Choosing the right school

Over the last couple of weeks, there have been so many anguished blogposts on this topic - from those who are frantically running from pillar to post trying to get their child into one school, anywhere ( by school I don't mean the Govt. schools without teachers, sanitation and teaching) to those who are unhappy with their current schools but can't find better options to those whose child has gotten into a reputed school but who aren't sure it's right for them. I can sympathise with all three types, which is why it's a great idea for Desimomz to take this on as the theme for the month. Please do go to their site over the month for more information than just my two cents.

A and I began thinking about playschool for Chubbocks when he was about 18 months old - just looking around at the options. I felt it was necessary for him as he was an extremely shy and sensitive child who refused to socialise with any other kids of his age in the park, and also wanted to do something structured in terms of his learning but not too much so. A 5-day program would be too much, I felt. We looked around at 2 or 3 playschools which were in our neighbourhood but some we felt were too big in class size, some had too much of an 'admission-focussed' approach, like teaching kids alphabets, spelling, numbers and 'Interview techniques', which almost made me gag. One of our friends happened to be working with a playschool group called Julia Gabriel. This is a Singapore-based chain of playschools and one of the first things that appealed to me was that their classes required the parent to accompany the child. There was no way I would have left an 18-month old Chubbocks alone anywhere.

We visited the school and spent nearly an hour observing the teachers, the classes and the school set-up. The school mission was to turn out 'confident communicators', and they explained they use the phonetic method to teach alphabets. Though the school was small, with a minuscule playground, they had a nice array of toys for kids including mock-hammers, a cookery counter and so on. The class-rooms were nice and roomy and each one had 3 teachers, along with one ayah on stand-by and they all had attached bathrooms which had been designed for little ones, with low-placed pots and steps leading up to the washbasins. The teaching really caught our fancy, consisting of a lot of fun and games, some running around and the way the teachers encouraged the kids to speak was wonderful. Most of all, we fell in love with the teacher who headed the beginner's class - a man called Jimmy. He had the most incredible level of patience we have ever seen, and the way he coaxed even the shyest of kids to speak or perform was amazing. We felt that our kiddo would be in good hands if Jimmy was to be his first transition to a school environment.

JG had 2 hour classes thrice a week, so I used to go on weekdays and A would go on Saturdays. It was always great fun to go, and Chubbocks, even though he didn't participate much at first, always enjoyed going there. Kids were taught about clean-up time - cleaning away their own toys and setting the stage for the next activity, to take off and put on their own shoes and the school served them a healthy snack, with juice, and fruit and vegetables. The phonetic method, I honestly couldn't appreciate until recently, because I didn't see it translating into reading skills, for example. But Jimmy really helped Chubbocks blossom from a shy kid who hung his head and clung to Mamma to one who fearlessly walks up to strangers and makes friends with them, be they kids or adults ( Come to think of it, Mamma now has to work to put a fear of strangers back), and has become an amazingly skillful communicator in three languages. When he graduated from his primary class to the next level, the first remark his new teacher made was about his communication skills. Granted some of that may be genetic, since not all the kids from Jimmy's class got that comment, but the ability to make him confident enough to state what he thinks is all thanks to Jimmy. Since Jimmy has now left JG, since the branch was shut down by the Gurgaon government ( who, by the way, are okay looking the other way when DLF encroaches on Panchayat land, builds glass and steel office buildings in a residential zone and bulldozes a main road for trucks and buses bang in a housing colony but can't let a playschool function in a residential area - do you get the logic? I sure don't!), we're actually looking around to find out where he is so Puddi can go to his new playschool for her initiation.

When it came to big school, however, contrary to playschool wherein we had been so foresighted, we were a bit too lazy. I was determined not to get all agitated and worked up like so many of our friends when it came to admissions and, as a result, completely missed seeing the ads schools put out about admissions deadlines, and so did A. All of a sudden, we were on the backfoot and scrambling and worried. Then A found that the local Delhi Public School admissions deadline was not over and we sent our factotum to fetch the forms. Unfortunately, there are 2 DPSs in the neighbourhood, one good and the other terrible, and our Man Friday had got the wrong form which we never figured out until much too late.

A somewhat experimental school, called Shikshantar, had extended admissions for more entrants so we decided to find out more about it. Two of my friends who had kids there praised it highly, calling it a school which helped kids become self-motivated and so on. The thing that worried A no end was that they have a completely unstructured curriculum for the first few years - kids just study what they feel like studying, so if you want your kids to be reading by a certain age and writing by another, that wasn't the best option. I still thought it sounded good and we sent off our application which, by the way, asked us lots of searching questions about our goals for the child and so on.

DPS had a formal interview process but we didn't want to put Chubbocks under any pressure, so we frankly didn't bother to 'prepare' him. He sailed through on his own( including singing 'Where's the party tonight' when asked to recite a poem) and we had to fork out a fortune ( Rs. 60,000, most of it non-refundable!!!) for the admission. I thought that that was too much money to throw away and we should wait for Shikshantar's decision before paying up but the deadlines didn't match and A panicked at the thought of Chubbocks not getting into any school at all due to our carelessness. So we paid through the nose, though I had no intention of sending him to an academic factory known for putting kids to the grindstone.

Then Shriram school, which had been dithering on admissions due to the Delhi government changes of rules finally decided to begin the process in Gurgaon at least. Most of our friends have their kids in Shriram and all of them are all praise for it. They all said it was a good, well-rounded school in the way it went about things and that academic pressure was quite low and they focussed more on turning out kids who were well-rounded human beings. True, the average kid there is from an upscale family and I had serious doubts about how well our middle-class mindset would fit in, but given the rave reviews, we plunged ahead.

Shriram thankfully didn't have an interview for kids. They like mixed-race or religion couples, so we were bang on. Plus they tend to like kids with working moms, so we got another bonus point. I seem to remember filling out a long and detailed form about our beliefs and so on, and we were on the list for the 'interaction'. At Shikshantar, while they had called parents and kids together, they let the kids run around and play in the playground and conducted their chats with the parents there itself, in a corner, which was nice and low-pressure.

At Shriram too, they had us in the same room, though a teacher led Chubbocks off to one corner where they had laid out all kinds of toys and pictures while A and I were being interviewed. We were happy to find a former colleague on the interview board too, and the questions were pretty innocuous, like how Chubbocks took to his sibling and so on. I was very confident afterwards that we would be in though A was still biting his nails until we got the letter confirming it. We were really happy about the way things had gone and felt we had had a really low pressure time of it, apart from losing some big bucks enroute.

A year down the line, and A and I still feel very happy and confident about our choice, the more so due to what the Director recently said about the competitive spirit. I think we got off pretty easy in the process of admissions, because I have known people who've gone round the bend running around to hundreds of schools. One of our friends didn't get admission for her son anywhere because they were out of the 5 km radius for all the good schools, and they had a son, which is 2 strikes down as per the Delhi Govt. rules. Finally they had to admit their son into a 'Convent' school on the Christian quota. Many of them opted for really expensive and brand new schools with no reputation as yet, because their kids didn't get in anywhere. I'm relieved not only that Chubc got into a good school but that he got into a school which has the kind of mix of academics and other skills that I wanted for him, and hopefully Puddi will make it there too.