 |
| Down by the Banks |
When Petra, one of the other volunteers at Kiran, asked me if I would be interested in setting up a physical education class for the students, I replied without hesitation. I’ve always loved sports and am a firm believer in the power of physical activity so I said of course I would be interested. By P.E., she went on to explain, she didn’t mean any really intricate activities, just some organized games with the children while she took one or two at a time around the compound on a horse for hippo-therapy. I’d never taught an actual “physical education” class before but I figured I’d attended plenty of them and had enough experience playing with large groups of kids to get by. My one uncertainty stemmed from the fact that I would be working with disabled kids, something I’d never done before. Still, I wasn’t that worried and started googling for ideas. I consider myself a fairly adept googler and so to my surprise, the cyber-sleuthing didn’t turn up any good resources about physical education for students with disabilities. Although I did find some information on how to adapt regular games, most of the activities that were described involved equipment that I knew I wouldn’t have. I left my research a little discouraged and instead, reverted back to good ol’ brainstorming which, in this case, meant thinking really hard to remember the games I played in P.E. in elementary school.
The next day, I approached my first class with a few ideas and a lot of prayers to the creativity gods. Put plainly, it didn’t go very well. In their defense, I don’t think the creativity gods abandoned me, just the 17 five and six year olds in my class. I managed to control them for all of 20 minutes before a on-looking teacher took pity on me and sent the kids off to the playground. I imagine controlling a class of antsy first graders anywhere in the world is hard enough, and I learned quickly that it becomes a tad harder when you don’t speak their language very well and are attempting to explain games rules with a small conversationally-geared vocabulary.
The following day, things went a little better with second grade and over course of the week, I developed a kind of plan, well, rhythm, for each class. I start each day by teaching “Down by a Banks,” a throwback from my early years that I haven’t played in at least a decade but knew Katie had played successfully at her work site, followed by “Duck, Duck, Goose,” followed by a racing game, followed by a catching game, followed by a general disintegration of the class when I try to explain the next game will involve me throwing the ball, all the children racing to it and the first one to get there picking it up and bringing it back to me. I say disintegrate because when I throw the ball, the children would usually race after it screaming like banshees and then, instead of picking it up and bringing it back, invariably kick it and race after it again screaming like banshees.
Still, I learned a couple valuable lessons in the first week. One, I realized the problem was not really finding games for children with disabilities, but rather finding games in general that I would be able to explain effectively. Second, I learned firsthand that every culture has its own games and that sometimes, the best way to keep the children engaged is to play games that they have grown up playing and that I may have never seen before. In fact, I realized after the first week or so that I was having such a hard time not just because I was explaining the games in muddled Hinglish, but also because I was teaching games based on American activities and principals. P.E. games taught in the US are generally variations of one or two games that every American child has grown up with. P.E. games taught in India are probably the same except that the games are variations of one or two games that every Indian child has grown up with. I was trying to explain American games that, to the children, were probably baseless and therefore that much more confusing.
Over the course of each one to one-and-half hour class, there are highs and there are lows. The lows usually involved me getting frustrated with misbehaving children or grappling at all my creative threads to think of another game or a way to explain it. The highs, however, come just as often, if not more, and are small flitting moments, almost video frames, when I see a grin of pure childish joy, hear the unmistakable sound of a child’s unrestrained gleeful laughter, or yes, realize that the children can’t pronounce “goose” and so have been playing the entire game by slapping their hands down on their peers’ heads with a chortled “groose!”
The other day, I went to run the class as usual, feeling fairly prepared for the nine hearing-impaired children I would have for the afternoon. Yes, they wouldn’t be able to hear me but I wasn’t that worried about that minor detail as most of my communication in these classes consists of mangled speech followed by elaborate pantomiming. When I got to the field, however, I was a little startled to be greeted by no less than twenty-five deaf children. I took a deep breath. The teacher, mercifully, saw my apprehension and agreed to stay with me and help run the class. Together, we managed to keep a fairly stable balance of power and played several games with the kids. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves and during a tag-esque game, my gaze fell on an eight or nine year old boy and the sight of pure glee on his face struck me as both an incredibly trivial and yet indescribably extraordinary phenomenon. It occurred to me that in a matter of minutes, seconds even, the excitement would pass and be forgotten among all the worries and other joys of life but at the same time, in that flash of delight , the emotion I was witnessing was absolute and real. It struck me then that my makeshift P.E. class is in no way changing the world and yet in moments like those, or when even for an hour I get to help children have simple, unadulterated fun, it might be doing something just as important.
