It all started when an ECE senior, Simpi dii (our mentor) asked me to come and join Club Inquizitive and start taking BBC English Learning classes. Also I came to know that BBC Learning English Programme is one of the multifarious activities of Club Inquizitive. And contrary to the popular belief, I realized that even teaching can be super fun, as it is also the first step of learning something new.
So basically, we had to take 10 lessons through which we had to make sure that:
- The girls had added knowledge about ‘correct’ English than they had before.
- At least, some part of their stage fear had vanished.
- The most important, let them learn while having fun.
I along with five of my other mates, namely, Keerthi (CSE), K.D. Sneha (CSE), Jayashree (CIVIL), Gnana (CSE) and Poojitha (CSE) did nothing but that. The attendance percentage was more than satisfactory, and we were glad when the girls came up with their own doubts and apprehensions. It meant that they were involving themselves in the classes and that is what we had wanted the whole time.
But since we knew that ‘All work and no play, makes Jack a dull boy’, we kept the sessions as interesting and as interactive as possible. We even included team activities at the end of every session so that everyone could participate. Personally, my favorites were Story Making (Using newspaper pieces!) and Dumb Charade on idioms. I would like to share one such anecdote here. We went to take class and soon realized that people were not really in the mood for studies that day. So we decided to play “Simon Says” with them. And just after two- three commands, all of them were rolling on the floor laughing, and soon the mood was set. I think that was a nice ice-breaker and that made further learning that day was the most effective and efficient one!
Another one was when we asked them to make a story out of the pieces of newspapers we gave them. We made 6 teams and all of also took part in the event to guide them and help them throughout. Simpi dii was the judge for this event. Now the team that I was allotted decided to name themselves the TCC, short for ‘Talented Challenging Champions’! When we were given the pieces, first we took some time to figure out what we wanted to do. We saw there was a picture of an actor and an actress. We immediately decided that we were going to pay an ode to Indian Cinema and took out around 10 paper cuttings to make one big poster. This was done by keeping in mind that we were 10 in a group and each one would go on to explain one of the cuttings. We understood clearly how hard a director really has to work to get a movie together. There is a lot of thinking involved, I can assure you that! Now we needed an explanation to describe this story beautifully. We made it as humourous as possible. People couldn’t stop laughing and we were literally smiling ear to ear. This also made us realize that the satisfaction of a happy mind is far greater than the monetary satisfaction that people are usually after! The icing to the cake after this event was that, even though we hadn’t doubted that we were champions, TCC was announced to be the winners! It felt really good, when all the juniors were so elated that they did a victory dance.
Another one of such amusing moments was when the girls had to come up and enact out idioms for their partners to understand. We were not involved as guides or mentors, and so we took the liberty of laughing at whatever funny gimmicks the girls were doing. As far as I remember, all the idioms were really funny. But the best ones that caught everyone’s attention were, “When pigs fly”, “The lights are on but no one’s home” and “Drink like a fish”. In the last one, the girl actually sucked up her cheeks to make others understand, and cursed at them when they didn’t understand that, which was even funnier!
All in all, it were 10 days full of fun and frolic, where we ensured that each day, each of us learnt something new!
