One of the first things you notice at the beginning of the school day, is how time is conceived differently in village India. School officially starts at 9am during the colder months, and 7.30 in the hot season, but with few clocks in the village (and little need for them), it’s usually about half an hour or more into the day before a lot of the children start turning up.

We begin with the whole school together, on the playing field, where the kids sing songs & prayers and then play sports and games for an hour. After this the children all split off into their respective classes and get on with their days. For the pre-primary children, this essentially involves a half day of nursery activities, lunch and then home. For the primary level children, the day is split into project & activity time before lunch and then more formal subject based learning after the lunch break.

As in a lot of schools, transitions between periods can be a little chaotic and when teachers are absent confusion around where the different kids are going to go or who’s going to cover each class adds to the drama. Dealing with such challenges has become part of the learning process about the difficulties in creating systems that enable quality education in rural environments. As with our sense of time, the process often challenges us to shed some our ‘western’ conceptions of what the best way to do things is.