Fancy Dress Party

I teach at an all boys school so I had not, until yesterday, seen my kids interact with girls of their age. I had only seen them interact with their female teachers with whom they demonstrate nothing short of respect and reverence. When I went to school yesterday, I was surprised to see a myriad of young women sprinkled amidst the landscape of boys. And I was glad. One thing I’ve found to be missing in my Indian Summer is interaction with Indian girls and women. Though I’m glad to teach at St. James, it does make me feel, to some extent, as though I’m missing out on something. While my other friends are going to dinner at the homes of their female mentor teachers and going saree shopping, I’m talking shop with the boys, which I don’t mind (well not always). So, when I went to school and saw the girls in their school uniforms, their salwars and their sarees, I felt more than a sense of relief; I felt at home.

My relief was short-lived. As soon as Aysha and I walked into school, we were ushered into a large tent where St. James was hosting an event called Jacosynthesis. The event is a highly-reputed and well advertised festival that features a series of activities, games, debates and is open to all schools, both male and female. The first event that I witnessed was a debate. In this debate, students from different schools across the city were imitating the Indian Parliament and arguing for and against different propositions. The debate was as heated as any I had ever seen with students aggressively arguing for their cause and even yelling at each other while hurling insults. I was so caught in the drama of the debate that I wasn’t paying attention to the arguments being made on stage, not until one of the boys (a boy I teach) stood up to counter an argument made by his female opponent. In his counter-response (attack?) he concluded that her claims were unfounded and suggested that she attend “a fancy dress party” instead of a debate. My jaw dropped. Had I heard correctly? I waited for others to demonstrate the appropriate degree of outrage. But they didn’t. The audience, composed mostly of other students, cheered. I looked desperately to the few teachers to my right and to my left for validation, but they seemed either not to have heard or not to have registered the comment. Were gender based attacks deemed appropriate then? As I continued to listen, I noticed that every counterpoint that a male student made in response to an argument launched by a female student ended (almost invariably) in a comment intended to undermine his female counterpart. The girls who were struggling to articulate their points were called useless and the girls who were arguing and winning were called terrorists which seemed like the academic version of the virgin/whore dichotomy.

I walked away from the debate feeling sick. I had never seen my boys behave that badly. I vowed to talk to them in class and to ask the teachers about their behavior after school. I wanted to try to understand why their comments had been deemed appropriate by virtue of their not having been deemed inappropriate. Though this is India, a country with a female president, it is also a country where young girls die more frequently than boys due to insufficient medical care and also a country where many young girls are sold into brothels as cited in Kristof and WuDunn’s Half the Sky. I’m reminded now of a young girl named Pooja. She’s a street girl in the fifth form. I meet her regularly as I walk out of my hotel. She sells her wares after attending school in the day and tells me which men to look out for on the street. She may not be on stage debating the rights of the Indian Parliament, but I have a suspicion that she fights for her rights on a daily basis as she walks the streets of Kolkata barefoot selling a tray full of hair adornments. Her face is weathered and she looks far older than her age, but she’s doing ok. And so are the girls on stage. After all, they didn’t go to a fancy dress party, did they?  They decided to go to school instead. 

Two Sides of a Coin

“Literature and life are two sides of a coin. Tell yourself that when you complain about reading Shakespeare.” I could have said those words myself, but I didn’t.  They were spoken by Shumita, a teacher I observed giving a review class on Macbeth. Just like any teacher worth her salt, Shumita was determined to inspire her students, most of whom were already determined to enter the highly competitive fields of science and engineering. “Vaulting ambition. Macbeth has it. Don’t you?”

As I observed Shumita teach, I was struck by her passion for literature and her commitment to her students. Both these qualities were self-evident as I walked into her classroom, a room with blue paint, a chalkboard, and rows upon rows of desks where 45 bodies squirmed shoulder to shoulder in the Kolkata heat. Though a class of 45 students may seem inconceivable to a U.S. educator, it’s a rather light load for an Indian one. Many classes here range between 40 and 60 students, if not more.  Because Indian teachers teach at least 7 classes per day (with as many as six preparations), they see between 200 and 400 students a day. Despite her load, Shumita gave her boys nothing short of everything she had. She was teaching as actively and passionately as I’ve ever seen anyone teach. She never sat down, she never slowed her pace, and she never took a break. I sat and watched in awe. After having taught four classes myself, I was exhausted. Could I do what Shumita does on a daily basis for an entire academic year? I don’t know. What I do know is this: I’ll never complain about teaching 120-160 students again. 

The Mad Competition for Survival

While I have always wanted to travel to India, I’m not here as a tourist. Not this time anyway. This Indian summer is a gift sponsored by the American Councils for International Education, a non-profit organization in Washington DC dedicated to the pursuit of mutual understanding across international borders. I traveled here along with 8 other American educators as part of a group selected to participate in the India Summer Teacher Educational Seminar. And that’s what we’re here to do. Teach. Each of us has been placed in schools across the city. I’ve been placed at the St. James School, one of the oldest and best reputed schools in Kolkata.

We arrived in India on Sunday and settled into our work on Monday by immersing ourselves in a day-long workshop intended to prepare us for our teaching experience. The workshop consisted of an introduction to Kolkata, a lecture on the secondary school system in West Bengal, an overview of our role as visiting educators, a crash-course in Bangla and an overview of medical do’s and dont's. Though we suffered from jet lag, we were inspired by the ample chai and the generosity of our hosts who took every opportunity to ensure that we were comfortable and that we were well taken care of. And we were.

Though I learned quite a bit from each aspect of our workshop (like the difference between Namaste and Nomoshkar and how to interpret or at least embrace the ambiguity of the Indian nod), I found myself most captivated by our lecture on the Indian school system. To put it simply, India suffers from a problem of supply and demand. There are too many students and not enough schools to accommodate them. This results in a culture of testing that seeks to weed students out by the end of their 10^th grade year. At the end of year 10, many students take exams that determine whether or not they can proceed to the 11^th and 12^th grade. If students are successful, they’ll compete for slots in the few colleges and universities available to them. This leads to increased pressure not only on students vying for selective university level education, but also on the teachers who are preparing them for these endeavors. Much like the US, India is beginning to implement teacher evaluation systems that aim to hold educators accountable for student test scores. And much like the US, Indian teachers are skeptical. But what can they do? And what can we do? As Dr. Basab Chaudhuri stated in his lecture, “Education is the key to success in this mad competition for survival.”

School starts tomorrow. Here’s hoping that I can (in some small measure) help my newly-adopted students compete. 

Baltimore meets Bengal

I expected sensory overload. I expected culture shock. I expected the unexpected. What I got instead was the rather uncanny sensation that all that was unfamiliar was somehow familiar too.  

In driving from the airport to my Kolkata hotel, I was inundated by sights of tropical greenery, men and women in bare feet, construction projects left unfinished and stray animals roaming the streets. It was Costa Rica, it was Armenia, it was even Baltimore; it was so many of the landscapes that I had inhabited over the course of my life. It was familiar and it was reassuring. If I could happily negotiate the first few minutes of my trip, I knew that I would undoubtedly be able to negotiate the next few weeks. Or that’s what I thought. As we got closer to the hotel, I started to lose sense of the familiar as I saw images of men and women both playing and bathing in water the color of the dusty streets. It was then that I knew that this experience would be different. Maybe it wasn’t Costa Rica or Armenia. Maybe it wasn’t even Baltimore. Maybe it was something new, something that would take me five weeks, five months, and perhaps even five years to begin to understand.