Living in The Presence

I mentioned earlier that the Mother had given the responsibility of the Free Progress section to Paru, Dhanvanti and me. There Were obviously other teachers who taught as well. I was in charge of the French classes. I had divided the 45 students into five groups. Let me tell you here about one of these groups. This was a group that focused on spoken French. We decided to create a story with this group: the story of a young boy. The story had to be completely imaginary. This is how it was organised: I would start the story and speak for two minutes. Then the person sitting next to

 me would continue the story for two minutes and the story would thus unfold with each successive narrator. We were nine in all. On the first two days, the story did not turn out so well. It is not so easy to create an imaginary story. On the third day, I took up the relay after every two students' improvisation. Slowly, the children began to get a feel of it. The enthusiasm now started increasing. Then they began enjoying this so much that they did not want to do anything else! The entire hour with me in the spoken French class just went into story-creation. But then this was the particularity of the Free Progress system: students were allowed to pursue whatever they had chosen for as long as they wished if the teacher felt that it was being done with sincere concentration and interest. There was no rigidity about time in this system of education. And so our story slowly began to take shape. Tanmay-da was the overall coordinator of this section. From time to time, he would come into the classroom to see how things were proceeding. Sometimes he would sit down with us and listen to the story. I had told him that we were trying to create an imaginary story. The students were enjoying this activity so much that they did not want to do anything else with me as long as we were not done with the story. I told myself that this group was not progressing much in French as besides speaking French, the group was not doing anything else connected with reading, writing or grammar. Nothing but story-making! After the fifth day, I went and told Tanmay-da, "They are so enthusiastic about creating stories that I cannot stop them, Tanmay-da. Could you kindly ask the Mother what I should do.? They are doing nothing else besides." Tanmay-da used to see the Mother regularly with regard to this section. He informed the Mother about it. She asked, "Do they speak in French?" Tanmay-da replied that besides French, no other language was used in the class. The Mother looked satisfied and answered smilingly, "Then let them continue with this conversation class. It's very good." Tanmay-da suggested to me that I continue the class as it was going. What's more, Tanmay-da started coming regularly to

this one-hour class and he would sit and listen and correct some of the French mistakes. And so we spent nine days of class in this story-making activity! We decided to write down this story and send it to the Mother. We did start writing the story down in the class but unfortunately we never got around to sending it to Her.