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Our journey with books Photos courtesy: Akash Singh
Nimesh Ved and Anshumalika Rai
W
e are associated with a school, catering to 300 students, in Eastern Uttar Pradesh. Together with colleagues we have undertaken an invigorating journey over the past two years. A journey to bring children and books closer to each other. This we share below. Phase one To begin with, the library was located on the first floor while the classrooms were on the ground floor. Also, most of the time it was behind a closed door; a door with two big locks. If you entered you would come came across a board that said, please be silent. The library did not have a friendly ambience. Colleagues associated with the library clearly did not possess the love for books. It was a responsibility and distant. Another colleague, during the initial days, suggested that I go and buy books since we had a budgetary allocation! A range of these books adorned the shelves in the library. These were books that senders wanted to get rid of and not those which children would want to read. Most of the books were in English (ours is a
Hindi medium school) and it seemed as if neither the teachers nor the students had even cared to flip the pages. Neil Gaimon in his Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming writes of this, “Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature”. On the one hand we had too many books and on the other, few that children would want to read! These few more often than not got lost amidst the lot. Books that had been donated were a major issue. Against this scenario, we decided to shut the library temporarily. Phase two Together with a few of our colleagues we planned the course of action for the months to come. We agreed that while customization (based on our needs) and learning from recent developments elsewhere (of books and children) were pertinent, we also would need to be flexible and allow space for course corrections. TEACHER PLUS, JULY 2020
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