“What will our host experience be like?” Someone asked to a pervious TGC India fellow during a pre-trip departure webinar in early June of 2019. “That is so difficult to answer because everyone one of you is going to have your own unique experience that won’t really compare to anyone else’s.” Now that I am here I understand that statement better, the variety of culture and experiences is so vast within India - literally if you go about 200km in any given direction you will be a new area that has a totally different native tongue. In fact, there are 234 identifiable native tongues and 22 major languages in India. Most Indians I spoke to knew around 3-4 languages and the most common language that connected and united everyone is English.
This post is dedicated to my 2019 TGC fellows, whom I love and appreciate as professionals and human beings and who I will miss dearly. Here are some of their experiences in the field that they shared with us. My hope is that this will help give the reader an idea of what the Indian education system is like from 6 different kinds of placements in India.
Pune “The Oxford of the East.” Perhaps the most progressive lessons were observed in Pune of our group - progressive in the sense that I imagine they would make some schools in America blush. One of the first lessons they observed was on human sexuality where the teacher was walking through what LGBTQ+ stand for. This was also the same school that gave one of our TGC fellows the following choices for teaching a lesson, “porn addiction, Eve teasing, premarital sex,” among others that I am now blanking on. This quickly became a running joke among us TGC fellows, “I think you got the leftovers on the list” (aka what the Indian teachers didn’t sign up to teach that week) we would say. But it also poses the question, what would their school like the American teacher to say about porn addiction or premarital sex? Because that can go a LOT of different directions. The fellow decided to go with “Eve teasing” which was the mildest of the choices. For those like me who maybe hadn’t heard of this term, Eve teasing is a euphemism used throughout South Asia, for public sexual harassment or sexual assault of women by men. Upon getting to her school she saw the following on the board and quickly shot a message to us saying “I’m no longer worried about teaching a lesson on Eve teasing.”
Calcutta - Here the young women at a prominent private all girls school impressed the TGC fellows with their drive. Infused in their curriculum was a focus on women’s empowerment in addition to academic excellence. For those familiar with the top NYC public schools, this school sounded very much a like an all girls version of Stuyvesant High School with perhaps a bit more progressive and forward thinking. The thinking process of many of the young women was “I go to an all girls school to focus on my education and not be distracted by relationships which will distract me from a bright future.” My favorite anecdotal stories from this school was when one of the TGC fellows who happens to be an expert in technology proved herself. At this school they have a tech guy who comes in and sets up the technology in the room for the teacher - the teachers are not expected to touch or necessarily know how to work the equipment. Before teaching her particular lesson to a class, the tech guy was struggling to turn on the projector with the remote - essentially the batteries were dead and he kept insisting the batteries were not dead and that something else was wrong. Our TGC fellow got up on a chair and push the “on” button on the projector and viola! The projector came on and she said something to the effect of “that’s right ladies we can problem solve too.”
Kerala Group 1 - There were two groups of TGC fellows who were sent to small towns in the south of India in the state of Kerala. Both pairs I believe were in government schools (what we in America would call public schools). Here the TGC fellows saw schools with less technology than Delhi, but students full of spirit. Both groups toured multiple schools in the region and did not necessarily stay at one school the whole time like some of us did. The schools in Kerala are especially proud of their 100% literacy rate. What most of us TGC fellows who were in cities were especially jealous of was the beautiful pictures they would send from Kerala - serene misty hills and pictures from the beach looking out toward the ocean. Yes, it was monsoon season so there wasn’t swimming on the beach and the downpours of rains could go from drizzle to downpour, but it was beautiful. One of the fellows from Vermont said he felt right at home there - which if anything made we me even more curious to see it for myself as Vermont is one of my top 5 favorite US states.
Kerala Group 2 - This pair had a music teacher and a incredibly outgoing NYC history teacher. They made the news in their village and sent us the video clip of the highlight. Also, working as a team they performed “Don’t worry, be Happy,” which of all the things the TGC fellows sent to each other that week was the one that had me laughing till nearly tears. It was like if you took Animal from the muppets and paired him with Ralph on the saxophone and the energy between the two was about how you would imagine that to be. But the kids loved it and that’s what matters most. Here the teachers were able to run a PD with the teachers in their school which included a variety of fun free online games that are popular in classrooms back home.
