When English becomes compulsory from June, it’ll be taught the swadeshi

So primary students will cosy up to a very Indian Meera had a little cat whose fur was white as snow, or smarten up to the country’s water crisis by singing Rain Rain do not fail, paper boats we will sail, rain rain come again, instead of asking it to “go away,” as generations before them chanted in schools.

Since “MacDonald is an alien identity,” his domain now ends with a village “grandfather” rural children can identify with, replacing him in the four crore My English textbooks, says Sugita Martin, State-level resource person for the Statewide massive and rigorous training for primary teachers (SMART PT 2000) that began yesterday. As many as 810 teachers are to be trained in the art of teaching English, by 140 resource persons.

While a turbaned dhoti-clad Maharashtrian shepherd beams out of the pages by his “black sheep,” Martin explains that “we need rain, we can’t teach our children to demand that it go away.” But Jack and Jill and the Twinkling Star stay untouched, though One-two buckle my shoe is now “a visit to the zoo,” with lions, peacocks and monkeys thrown in to strengthen vocabulary.

Teachers from across all the districts have converged at Pune for the training. They wake up at the crack of dawn for yoga and pranayama, before a 30-minute drill at 7.15 am, reciting 19 nursery rhymes with demonstrations every day this week. This will give them an “actual feel of classroom participation in teaching English through the play-way method,” says Dattatreya Tapkir, section officer, Jeevan Shikshan Publication, Maharashtra State Council for Educational Research and Training (MSCERT).

Designed to break down inhibitions of Urdu, Gujarati, Tamil, Kannada, and Sindhi medium school teachers, the 56 50-minute classes over the next five days from 6.30 am to 10.30 pm will train teachers to also assess student performance collectively and individually after every unit is completed.

Setting aside conventional examinations, a check-list provided to teachers in the Let us Teach training module lays down three grades of A for above average, B for average and C for below average, to assess student performance in listening, speaking, conversational skills, attention span, and pronunciation.

Chairman of Balbharati’s English committee, Ramesh Dhongde, admits that students, especially in the villages, will suffer because textbooks will be available only by October. “SMART PT resource persons must focus on training the participants to make up for this loss,” he says, insisting that imposing compulsory English in no way “diminishes the importance of the mother tongue.”

Two 90-minute audio cassettes on nursery rhymes and pronunciation will be released by Balchitravani next week. Padmavati Bidwe from the State Institute of English for Maharashtra, Aurangabad, says the project should succeed because the 360-strong illustrated vocabulary from taxi, fan, tractor, engine to umpire, is familiar across the state. “We will accept even pronunciations the Indian way,” she says.