Express Investigation — Part 3 | Stories they bring to class: Broken homes, lost jobs, troubled lives | Education News,The Indian Express
Each of the 38 students in Neha Sharma's mathematics class bring a unique set of challenges to the classroom encumbered by their personal stories.
(‘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.)
Harish’s father is a daily-wage worker who says he needs to take his wife once a month to a dargah to treat her “mental illness”. When they are out, no one’s there to ensure Harish goes to school. Siddharth’s father is an alcoholic and his mother, who recently lost her anganwadi job, says he often turns violent and beats her up. Keerti’s father, a fruit seller, struggled through the pandemic to buy his three children a phone to help them through their online classes.
The vulnerabilities of these families frame the multiple back stories that make Neha Sharma’s task — as mathematics teacher of Class 5A of the Delhi government’s Veer Savarkar Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya — one of the most challenging as she attempts to bridge the learning gap after two years of an unprecedented pandemic-induced shutdown.
In fact, each of Neha’s 38 students, including 10-year-olds Harish, Siddharth and Keerti bring to the classroom a unique set of challenges encumbered by their personal stories.
Tracking Class 5A through five weeks — sitting in for each of their 26 math classes — The Indian Express found that as the children navigated coursework in the classroom, the challenges outside were equally daunting. Especially when the pandemic has been particularly harsh on children from economically weaker sections and working-class families, the demographic that constitutes much of Class 5A.
Rating: 5