Bangalore - This was my host field experience location, which I will write about in more detail in a future blog post. However, to introduce the basics - my host school was the equivalent of a private school in America and consisted of 7000 students, 5 buildings (one administration, one Kindergarten, one lower elementary, one middle school, and one high school), and beautiful resort like campus grounds with palm trees lining the entrance and multiple gardens. I was even told that there was a “campus” peacock that someone took care of, but that really peacocks are not pets because they are the bird of India so they just put out food for it every morning. I never saw this peacock so I cannot vouch for its existence - but I was intrigued by the thought. Can you imagine going to a place for learning that had beautifully maintained grounds with wild peacocks??? I feel like even if you were trying NOT to actively learn you would be learning because the environment was so beautiful. My host school was unlike any school I have seen in America. It is working toward 100% renewable energy and sustainable energy. They filter their own water for drinking and reharvest the used water for other things that didn’t need filtered water (things like toilets I imagine). They had a vegetable garden on campus that we ran out of time to see where they teach kids how to grow things too. In addition, the community of educators were so genuinely “students first” in a way that I found to be massively inspiring. If teachers had an idea they wanted to try out because it was good for kids, the answer they were given was always yes. It was a magical and impressive place to be; I have never experienced a school like it.
Hyderabad - Upon arriving back in Delhi from our host visits, Karly and I paired with the team from Hyderabad and our experiences could not have been different. In Hyderabad they were in a low resourced government school. Before arriving in India one of the TGC fellows going to
Hyderabad had organized a campaign to bring the school a piece of technology. She sent them a list of things she was willing to donate to the school - one of the things listed was an old school overhead projector, which is what the school said they wanted. After touring the schools in New Delhi that had a lot of technology she thought maybe there was a communication barrier and that the school actually meant a projector not an overhead projector. In a mad dash with our host Rajesh, she set out on the streets of Delhi to buy a projector for the school, which also included a drive by moped drop off and exchange of cash among many other adventures. Upon arriving at the school, she quickly realized that yes, it was the overhead projector they wanted as the school didn’t have WiFi or a single working computer and the very infrastructure of the building was crumbling. The atmosphere sounded similar to the inner city schools in Detroit and parts of NYC, however, I was left with the impression students here faced a deeper poverty different from what we might see back home. Despite the challenges these two fellows faced, they bonded with the teachers/students, learned and played cricket in a saree, and are already generating ideas for future international collaborations and grant writings to improve special education in the Hyderabad community.
This post is dedicated to my 2019 TGC fellows, whom I love and appreciate as professionals and human beings and who I will miss dearly. Here are some of their experiences in the field that they shared with us. My hope is that this will help give the reader an idea of what the Indian education system is like from 6 different kinds of placements in India.
Pune “The Oxford of the East.” Perhaps the most progressive lessons were observed in Pune of our group - progressive in the sense that I imagine they would make some schools in America blush. One of the first lessons they observed was on human sexuality where the teacher was walking through what LGBTQ+ stand for. This was also the same school that gave one of our TGC fellows the following choices for teaching a lesson, “porn addiction, Eve teasing, premarital sex,” among others that I am now blanking on. This quickly became a running joke among us TGC fellows, “I think you got the leftovers on the list” (aka what the Indian teachers didn’t sign up to teach that week) we would say. But it also poses the question, what would their school like the American teacher to say about porn addiction or premarital sex? Because that can go a LOT of different directions. The fellow decided to go with “Eve teasing” which was the mildest of the choices. For those like me who maybe hadn’t heard of this term, Eve teasing is a euphemism used throughout South Asia, for public sexual harassment or sexual assault of women by men. Upon getting to her school she saw the following on the board and quickly shot a message to us saying “I’m no longer worried about teaching a lesson on Eve teasing.”
