Visiting the Government Schools for the First Time

I was getting closer to the beginning my action. and hence it was necessary to visit the schools.

Today I visited both the government schools: The Kokapet Upper Primary School and the Nallagandla Primary School along with Mrs. Lalitha and Mr. Gandhi. I had wanted to visit the schools in the investigation phase of my project itself, however, since the month of May till mid-June the schools in India were closed for summer, and since Mid-June to mid-July I was off for my Summer studies at Stanford, I could not do it then. In any case, Mrs. Lalitha had advised me that it was better to visit the schools closer to the session as then I could get a more realistic picture of the schools and labs.

This experience truly gave me an insight into the number of computer systems in the schools, and with the number of children as given by Mrs. Lalitha, I was finally able to make some fair calculations about the time I would need to spend to complete my project. There were 10 systems in each school. So, I decided that there would be 20 students in each session, with each student doing 1 to 2 hours of code.

This would mean that: For the Nallagandla school, I would need about 3 sessions (about 70 children) while for the Kokapet school, I would need about 4 sessions (about 90 children). For the Nallagandla Primary School, there would be 1 session for the 4th graders and 2 sessions for the 5th graders. For the Kokapet Upper Primary School, there would be 2 sessions for the 6th graders, 1 session for the 7th graders and 1 session for the 8th graders. In total, I would require 7 sessions with the children.

This led me to make a schedule for my action. I felt it would be most convenient for me if I were to visit the government schools on Saturday afternoons. However, Mrs. Lalitha and Mr. Gandhi informed me that the 2nd Saturday was a mandatory holiday in the schools and that the rest of the Saturdays the government had recently mandated a program to be conducted in the afternoon. So, the only option was to have the session Saturday mornings which was not convenient to me as I had my piano classes at that time. To add to this, when I checked the calendar, I realized that the 2nd of September is a holiday on the occasion of Bakr Id, and the time-period between the 20th of September and the 3rd of November would be holidays on the occasion of Dussehra, one of India’s biggest festival.

Considering this, I started chalking out a few possible options:

My first option was to try selecting a week day in which I could miss the second-half portion of school, and my second choice was to try contacting the Head Masters of the schools with the assistance of Mrs. Lalitha to convince them to grant permission to conduct the sessions during the Dussehra break. Unfortunately, Mr. Gandhi gave me yet another disturbing news that the sessions may not work out for the high school children of the Upper Primary School because these children usually worked with their families in their free time. Thus, I settled at narrowing down the focus to only the Kokapet Primary School.