Back to School...

For the first time in more than three months, Jenna and I awoke this morning with an actual schedule to follow. We had our first day of the TESOL training course that will give us the certification we need in order to teach English in India.

The classes occur at a nondescript four-story building just around the corner from our guest house, behind a gated door and up a narrow flight of stairs. Somebody's Kawasaki motorcycle sits dusty and abandoned on the ground-floor landing. Our teacher is a well-spoken Bengali woman named Sangeeta. She tells us in a pleasingly British accent that she speaks English, Bengali, Hindi and "two or three others" as is if she is listing favorite movies instead of languages. Sangeeta's mother was a teacher at a missionary school in Lucknow, which is several hundred miles northwest of Kolkata. And she grew up making summer trips to visit her grandparents in Varanasi--the city where devout Hindus take the remains of loved ones to be cremated and spread over the Ganges. She moved to Kolkata as a young girl and now considers herself a proud Kolkatan. Her pride for the city rings clear in our first day of class as she speaks of the city's long intellectual history ("This is where India's first major university was founded") and its citizens' contributions to Indian and global society ("Home to three Nobel laureates").

"You can stop any man on the street here," she says, "and you can engage him in a conversation about politics or literature or the cinema or theater. This would not happen in Delhi. No, all people in Delhi want to talk about is business. You could stop somebody in Delhi and they probably wouldn't even know who the prime minister is. Here in Kolkata we take pride in knowing about the world--Africa, Latin America, Cuba, Eastern Europe. It does not matter."

This digressive but interesting prelude to our first day of class was putting Kolkata in a different light for me. Sangeeta continued: "We love to read and Bengalis value education. Even the poorest of the poor will send their children to school because we know how important education is. This city is considered the cultural capitol of India. Not Delhi or Mumbai. Nor Chennai. It is here: Kolkata."

Sangeeta went on from here to lay out how the next three weeks would go: first we would take lessons in rudimentary Bengali, so as to teach us the cognitive processes behind learning a foreign language. Then, we would learn a little about the theory and practice of teaching. After that, we would conduct practice lessons in front of the group. In the final week, we would go out into a public school in Kolkata and teach lessons to primary school children. "It will be a thoroughly enjoyable experience," Sangeeta said. "Your classes may be 20 or 30...or maybe 40 or 50. But that is Kolkata for you."

All in all, it sounded like a very similar setup to the training institute Jenna and I went through as part of Teach For America, just shorter and much less intensive.

The group consisted of six people including Jenna and I. Matt, a New Zealander who had worked as a carpenter in his home country as well as in Australia and Britain for the past five years. We had already met him because he and his girlfriend were staying in the other room in our guest house quarters. It seems Matt has been footloose for awhile. In getting to know him over the preceding two days, he would casually mention a time in such-and-such country--Thailand, Nepal, India in an earlier year, Burma. He likes to surf and does not much care where he goes after this training course. Must be nice.

The other three in the group are all Americans. Summer recently graduated from James Madison University and had been working as a Starbucks barrista. Colleen is from North Carolina but had lately been in Colorado teaching venture sports like rock-climbing and whitewater rafting. And Phil is a Bard College graduate and opera buff who had moved from New York City. They are all earnest and expressed the same wide-eyed impressions of Kolkata that Jenna and I had noted since arriving Thursday night.

Jenna and I do not expect the course to be too challenging but we are excited to be back "on a schedule". And we could honestly use a refresher on teaching after having spent the summer doing little else but planning our wedding and watching movies off Netflix.