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October 08, 2007
About bubbles and numbers
Maybe it’s a good sign, but I’ve stopped pausing every few days to remark to myself about how long I’ve been in Bangalore, how long I’ve been at Akshara, and what on earth I’ve been doing. A cause (or maybe a result) of my lack of writing for so long.
My work at Akshara has settled into something of a rhythm, which means I think and speak about Akshara’s programs with some level of familiarity nowadays --and I even fancy myself as having some sort of history with the organization, saying things like “When the math program first started…” When I first got to Akshara, it seemed like everyone was saying things like that to me. At Harvard I imagined that the people with the really serious field experience had this sort of air of mystery about them, like they understood things that couldn’t be explained in words, and had magical skills that would emerge from them in the right contexts. Maybe “the field” isn’t so mysterious after all.
That said, I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of “the field.” First of all, what an odd term – as though office-bound development people are plantation owners looking out over their rice crops, or rich people who get the good seats at a baseball game – but also, what an odd concept. After all, “the field” – which sounds like some sort of side issue – is really the basis of an NGO’s existence. If anything, “I work at an NGO” should apply to fieldwork, and office-rats like me should be the ones who get slapped with dehumanizing blanket terminology, like “she works in the bubble,” or “she’s an A.C.-worker.”
The work I’ve been doing of late has indeed been bubble-work: a lot of playing with data and reading documents. Two big things I’ve worked on are a paper on pupil-teacher ratio and its effects on KLP’s reading program and background note on the reading program’s methodology. The reading program was an attempt to pull together my learning from the past few months, and put down on paper all the slightly differently-shaded narratives of the reading program I’ve been hearing since coming to Akshara. The PTR paper was my first dive into the limited data I have – after a week and a half of pestering people I now have much more to play with – and I was amazed at quickly it drew me in. I found myself learning statistics backwards – experimenting with things, then realizing I needed a step I should have done earlier, then moving back a step further. Those people who taught me statistics were pretty much dead-on – I had proved them right by the end.
What was even more amazing was how thick with information a few numbers could be. I had the number of students and the number of teachers in Bangalore’s schools, the results from the reading program in the same schools, and the pupil-teacher numbers in 10 Karnataka districts; I ended up with an idea of the relationship between pupil-teacher-ratio kids’ performance in the reading program and some staggering numbers on the state of Karnataka. For example, Karnataka, according to government numbers, has 677 schools with no teachers but some students attending.
All very impressive-sounding, but my real next question is what to do with data like this. Put it on the Internet to be discovered by students who happen to be Googling education in Karnataka? When I presented my results to Akshara staff, they were all somewhat shocked and said the government should know about it. But when our new staff member, a former DPI in the Department of Education, saw the same numbers, he took them with more than a pinch of salt. “It can’t be,” he said. “We’d have to check. You can’t have a school with no teachers. Most of government data doesn’t match up anyway.”
Last week, A, M, and I made what seemed like a holy pilgrimage to one of the hard-to-reach schools in the dataset: in Kalenahalli, the school with the smallest official PTR in Bangalore during the reading program, 7 children to 2 teachers. After multiple buses and walking in the hot sun, I was told that last year there were 9 children at the school, and yes, it came through as 7 because 2 of them never actually attended. If data were always this accurate, I thought, it could be immensely powerful. Yet it was also somewhat strange. I had built up an image in my mind of a “problem school,” an inefficient teacher placement, and arrived at a tiny, peaceful space with clean bathrooms and classrooms and a hardworking HM who asked us repeatedly to open a library in her school so the adults in the village would get into the habit of reading the newspaper. Maybe that’s something of what’s missing in the bubble, the “strength in the voice” that a Brown alum had told me about before I left for Bangalore. Maybe it’s not so bad for me to work partly in the bubble, if I like it and am good at it, but it’s absolutely key to be sensitive enough to open myself to well-rounded human voices and forms as often as I can.
Bangalore is funny in all the bubbles it has, not just the field bubbles and the office bubbles, but the temple bubble, the expat bubble, the pub bubble, the intellectual bubble. When you don’t quite fit into a bubble you’re desperate to let people know. I’ve had two auto drivers in the past couple of months who talked to me in a friendly way, and both talked about their desire for higher education – one for an MBA, the other for a PhD in economics. It struck me that they wanted me to burst the bubble for them, to see them as people through the usual wall that exists between upper-class-looking auto-rider and not-so-upper-class-looking driver.
On our school visit, we also visited a school with a small library program. The librarian looked nervous about playing with the children; the other teachers at the school had assigned her to drill children on English and she was threatening them with a stick like the best of them. But when A picked up a book and started to read to them, the transformation in them was astonishing. Children crowded around him like middle-class kids might crowd around an iPod or a human heart; children from other schools tried to listen in from the windows. Except this was a book – no more and no less.
Later, as we ate lunch in the courtyard, a group of children started reading to each other. One girl held a book in her hand and read aloud, with the confidence and cadence of a Yakshagana performer; the other children crowded around and repeated after her. As a child, I would carry books around with me like friends, hiding them under the dining table at dinner, running off to read when guests came over. I used to think it was hard to inspire a love of reading – or more broadly, a love of learning – like that. But it seems that really, it’s not – it’s there to be taken advantage of, and at the very least, educationists should try not to ruin it.
There are many ways in which I am lucky, and one is that I’ve never been allowed to stop learning. I have the option to surprise people with the way I act, to stay within or move beyond the world I was born into. I can slip in and out of bubbles, study classical dance, take a BTMC bus, go to Pizza Hut, hang out with software engineers, switch languages with basic facility, spend time with family, and eat guavas on the street. It seems to me that the best way to burst a bubble is education, and most people here have a strong belief in it, whether or not they think it’s a possibility they personally can aspire to. It would be nice if it were so easy – and yet there’s something about Bangalore that suggests good odds.
Posted by gowriv at October 8, 2007 12:12 PM