SANJAY BORKAR
PONDA
A lesson well taught. While Goa is at war over the medium of instruction in schools, there is a Marathi medium government primary school in Ponda with a meager student count of 9, where MoI takes a back seat and education takes centrestage.
What makes this school unusual is the composition of its students. Not one of the nine students in the school is a Goan and they hail from UP, Rajasthan, Telangana, Karnataka and Chhattisgarh. One student even hails from across India’s borders in Nepal.
With the migrant communities making Goa their home, many of these children are now being enrolled in government schools across the State, providing the much-needed student numbers to these schools struggling to maintain the minimum student strength.
This school has a total of nine students, comprising one girl child (Std 1), one boy and one girl (Std 2), one boy and two girls (Std 3) and three boys (Std 4).
A visit to this two-room school revealed that a ‘baai’ (lady teacher) was seen seated among the students, rather than occupying her chair and was busy imparting education to all the students of all classes in one classroom.
“If I were to sit in my allotted place, it would be difficult for me to teach as all nine students of four different classes are seated at one place,” explained the teacher who spoke on condition
of anonymity.
Asked how she communicates with her students, she replied: “Most of the time, I communicate in Hindi
or Marathi.”
“One student from Telangana does not know Hindi or English and I don’t understand his language (Telugu). Hence, it becomes a problem in such cases, but their ability to grasp languages is good and they have been good at learning local languages,” the teacher said.
Maths, Marathi, ‘Parisar’ and English are the four subjects taught at the GPS. The State government’s failure to recruit an English teacher for this GPS has forced the lone teacher to teach English subject as well.
According to sources from ADEI office at Ponda, there was an English teacher in the GPS for one year, but that teacher was transferred later.
“Most of our GPSs have a ‘one class-one teacher’ policy. The teachers have a heavy workload to teach all classes and it is not easy to manage all four classes in one room,” admitted the source.
“This GPS with nine students has been existing, mainly because the teacher there has persuaded people to enrol their children. This year, only one student was admitted to Std 1 and that too, all because of her efforts,” said the source.
Incidentally, the efforts of the teacher is not restricted to the classroom.
“This teacher picks up two students from her locality, about 3 kms away from GPS, and takes them to school. She also drops them home after school,” informed a locals residing near the GPS.
Such has been the enthusiasm among the schoolchildren from the migrant communities that they have excelled in languages other than their mother tongue.
“The Nepali student of this school speaks in Marathi and also recites English poems. In fact, he won the first prize at an English poem reciting competition. If teachers train them well, the language barrier can easily be overcome,” said another source at the
ADEI office.
According to this source, there are a few other GPSs in the State where the entire student strength is made up of non-Goan children.
