Goodbye to All That

Images of some of our students in our final week at JM.

The other day as Jenna and I began to sort through our belongings in Tirur—separating what we will take with us to Calcutta from what we will leave behind—I came across some dusty papers stacked up in a corner of our bedroom. They were papers from JM, the very first assignment we gave our kids our first day teaching back in October.

We had done a ‘get-to-know-you’ activity. We had asked the students to complete a series of simple questions: draw a picture of your family, write down your birthday, write and draw your favorite hobby, and write your age. For Jenna’s students, who were younger, she asked them to draw a picture of their ‘dream job’ and also draw a picture of their favorite animal. For my students, who were nearly high school age, I asked them to draw their home and write the name of someone important to them.

I found myself distracted from packing as I slowly leafed through the tilting pile of paper. I scanned through the sheets, I spotted a few names I recognized and chuckled at some of the drawings. Some students had quickly breezed through the assignment, scratching out their answers in near-indecipherable lettering. But others had shown an astonishing amount of care and dedication.

I hated to throw them away, but I also did not want to lug a good five pounds of paper in my backpack. So I made a compromise. I decided to tally the students’ answers and put up the results of my unscientific straw poll on the blog. You the readers now get, what I think, is a fairly telling ‘snapshot’ of adolescence in Tirur. Keep in mind, this survey is wholly amateur and the results detailed in this post only come from about half our students (392 students to be exact.). At some point, we must have thrown away or lost the other half of our students’ papers.

With all obvious caveats in mind, here is what I can say about our students at JM Higher Secondary School in Tirur:

--71% of our students come from families of five or more members. We asked students to draw who they live with, and many times this included grandparents and in-laws. The biggest family depicted was 13 members.

--Only 3.5% of our students are only children. Only one student comes from a single-parent home.

--32% of our students claimed their favorite hobby was a sport of some kind—football, cricket, badminton—making recreational sports the most popular out-of-school pastime. The next most favored hobbies were playing on the computer (20%), reading (17%), and watching TV (13%).

--With a whopping 68%, Kerala is by far the most common place that my older students claimed as their ‘home’. ‘India’ (28%) was next, followed by ‘Malappuram’ (22%).

--34% of Jenna’s younger students say being a teacher is their ‘dream job’. Following that are ‘doctor’ (26%), ‘pilot’ (23%), and ‘engineer’ (14%).

--50% of Jenna’s students also say their favorite animal is a cat. Rabbits are next (9%), followed by chickens (8%). Dogs only garner 7 percent. Not surprising for a mainly Muslim school, since that faith looks at dogs with great distrust.

These numbers lead me to a few conclusions. First, our JM students, generally speaking, have many deep family attachments. The majority (more than 70 percent) live with at least four people and many of these live with extended family—grandparents, in-laws, aunts, uncles, cousins. The effect this has is untold and beyond the ambit of my little survey, but I cannot help but conclude that the students in Tirur have a more stable family environment at home and are made more accountable by their elders for their schoolwork than the students I taught in Houston.

Second, the recreational habits of the students in Tirur show a good balance. The most popular activity outside of school is, thankfully, playing sports. It is not surprising to see that ‘playing on computers’ is a distant second, but it is encouraging to find that ‘reading’ is a more popular activity than ‘watching TV’. The results might be influenced by the level of disposable income in Tirur. TVs at home are not universal and personal computers are rare. Therefore, students must be more imaginative and active in what they do to fill their free time.

Third, the ‘dream jobs’ espoused by Jenna’s students show a striking amount of realism and rational ambition. The top jobs are teacher, doctor, pilot, and engineer. Good jobs that are attainable with the correct amount of drive and hard work. Anecdotally, both Jenna and I found it rare for students to say their ‘dream job’ was to be a ‘professional athlete’ or ‘singer’ or ‘actor’.

In sum, what I get from looking wistfully at these surveys is that kids in Tirur, indeed, have the freedom and complaisance to be kids. By and large, they come from solid family backgrounds, they pursue playful out-of-school activities, and they have formulated ambitious but realistic visions of their futures.

In contrast, the kids I taught in urban Houston had grown up too fast. Frequently, their family lives were in turmoil. They had been exposed unhealthily to sex, drugs, and violence. And many of them held fantastical notions of their careers and ambitions.

Looking back on it, only once did I have to correct a student at JM for writing something inappropriate on that ‘get-to-know-you’ assignment. The student had said one of his favorite hobbies was ‘drinking beer’. When I tapped him on the shoulder, he scratched it out and re-wrote ‘football’ in mortification.

JM proved to be a different world than I was used to. And that was not always a bad thing.