The nursery teacher who watched children eat, and could not say why

The snack table is a teaching material before it is a meal

In a Montessori environment for children between two and a half and six, food is already on the shelf as work. There is a jug and a small glass for pouring. There is a spooning tray, then a tonging tray, then a banana and a blunt knife and a board, and a child who has cut the banana lays the slices out and offers them to the others. There is a table to be laid and cleared, a cloth to be wrung out, and the whole slow business of serving somebody else before serving yourself. The snack is not a break in the morning. It is the morning's most heavily used material.

Geetha Rajan has run that environment in Coimbatore for nine years, twenty-four children at a time, mixed ages in one room by design. Then at noon the lunch boxes come out and the room becomes something else entirely. Curd rice in a steel box with a spoon of pickle. A dosai folded into quarters and gone cold. Lemon rice packed at half past six. A box of biscuits because the child refuses everything else and the mother has given up the argument before it starts. A boy who opens his box, looks at it, closes it and says he is not hungry, four days a week, for a year.

She writes the observation note that goes home. She has been writing that note for nine years.

What a nursery teacher sees that nobody else can

A parent sees one child eat. A doctor sees a child for eleven minutes twice a year. Geetha watches twenty-four children eat, twice a day, two hundred days a year, in a group that includes older and younger children doing the same thing at the same table. She knows within a fortnight which child has never chewed anything harder than idli, which one gags at the sight of a vegetable rather than at the taste of it, which one has energy at nine and is lying on the mat by eleven, and which one eats everything in the box and then finishes half of a friend's.

That is a body of observation no other adult in the child's life possesses, and for nine years she had no vocabulary to put it into. The note home said the child did not finish lunch today, which is a fact and not information.

Half past three at the gate

The questions arrive in the fifteen minutes when the parents collect. They are the same questions in every Coimbatore school and probably in every Indian one.

He will only drink milk, is milk not enough. She eats curd rice and nothing else, will she manage. My mother-in-law says give ghee twice a day and he will fill out. The doctor said he needs protein, so should I give a powder. Is ragi kanji better than rice, my neighbour has stopped rice altogether. He is four, can I give him coffee in the morning, everyone at home drinks it. She is the shortest in the class, teacher, is something wrong.

For nine years Geetha answered from three sources: her own upbringing, what she had watched a hundred other mothers do, and a general instinct for moderation. Her answers were kind and mostly harmless. They were also completely unsupported, and she knew that the mother asking about the powder was going to buy the powder if the answer was a vague one.

Two other habits sit around the school and neither of them is anybody's fault. There is a bakery a short walk from the gate, and by half past three a good number of the children leave holding a bun with butter and jam in it, because it is cheap, it is quick and the child is hungry after a morning of work. And there is the birthday ritual, in which a cake comes to the classroom, is cut with ceremony, and is followed by a packet of sweets handed to every child to take home. Geetha had no objection to either and no idea what to say about the fact that in a class of twenty-four there is a birthday most weeks.

Where Montessori training stops

A Montessori or nursery training course is thorough about the things it covers. The albums, the sequence of the materials, how to present a lesson, how to observe and record, normalisation, the prepared environment, child development in broad terms. The practical life area includes food preparation in genuine detail, but it is there for coordination, concentration, independence and grace, which is exactly what it should be there for. Nothing in the syllabus concerns what the food is doing once the child has eaten it.

So a teacher finishes her training able to design a perfect snack sequence and unable to say whether the snack has any value in it. She can teach a four-year-old to pour milk without spilling, and cannot say whether a four-year-old drinking a litre and a half of it a day is a child who is well nourished or a child who is becoming anaemic. Those are not the same question and only one of them was taught.

Two specific gaps do the most damage in an Indian nursery. The first is growth. Most preschools weigh and measure children at least once a year, enter it in a card, and send the card home. Nobody trains the teacher to read it, which means the school collects the single most useful early signal there is and does nothing with it. The second is iron, which is invisible, common in exactly this age group, and shows itself as the tired child at the back of the mat rather than as anything a teacher would call illness.

