University undergrads help rural children

Saturday, 26 July 2014 04:19 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

It’s a Sunday afternoon. A group of university undergraduates are waiting for the train to take them to a remote rural area around 250kms from Perth, the capital of Western Australia (WA). Their destination is Trayning amidst WA’s farmlands. The area named after ‘Trayning Well’ – derived from two aboriginal names ‘Durri-ing’ and ‘Duraning’ – the words meaning ‘to crawl’ and ‘a camping place’. It came to be identified as a ‘snake crawling in the grass near campsite’. The gold rush of the 1880s made people rush to the area.

The group comprising 12 females and four male students has a mission. They are volunteers of ‘Teach Learn Grow’ (TLG) – a non-profit organisation aiming to bridge the gap in education for disadvantaged and indigenous children in rural Western Australia so that their full potential is realised. Free tutoring and mentoring services are provided during the week. They are going to be part of the staff in the primary school at this sparsely populated rural town for a week. It is going to be a teaching as well as a learning experience to them. The school bus picks them up from the train station and brings them to the community hall where they will stay. The head master is on hand to meet them and give the keys. With just one grocery shop in the town with provisions barely enough for the community, the group has taken all what they need to cook their own meals. Being winter it’s quite cold. Luckily for them there is a heater in the hall which will be their sleeping area. They look round for showers – there aren’t any. They are told they will have to walk a little distance for a bath. The school is just a few yards away. The school with classes from kindergarten to Grade 7 has 42 children. There are four teachers. In addition to his administrative

duties, the head master teaches the Grade 5-7 students. Some may go to a distant high school after grade 7. Others will drop out. The volunteers who act as tutors during the week assess the students and plan their work accordingly in consultation with the regular teachers. The tutors found the facilities in the school quite adequate. Most of the children showed a keen interest in listening to the tutors and followed what was taught. This does not happen always. They had experienced instances when the students just were not interested. In such cases their task is to inspire them and create an interest in learning in a bid to consolidate the student’s knowledge. This group of volunteers is only one of a dozen or more groups who go to rural schools twice per year. In 2013, eleven schools had been covered. In November 2013, 180 volunteers were selected and sent to the schools where each child was tutored for two hours per day. Tutors spent six hours a day tutoring and utilised the remainder of the day to mentor children during sports events, science experiments and other activities. Funding for TLG comes from universities and corporates. “It was a totally new experience for us,” the group members said at the end of the tutoring. “We are happy we were able to contribute even in a small way towards the educational development of these kids.” The coordinators Thisuri Jayawardena and Chris Long are quite pleased. “The program went exactly as we planned and it was a great team effort,” they said.