Express Investigation — Part 1 | A national math problem: How to teach Class 5 kids after 2 years lost | Education News,The Indian Express
Over two months, The Indian Express tracked a mathematics class of 10-year-olds in a Delhi government school to find how a teacher is racing against time to plug their critical learning gaps in the wake of the pandemic. The story of a teacher Neha Sharma and the 38 children in her Class 5 A illustrates the unprecedented challenge playing out in countless classrooms across the country.
(‘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.)
Siddharth cannot subtract 13 from 21 because this entails borrowing. Keerti can do only simple division, so 59 divided by 7 is a struggle since she hasn’t understood the concept of a remainder. Harish’s climb is steeper: he cannot identify one-digit numbers, something he should have been able to do in pre-school.
All three are 10-year-olds, students of Class 5A at the Veer Savarkar Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya, a Delhi government school in Kalkaji. Each should have been fluent in these foundational mathematical skills that are taught in Class 3 or earlier. But this class of 38 children — 20 girls and 18 boys — were last in school in Class 2.
Now back after two years of a pandemic and a lockdown that touched every aspect their lives, their teacher Neha Sharma, 31, has a problem, one that teachers across the country are grappling with, highlighted by the recently released results of the National Achievement Survey (NAS): academic performances in schools across the country, including in the national capital, slipped below levels recorded in 2017, except in Punjab and Rajasthan.
Over two years of the pandemic, much of these Class 5 kids’ learning happened through weekly worksheets and activities shared on WhatsApp. But with access to devices and data uneven, digital learning remained, at best, very patchy.
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