Teachers and Their Pupils Around the World

OVER the past seven months, Monitor readers have "visited" classrooms on six continents and heard from teachers in all manner of economic and social conditions. An annotated list of the articles in this series:

Australia: Anne Scherer rarely sees her sixth- and seventh-grade class; she teaches students scattered across the outback via shortwave radio. (Nov. 4, 1991)

Brazil: Jandira Maria da Silva teaches two shifts of fourth-graders at an urban So Paulo school that was rural when she attended it not so long ago. (Nov. 18, 1991)

Japan: Tokyo's Yoshiaki Takahashi lectures up to 200 students in his English classes at a popular "cram" school. "I am 120 percent satisfied with my teaching job," he said. (Dec. 2, 1991)

England: "Reception" class (kindergarten) teacher Helen Sabin of Clay Cross, Derbyshire, was dealing with controversial new government guidelines stressing "basic" education. (Dec. 16, 1991)

Austin, Texas: Janis Lariviere, an 11th-grade chemistry teacher, was feeling the new demands being made on teachers: "We can't become mom, dad, and everything," she told the Monitor. "But we have to do as much as we can. We've got to be the stable factor in [students'] lives." (Dec. 30, 1991)

Chicago: Lynn Cherkasky-Davis teaches kindergarten in the inner city. "You never get more than you ask for," she said of her standing request that all visitors (including the Monitor's reporter) bring books to read aloud to her class. "As long as it involves my kids, I ask." (Jan. 21)

Russia: Moscow historian Anatoly Shikman raised officials' hackles in the 1970s when he asked high-schoolers to compare government versions of events with news on the BBC and Voice of America. (Feb. 3)

Algeria: Dalila Zait was relieved that her sixth-graders were relatively free from the fundamentalist Islamic trends sweeping through upper grades. (Feb. 18)

Germany: Eighth-grade German instructor Birgit Grille said bluntly that "this year has been a catastrophe" at her Dresden school in former East Germany. (March 2)

Mexico: Carmen Garcia Diaz trains her sixth-graders "to be battlers in order to secure their necessities." (March 16)

Kenya: Margaret Waigu Githegi is an innovative teacher of English at the Chuka High School for Boys in Kenya. (March 30)

Canada: Montreal high-school studio art teacher Christine Harvey said "my priority is in pushing them to be the best they can be." (April 13)

China: Bai Gunling must teach first- and second-graders together in a cave classroom in rural Shaanxi province. (April 27)

India: Mansingh Rahi is headmaster and fifth-grade teacher in a village school. Air-conditioned bureaucrats do not understand education that takes place "under a tree," he said. (May 11)