'm sure that some of the kids who were not there today couldn't do some of the work though. That's really where the problem is, because they're all at such different levels.
When Subhamita came to the flat to meet the electrician, I talked to her about the problems I see with the syllabus. She told me some of the things on there aren't taught in Indian schools (like averages and percentages) and said I should teach those. I'm happy to do that, but that will not take 7 months to teach.
This is the problem with CRAWL. It has great ambitions, and the philosophy of the programs is good, but it really lacks structure and organization. I don't know how to offer suggestions without offending Subhamita and Kakoli though. As far as the syllabus, I'm not too worried, because I will follow one of the many text books laying around and just figure out for myself what the kids need to work on. What I'm worried about is what will happen when I leave and the kids are back to volunteers who only stay for a month or two.
Ellenoor and I decided to organize a big cabinet in the flat that has lots of story books and text books in it. (Its currently in complete disarray). We found a suggestion book for the volunteers that had been written in up to early this year. Suggestion that appear a year ago are the same things that need changing now. I also found a copy of the same syllabus I have buried under a pile of books, which suggests to me that they used the same one last year.
All this begins to make sense with the knowledge that Subhamita and Kakoli are both pursuing their PhDs currently. I found that out last week. So they have their hands extra-full.
I hope that I can find a way to help get the program organized better before I leave. There's definitely lots of work to be done...