On
the 18th of October, English E.teach conducted a long awaited
training for the students of the Seva Sadan D’Ed College at Gamdevi.
D’ed
is a ‘Diploma in Education’ degree which equips teachers to teach children up
to the 8th grade. It is a very intensive course with subjects like
ICT (Info-Communication Technology) and Psychology. However, the numbers at
this D’Ed college have been steadily plummeting. Just 4 years back, Seva Sadan
had a D’Ed class size of 240 students! And as of this year, the students total is
barely 29!
You
may wonder about the cause of this fast decline?
The
reason is simple-It is a Marathi medium college.
At
EET, we are familiar with this horror story- Parents aren’t sending their kids
to vernacular medium schools, the school has to shut down & the teachers
lose their jobs. BUT the other effect that nobody talks about is this-
The
child is put into an English medium school where he is confused and lost due to
the challenge of learning science, math, history etc in English; he/she gets
demotivated, the parents get frustrated, they are spending money they don’t
have on his/her schooling and eventually the child drops out.
Q1. How
can these problem be solved?
Ans1.
Vernacular schools need to teach better English.
Q2. How
can that happen?
Ans2.
The teachers in Vernacular schools need to be better equipped to teach English.
Q3. How
can the teachers be helped?
Ans.
English E.teach provides them with the English teaching tool FREE and trains
them in it’s use. We then follow up with the teacher on a weekly basis to check
on the children and her progress with the English DVDs.
And
that’s exactly what we did here!
The
Training session went on for 3 hours. It started off with a discussion of the
problems these future teachers anticipate once they enter the Marathi Medium
School system in Mumbai. After that they were introduced to our DVDs. During
the demo, the teachers quickly started picking up the pronunciations, sentence
structure and comprehension of English they will need to teach their students.
But
the best way to learn something is to do it. So the class was broken up into
groups where all the teachers had to teach a short English lesson using our
DVDs.
It
took them only 10 minutes to prepare the lesson, as the DVDs are so easy to use;
They almost act as a teacher’s guide. Once they all had presented their
lessons, we had a feedback round. Everyone chimed in and gave their opinions,
feedback and shared their hopes of being able to use these DVDs and teach
English to kids as effortlessly as they had today. Their professors were so
impressed that they requested for a set of our DVDs to use for training on a
regular basis in their college. Obviously, we happily obliged. Obviously, Free
of cost.
-Piroja Shroff
For
information on our DVDs or to fix up a FREE training at your school/College,
contact us at: eteach.bcpt@gmail.com
We have come to the end of the year. And the most human
thing to do is to sit down and recap the year that has passed us by. We, at
English E.Teach, are a small group of people who are bound by our belief in the
program and the dedication to give it our hundred percent. 
2)
One of our goals in 2016 was to get a blanket
permission letter for the use of English E.Teach program in every vernacular
municipal school across Mumbai from the Brihan Mumbai Municipal Corporation.
All our team members – educationists and facilitators, got together to
accomplish this task. This permission letter would open a lot more doors and
opportunities for us to reach out to the underprivileged children of Mumbai. 
