Panigram English Classes Grow Exponentially

Over 150 children children attended the third Panigram Resort English lesson, more than double the number of the previous week again!

Our third Friday English Lesson was about geography. In preparation, as usual, we went to the market in search for supplies. We were on a hunt for either a world map or globe, preferably in English. Who knew it would be such a difficult feat just to get a map that wasn’t distorted, inaccurate, or discolored. We finally settled on a decent laminated map in Bengali. We figured we would put labels in English on top of the map.

When Friday came, and as class drew near, Caio, Tim, and I found ourselves in a bit of a time crunch. We were trying to print out pictures at the village photo shop. As with everything in Bangladesh, it took longer than expected- much longer. With 3 o’clock just minutes away, Caio and I started bickering obnoxiously until we actually reached the project site five minutes late. Approaching the pavilion was like being a gladiator about to fight in the coliseum. Our pavilion guards were trying to control the chants, clapping, and laughter of what we estimated was about 150 kids. I was overwhelmed. Although the fighting between Caio and I had yet to subside, I knew I needed his help to effectively teach this massive amount of students. So we put our brawl aside and began class.

Katrina is mobbed by the crowd. We had to move the lesson to in front of our tool shed as the pavilion would collapse if 150 children stood on it.

First, like always, we reviewed the previous lessons. Singing the ABC’s, counting numbers, reviewing body parts and hygiene was a great way to kick off the session. We took out the world map and started with locating Bangladesh on the map. We then reviewed continents, starting with Asia. We reviewed, from largest to smallest, all the continents. As we pointed on the map each continent, they responded with the name. As we reviewed each continent we talked about an aspect of culture there, for example we discussed animals in Africa, dance in South America, food in Europe, weather in Antarctica and sports in North America. We then looked at the 5 oceans. We tried very hard to also describe 3 important vocabulary words: size, population, and density. Since Bangladesh is one of the densest countries in the world, we emphasized the meaning of density- which is kind of a difficult concept to convey. To do this we first explained size by drawing a small circle and a large circle, second we explained population by first drawing a few dots, and then many clusters of dots, third we explained density by putting the few dots in the large circle, and the many dots into the small circle. We asked them what Bangladesh was more like and many of them understood their country had a lot of people in a relatively small country. I found this interesting considering village life isn’t very crowded or dense.

Our activity at the end of the class was to crank up the Latin music on my portable speakers and deliver a little Salsa lesson. Unfortunately, with 150 kids, as you might imagine, it was pretty hectic. All the kids were climbing on top of Caio and pulling us around like rag dolls. So, after a little salsa demonstration, we let the kids run around to the music.

We rode away in the rickshaw with a group of kids running behind us, as if they were in a marathon. However, they weren’t the ones exhausted. We were. What a day! What a class! We realized if the classes kept growing exponentially, we’d have to find another way to teach, perhaps Caio takes half the class, and I the other? It seems that we are beginning to face the challenges that the village schools currently face, too much demand, not enough supply.

Village children learning to salsa.