Calcutta - Here the young women at a prominent private all girls school impressed the TGC fellows with their drive. Infused in their curriculum was a focus on women’s empowerment in addition to academic excellence. For those familiar with the top NYC public schools, this school sounded very much a like an all girls version of Stuyvesant High School with perhaps a bit more progressive and forward thinking. The thinking process of many of the young women was “I go to an all girls school to focus on my education and not be distracted by relationships which will distract me from a bright future.” My favorite anecdotal stories from this school was when one of the TGC fellows who happens to be an expert in technology proved herself. At this school they have a tech guy who comes in and sets up the technology in the room for the teacher - the teachers are not expected to touch or necessarily know how to work the equipment. Before teaching her particular lesson to a class, the tech guy was struggling to turn on the projector with the remote - essentially the batteries were dead and he kept insisting the batteries were not dead and that something else was wrong. Our TGC fellow got up on a chair and push the “on” button on the projector and viola! The projector came on and she said something to the effect of “that’s right ladies we can problem solve too.”
Kerala Group 1 - There were two groups of TGC fellows who were sent to small towns in the south of India in the state of Kerala. Both pairs I believe were in government schools (what we in America would call public schools). Here the TGC fellows saw schools with less technology than Delhi, but students full of spirit. Both groups toured multiple schools in the region and did not necessarily stay at one school the whole time like some of us did. The schools in Kerala are especially proud of their 100% literacy rate. What most of us TGC fellows who were in cities were especially jealous of was the beautiful pictures they would send from Kerala - serene misty hills and pictures from the beach looking out toward the ocean. Yes, it was monsoon season so there wasn’t swimming on the beach and the downpours of rains could go from drizzle to downpour, but it was beautiful. One of the fellows from Vermont said he felt right at home there - which if anything made we me even more curious to see it for myself as Vermont is one of my top 5 favorite US states.
Bangalore - This was my host field experience location, which I will write about in more detail in a future blog post. However, to introduce the basics - my host school was the equivalent of a private school in America and consisted of 7000 students, 5 buildings (one administration, one Kindergarten, one lower elementary, one middle school, and one high school), and beautiful resort like campus grounds with palm trees lining the entrance and multiple gardens. I was even told that there was a “campus” peacock that someone took care of, but that really peacocks are not pets because they are the bird of India so they just put out food for it every morning. I never saw this peacock so I cannot vouch for its existence - but I was intrigued by the thought. Can you imagine going to a place for learning that had beautifully maintained grounds with wild peacocks??? I feel like even if you were trying NOT to actively learn you would be learning because the environment was so beautiful. My host school was unlike any school I have seen in America. It is working toward 100% renewable energy and sustainable energy. They filter their own water for drinking and reharvest the used water for other things that didn’t need filtered water (things like toilets I imagine). They had a vegetable garden on campus that we ran out of time to see where they teach kids how to grow things too. In addition, the community of educators were so genuinely “students first” in a way that I found to be massively inspiring. If teachers had an idea they wanted to try out because it was good for kids, the answer they were given was always yes. It was a magical and impressive place to be; I have never experienced a school like it.
Hyderabad - Upon arriving back in Delhi from our host visits, Karly and I paired with the team from Hyderabad and our experiences could not have been different. In Hyderabad they were in a low resourced government school. Before arriving in India one of the TGC fellows going to
Hyderabad had organized a campaign to bring the school a piece of technology. She sent them a list of things she was willing to donate to the school - one of the things listed was an old school overhead projector, which is what the school said they wanted. After touring the schools in New Delhi that had a lot of technology she thought maybe there was a communication barrier and that the school actually meant a projector not an overhead projector. In a mad dash with our host Rajesh, she set out on the streets of Delhi to buy a projector for the school, which also included a drive by moped drop off and exchange of cash among many other adventures. Upon arriving at the school, she quickly realized that yes, it was the overhead projector they wanted as the school didn’t have WiFi or a single working computer and the very infrastructure of the building was crumbling. The atmosphere sounded similar to the inner city schools in Detroit and parts of NYC, however, I was left with the impression students here faced a deeper poverty different from what we might see back home. Despite the challenges these two fellows faced, they bonded with the teachers/students, learned and played cricket in a saree, and are already generating ideas for future international collaborations and grant writings to improve special education in the Hyderabad community.
No comments:
Post a Comment