"Teacher? Autograph?"

We took a less adventurous ride on our second day of teaching in Kolkata. This time, the school we taught at was only about 20 minutes away from the ATI offices. We passed through some more affluent neighborhoods to get there, with smoothly paved four-lane roads and apartment buildings with security guards and locked gates. We also passed a sprawling complex with a high brick wall and concertina wire all around. The front gate let us know this was the main training ground for the Kolkata Police.

We turned down some side streets and made a typically circuitous way down some narrow lanes--nearly side-swiping pedestrians, dogs and bicyclists along the way--and reached Khidderpore Ballika Vidyavathan. This was another all-girls school. It sat clustered on the end of a crowded block across from a park. The building was three stories high and the school itself comprised only the second floor. We trudged up a twisting set of stairs and found ourselves in our classroom.

Really, it was one large room--the size of a small gym. The space had been divided into three smaller "classrooms" by plywood dividers placed at intervals to split the room up into thirds. We would be teaching three at a time in these boxed-in areas.

The girls filed in excitedly, beaming and squealing. The school's teachers--dressed in bright saris--led them to their assigned spaces. They tromped in loudly on the hardwood floors and plopped their backpacks on the rickety wooden benches that served as seats. After a chaotic few minutes, all the girls were set and the first three teachers began: Summer on one end of the room, Philip on the opposite end and me in the middle.

The girls we taught today were slightly older--maybe sixth and seventh grade. Yet, their English skills were not as strong as the girls from Day One. Still, they were enthusiastic and polite. They all were dressed in matching teal skirts with white, collared undershirts. They had all braided their hair in tight pigtails and had teal ribbons in their hair. The lesson involved a lot of listening, and the space was not great for this purpose--hard floors, high ceilings, concrete walls and three loud teacher voices talking at once. Yet, the girls remained poised and on-task. Every so often I would catch some girls talking or whispering while I was teaching, and I would look closer to redirect them. (My teacher instincts told me, of course, that they were off-task.) However, on closer examination I realized the girls were invariably talking about the lesson or practicing the English I had just gone over on the board.

Jenna and I taught in the same space. It was fun to observe each other. We had different sets of girls. At the end of my 40-minute lesson, the school headmistress came in and ordered the girls to file out and a new group of rambunctious pre-teens came in and sat down. Jenna's group was a year older and slightly more proficient in English. Still, Jenna agreed that today's lesson was a bit harder to get through than Monday's. Still, the girls brightened our days. Jenna says she has "actually enjoyed" teaching the past two days.

One thing I will remember from this day, though, is what happened at the end of my lesson. As I wrapped up and the girls got ready to go, several of them got out notepads and pencils. They hurriedly thrust the pads and pencils at me, fighting each other for space. "Teacher! Teacher? Autograph? Sign?" they said pleadingly. They were asking me for my autograph, as if I was some big Bollywood star like Salman Khan. The ATI trainers had actually warned us about this phenomenon, and they had told us to politely decline. For if we signed one girls' paper, then we would be stuck for hours signing every girl's.

As we left, one of the ATI trainers laughed and said, "There will only be a few times in your life when you will feel like a rock star. That was one of them."