What a child nutrition course changed in the classroom

The snack shelf acquired a purpose

The materials did not change, because they did not need to. What changed was what goes on the tray. The morning snack now regularly includes something from the groundnut, roasted gram and sesame family alongside the fruit, a seasonal fruit cut in the room rather than a packaged juice, and, in the way that matters most in a Tamil kitchen, a reason given to parents for the millet in the rotation rather than an assumption that they will approve. A child who cuts a guava and serves it to four other children eats guava. That was always true; now it is being used deliberately.

The growth card became readable

Geetha now reads the height and weight card as two separate questions rather than one worry. Is this child short for her age, and is this child thin for her height. A small, sturdy, energetic child from a small family is usually a small child. A child whose height has stopped moving between one entry and the next is a different matter, and so is a child who is steadily falling away from where he was tracking. The point of reading it properly is not to label anybody. It is to know which two cards out of twenty-four should produce a quiet conversation with the family and a recommendation to see the doctor with the card in hand.

The milk problem stopped being a mystery

The child who drinks milk all day is a fixture of Indian preschools, and the training explained the mechanism: a large volume of milk fills a small stomach, displaces the iron-bearing food the child would otherwise eat, and leaves a pale, irritable, poorly eating four-year-old whose mother believes she is doing everything right because the child is getting so much milk. Geetha can now explain that sequence to a parent in two sentences, in Tamil, without suggesting that anybody has done anything wrong. The same applies to the morning coffee, which is offered in affection and works directly against the iron in the meal it accompanies.

The note that goes home says something

The observation note used to record that the box came back full. It now records what came back and what went, which texture the child avoided, whether the refusal was at the first bite or after ten minutes, and whether the child ate when seated beside a particular friend. Over a fortnight that turns into a pattern a parent can act on, and it turns a complaint into evidence. The birthday and celebration question was settled the same way, by a school rule rather than by a teacher's opinion: the cake stays, the take-home packet goes, and fruit or a savoury item is suggested to parents who ask what else they might send.

The parent conversation got a shape

The fifteen minutes at the gate now runs differently. She asks what the child ate yesterday rather than what the child likes. She asks how many times, not how much. She gives one change rather than five, because a parent who is handed five changes makes none of them. And she has a source to name: the national dietary guidance for Indians, which shifts the conversation from the teacher's opinion to something published, and a mother argues with an opinion in a way she does not argue with a reference.

Fitting study into a school term

A preschool teacher's year is not like a school teacher's. The working day ends early but the term runs long, and the weeks before the annual day consume everything. The genuine study windows are the afternoon quiet once the children have gone, and the April and May break.

NNWA's Child Nutrition course is taught live in English and Hindi with recordings kept available for life, which is what let Geetha take the bulk of it in the summer and keep going through the term at her own pace. Fees for the short courses are told to you before you sign up and can be paid in instalments. It is worth being precise about the certificate: short courses come with the NNWA certificate, whereas the Medhavi Skills University award sits with the flagship diplomas. She followed it with Child & Adolescent Nutrition, which carries her through to the age group the primary school upstairs teaches, and later took the Certification in Nutrition for the adult and family side of the work, since half the questions at the gate are actually about the mother.

What a nursery teacher must not do

The first limit concerns the child's ears. Nothing about a child's size, weight or eating is ever discussed in front of the child or within hearing of the group. A four-year-old told she is fat, or told she is too thin, keeps that sentence for a very long time, and a teacher is a more powerful voice in that respect than she may realise. Conversations with parents happen away from the room and without naming any other child.

The second is that a teacher does not diagnose and does not treat. She observes, records and refers. Faltering growth, a child who is not gaining across a year, suspected anaemia, a food allergy, a child who chokes or coughs on thin liquids: each of those goes to the family and the doctor, and none of them is settled in a classroom. She does not recommend supplements, and she does not endorse the powder the mother is asking about.

The third limit is a safety one and it belongs to the school rather than to nutrition as a subject. Whole groundnuts, whole grapes and hard sweets are a choking risk in this age group and are handled accordingly, allergy information is collected on admission and is known to every adult in the room, and any child with a diagnosed allergy has a written plan agreed with the parents rather than a teacher's memory.