An Express Investigation – Part 2 | Class 5A Topic: Mathematics | Education News,The Indian Express
The last time they were physically in school was in Class 2, just before the pandemic shut down their classroom and upended their lives at home, too. So Neha Sharma’s students, back to begin Class 5, are struggling with basics.
(‘A Math Problem’ is an investigative series on the unprecedented education crisis caused by the pandemic-induced school closures. The Indian Express sat in through five weeks of mathematics lessons in a Delhi government school to track how a class recovers its Covid learning losses. You can read all four parts here.)
“Close your eyes and think… is there any time of your day that mathematics is not around you?” The children shift in their seats, their impatient eyes dart behind their shut eyelids as they attempt to conjure up math images.
Thus begin two months of an unprecedented assignment for Neha Sharma, class teacher of 5A of the Delhi government’s Veer Savarkar Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya, and her class of 38 who are back in school after two years of the pandemic.
While the CBSE Class 5 curriculum prescribes word problems with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, angles and degrees, perimeter and area, fractions, factors and multiples with LCM and HCF, measuring volume of cuboids, and expressing tenths and hundredths in decimal points, after two years of disrupted learning, Neha’s class is hardly equipped to tackle any of these. In mid-March Sharma had assessed the children and the results were dispiriting: many struggle with foundational mathematics that are taught in Class 3 or earlier: two-digit subtraction, division with remainder, even identifying numbers from 1-99.
As schools reopened, to full capacity, on April 1, the Delhi government’s Education Department decided that until mid-June, classes 3 to 9 would focus on the basics of reading, writing and maths through the tools provided by the government’s Mission Buniyaad, a foundational learning programme which, in normal circumstances, is only for children identified as being behind their grade level.
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