By Mita Radhakrishnan | Project Leader and Eternal Idealist
Hello all!
How time flies!
Our first GlobalGiving Women's English group has finished its Tomatis program. They did the 40 hours passive and 30 hours active program of listening training, just as stated in our project proposal. All reported a greater understanding of English, as well as less hesitation in speaking, more ease or flow of the language, and more confidence.
Maybe you can evaluate this yourselves? Have a look at these Before and After videos and tell us what you think. What do you hear and observe? Do you see any changes? Please share your observations/thoughts!
Unfortunately, due to the startup difficulties, only two of the four took the Language Lab's English level test before starting the program, in the middle, and after finishing. But those tests - mainly grammar tests - revealed an improvement of 50%. Which is amazing, considering the fact that everyone thinks one has to have classes specifically on grammar in order to learn it. Whereas, the 50% improvement was due only to the listening training, with no grammar classes at all!
Three of them followed up the program by joining English classes with a teacher in our Tomatis classroom. (One could not due to work commitments). The youngest just joined college. Another qualified to start the process of joining Auroville as a "Newcomer". The third is making progress writing emails, required by her job. We will keep following them to see how they progress and what they need. More individual sessions reading out loud with a teacher will definitely help further.
Meanwhile, it has been difficult to create another group to follow the first one. We realize that actually, developing the project as we originally conceived it, requires one person dedicated only to the project, who can do the legwork required to spread the word to women. It is true that we get a lot more men than women coming to the Lab on their own. So reaching out to women, requires a woman dedicated to the task! Inundated with so many different tasks and work, including our commitment to the daily programs for children with special needs (autism spectrum, learning disorders, developmental delays, etc), and so much work related to the Auroville collectivity in the last few months, there was very little time to do this PR work and reach out in the way the project requires. But it is our Commitment, and we will keep it!
The project requires new energy! Actually, we had depended on one of our wonderful women assistants to anchor this project. But her maternity leave extended (3 months have turned into 11). We miss her terribly, but life circumstances got in the way! She promises now to be back in January. In the meantime, we'll reach out to the pool of Auroville volunteers for a Tamil-speaking woman to work either full-time or at least half time. We have been praying for that angel to arrive soon! As of yesterday, we might just have found someone who can lead us to her! We'll keep you posted!
By Mita | Project Leader and Eternal Idealist
By Mita | With Tapas, Project Leader and Eternal Idealist
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