Geography lessons from textbooks? That is so passé! Articles from in-flight magazines, a piece from a travel book – those are what might go into a "subject file" for the students of Sanskriti School.
Principal of Sanskriti, Devyani Mungale used to be part of the conventional school system; in fact she taught at the Delhi Public School, NOIDA for 10 years. But something was missing. Mrs. Mungale says, "I got an opportunity to attend many wonderful workshops. You came back recharged, but once you came back to your classroom, it was so difficult to implement them with large numbers; you were always racing against time because you needed to finish things just because the other section had done that." Disillusioned, Mrs. Mungale decided to start her own school, and Sanskriti School was born.
Mrs. Mungale realized that in conventional schools, only the brightest or the most mischievous students got noticed in class. Often times, the kids that really needed help the most fell through the cracks. This is what she has set out to remedy in her school. The soft-spoken principal insists, "There is nothing wrong with the children as such." Nothing that some loving, individualized attention won't remedy. Towards that end, she has 8 teachers for the 32 students in her school, a ratio of teacher to student which would be unimaginable in a conventional school.
Sanskriti differentiates between kids by assigning them to different "learning groups". For example, a child could be in class 5, but if her Maths skills are not up to par, she would work on lower-level Maths until she was able to catch up.
In Sanskriti if a child is distracted, he might be sent off to tend to the 2-3 plants he is assigned; he could work on a puzzle, or play a board game. To learn a poem, the child might choose to sit on a bench in the front yard. And vocabulary building isn't by memorization, he'd play Scrabble instead.
Presently located in a bungalow in Baner, the school hopes to move to a 7 acre plot near Chandi Chowk by June. Mrs. Mungale says, "I intend to have farming patches for them where they can actually see the rabi and kharif crops rather than reading in the books about them."
For examinations, they follow the National Open School system which is based on CBSE. Mrs. Mungale in NOS, says except for English, all other subjects are on par with CBSE. But, says Mrs. Mungale, this should not matter, because the English her kids are exposed to exceeds even CBSE's specifications.
As to what the kids can expect to get out of this school, Mrs. Mungale just hopes to inculcate a love of learning in a stress-free environment.
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