Teaching standards

The teachers in the school where she was admitted at age 9 (class 5) were of low quality standards in English. Most of them wouldn’t be anywhere near to Varuna even in local geographical knowledge. For, she had travelled with me to many places in our state. I am even doubtful even if there would have been any teacher in that school at that time who had even heard of Enid Blyton. Varuna had already started reading Enid Blyton. Moreover, she was aware of such names as Somerset Maugham (Princess September), Oscar Wilde (Happy Prince, Selfish Giant, The fisherman and his soul), and many other British classical writers, at a very young age. A lot of English fairytales she had already read on her own.

At age 4, when a count was taken of the number of English films that she had seen till then, it was reaching more than 400 (mainly Star Movies). Most of her teachers would not have seen many English films at that time, if at all they had.

Beyond that, she was quite good in computer typing, and learned in such software applications as Adobe PageMaker, Adobe Photoshop, Flash, MSWord, Adobe Acrobat, Macromedia Dreamweaver (web designing) and many others including rudiments of audio and video editing. She was easily better informed in many things than her teachers. Moreover she was quite at home in Internet usage, search engine usage and such things. At age 5.

Inside the class, she naturally was a different person, and quite obviously at a different plane, mentally. However, I understood that other children in her class used to draw her into confrontation with them by merely nudging her. Yet, there was no disinterest in her. She made friends with many classmates, yet, I could notice a gradual lessening of her English language features.