Sarangapani article - Slightly off topic

I was fascinated by the Sarangapani article. I say this post is off topic because my thoughts are related to the topic of the article as opposed to learning from it's methods. I missed the first week of class because of an 8 week trip I've been on with my family. The bulk of the time was in India. The connection to the reading came from connecting with a family living in a village outside Calcutta. I've know the family for 7 years and we have seen them a hand full of times during this time. I made two observations that are relevant to the topic of Saragapani’s article. First was that my friend Simpson is fairly fluent in spoken English, but struggles a bit with reading and writing. He is somewhere around a 3rd or 4th grade level per a mutual friend who is an elementary teacher. This was not that surprising to me. You meet some guy in a developing country who is an orphanage worker (therapy assistant) in the place where your adopted daughter spent her first 7 months who has trouble reading and writing. There are probably 500 million others just about like him right? It was a second observation that fascinated me. It was his wife’s ability level. She was not able to speak in English as well, but she could pick up just about anything (including physical therapy text books) and read them. She didn’t comprehend what she was reading, but she was able to read fluently. This ability surprised me. How could you read fluently and not comprehend. (Between the two of them, btw, my friend was able to get through the physical therapy texts.)

My question about how this could happen was partly answered when my friend showed me with pride how well his kindergarten-age daughter could read. She read from a “computer” textbook where she read the names of parts of a computer. In observing her read, I could see how her mother could read fluently with so little comprehension. This child was reading and a monotonous tone of voice and clearly was hyper-focused on the mechanics of reading, but not having any comprehension of the meaning of “hard drive” or “CPU”. It was very fascinating for me, but sad at the same time. I felt that this little girl is at risk for growing up like her mother, able to read, but not comprehend. I have seen first hand the importance of text books in village education in India, not in a government school, but in kids attending a school that may be a small step up from the government schools imo. Memorizing the parts of a computer and parroting them out of a text would not be appropriate for a kindergarten age kid imo (in my culture), but this was exactly what was happening in my friend’s home. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that she was not memorizing parts of a computer. There was no computer around. She was just looking at poor quality photos and illustrations of parts of a computer and memorizing words associated with these images. I’m quite sure the images were meaningless to her.

I gave my friend a few of my daughter’s books and told him to have her read them to her younger brother and to look at the pictures while she was reading. I don’t have high hopes for this kid or her little brother. But meeting them certainly primed me for reading the Sarangapani article!

Issues around units of analysis come to mind. (perhaps because I’ve just been reading the Frake article) Sarangapani does a nice job describing what’s happening in the school and what the experience may be like for the students. What I observed last month gave me a very tiny snapshot of what the impact of this kind of an education has on adults. A broader ethnographic study of education in this setting would be fascinating to me. A study covering education, but also focusing on where students end up after school, what the family lives are like, and how this school fit into the larger society would be very interesting. Perhaps I’ll have to read the rest of Sarangapani’s work. J