Why We're Here

And suddenly, we see why we are here in India.

After three summer months planning for both our trip and our wedding, after an August filled with the frenzied details of packing, after a September spent in the heat and grime of Kolkata getting our proper certification, after a week in the Himalayas on our unofficial ‘honeymoon’, and after two more laborious weeks in Bangalore stuck in jobless limbo, Jenna and I finally went back to work Tuesday.

The JM Higher Secondary School in Tirur could not have welcomed us better. Split between two campuses, the school is a Muslim private school with more than 2,500 students. The higher grades and a few scattered younger classes learn at one building at the top of a winding asphalt road on a densely wooded hill. The middle grades and some more young kids learn at another campus at the bottom of the hill, in a small valley surrounded by palm trees.

Most days, Jenna and I both will teach students in the middle grades—called standards in India—at the bottom of the hill. On Mondays and Tuesdays, I will spend the mornings at the upper campus teaching older kids in 10th and 11th standards. On these two days, I will go back to the lower campus in the afternoons to teach 8th and 9th standards. Jenna stays at the lower campus all day every day teaching 5th-7th standards. (We have figured out that Indian ‘standards’ are a number higher than a typical American ‘grade’. So, an 8th standard student in India would be a 7th grader in the US.)

We learned our schedule and all these details of the Indian education system from various helpful staff members who engaged us in conversation throughout the day. This school has welcomed ATI graduates in the past, so the other faculty members are fairly used to the sight of Westerners confusedly stumbling their way around the hallways.

“What is your name?” is how the staff member typically started the conversation.

We would tell them our names. They would scrunch their nose and ask us to spell it. Then they would tell us their own names and spell them. “Have a good day. Good luck!” is how they would usually end the conversation.

A chemistry teacher named Shabab introduced himself to me at the upper campus Tuesday. I had yet to teach a class and was sitting expectantly in the teachers’ lounge on the second floor—a room crammed with old dusty textbooks and school supplies.

“Do you know Shaun?” he asked me. I had gathered the previous day from our ATI guide Serush that Shaun was the teacher who had just left Tirur (and had incidentally lived in our current apartment and contributed to its destitute state).

I told Shabab that I had never met Shaun. “Ahh, well he learned a little Malayalam,” Shabab said, speaking of the local language. He nodded reflectively. “I think the students actually taught Shaun more Malayalam than he taught them English,” he said chuckling.


As for the classes, we learned that they are divided evenly between girls and boys. The school (and Tirur in general) is ruled by a strict set of conservative Muslim values. Therefore, all the girls wear black headscarves with their light blue, pinstriped uniforms. And the genders sit on opposite sides of the room from one another. The day begins with a sung Muslim prayer broadcast over loudspeakers to both campuses. At the sound, students and teachers rise and stand at casual attention. Students also break in the middle of the day for prayers at a small mosque between the campuses and then have lunch. The day begins at 9:45 and ends at 4:30.

The first day of teaching spun by in a whirlwind Tuesday. I saw six classes and Jenna saw five. Each class had at least 25 students. And the periods only lasted 40 minutes. Faces blurred together and names were impossible to memorize. Of course, the two students I was able to match with names today were mischief-makers—Ashique, a talkative boy in my 6th period, and Shahanna, a girl with adept English skills and a quick wit in my 7th period.

Regardless of the culture or the religion or the language, though, students have certain common characteristics around the world. They will laugh uncontrollably when you mispronounce their name. They will ask titillating questions just to get a rise out of you. (Like the girl who asked Tuesday if she could write down the name of her “lover” during a get-to-know-you activity.) They will groan when you ask them to complete their work. They will try to hide the fact that they have not done any work by casually putting their hand over their paper while thoughtfully staring at the ceiling. They will immediately start to talk to their friends when you turn your back. They will shout out the answer and keep shouting it, even if you ignore them for the half-dozen times they scream it. Boys will pinch each other and go crazy if you mention sports. Girls will roll their eyes at anything boys do. And they all smile and blush if you tell them, “Good job!”

I said “Good job” a lot Tuesday, and I got a lot of smiles. And in those moments, I knew that all the waiting, the planning, the training, the traveling, the packing, and the repacking…all of it…was worth it.