Realization

the past 2 days have been super busy and really interesting for me. yesterday, i met with the people at UP State Aids Control (UPSACS), which oversees the national AIDS program work at the state level, and i met with people at UNICEF Lucknow. the UPSACS meeting was somewhat disillusioning, because the people weren't as passionate as i expected. nor were the people at UNICEF. the state people seem to have a very fixed idea of how they are going to deal with educating adolescents in UP, and that plan doesn't include non-school going children, which is very high rate, nor does it include non-government schools, nearly half the school going population. they also have a highly "structured and organized" system, bureaucratic and unnecessary in my opinion, for training teachers. i got the same information from the UNICEF people, but they gave this genius explanation that urban children don't need as much education as rural children, because they are being educated by the media- aka bollywood and television. do we really want indian mtv teaching children about sexual behavior?

so, it was definitely interesting to hear what these groups are doing, and i really don't mean to be as critical as it seems. i appreciate their efforts to educate, but i just question the effectiveness of their well intentions. i feel like they need to take a more creative approach to education- instead of lectures during biology class, they could try peer education and group discussions. i have read that these methods are more effective than traditional teacher lectures, and after i spent the day in a high school watching one of these classes, i feel even more strongly about this peer based/discussion based format. i went to an 11th grade class with a medical school faculty member and 2 medschool interns, and the interns and i watched the faculty member teach the kids. the positive things about this class: there was an emphasis on building life skills, they had an anonymous question box, the medschool faculty teacher was very friendly and honest. the negatives: the students' regular teachers were completely disinterested and dismissed the class early because they (the teachers) wanted to go home, the program was structured to be a full day of lecture which got very tedious by the end, the interns didn't do any peer educating (they just sat in the back and passed out papers)

so, my thought is that there are so many ways to get to these children and the fact that the educators have been able to convince schools to let them teach in them in a huge step! but, i feel like there are some areas that require some reevaluation:

1. peer education needs to be given priority
2. teachers need to care about the well being of their students and emphasize the importance of this education in their regular classes
3. there needs to be a system in place for teaching kids in non-gvt schools
4. the gvt needs to shift some of their attention to non-school going kids, or mandate primary and secondary education so all kids have equal access to basic information

so, those are my thoughts on the last two days. there were some other issues with rural/urban dynamics, but i'll save that for another post! the crucial lesson is that i need to remain cognizant of the fact that all these groups and people want to resolve the AIDS issues. So, even some of the programming and attitudes don't seem ideal, everyone has the same goal of curtailing the spread of AIDS. i definitely need to keep reminding myself of that.

also, there was a single quote on the wall of the school i was in today, which i also need to always remember:

"an ounce of practice is better than a ton of theory"