Unbelievable

Quote of the day from a colleague: "International teaching is the best-kept secret ever!"

This school is unbelievable. Today I pulled two laptop carts from the Social Studies office 3 doors away into my room. There are enough outlets in the room that all 17 students (big class! :) ) can easily plug them in. They were working on issue papers that I assigned to them yesterday and that are due Friday. After they started working several of them came to me to ask good questions about their choice of issue or research alternatives. No one asked me to repeat instructions. No one whined. And then they started to work. It got quiet - all you could hear was typing. I walked around a couple of times watching them working, and I made a few lame jokes. Then I sat down at my desk and watched them for awhile. I realized that there were no discipline issues at all. And that, for the first time ever in my teaching career outside of essay testing, I could do some work at my desk.

The first class ends. I stand out in the "hallway" (it's outside my room, and outside in general, and it overlooks a lovely courtyard garden) and chat with some tenth graders who have lockers next to the classroom and are all friendly and joke with me. And then I keep standing there, and finally I wonder when passing time is over, so I go inside to look and find out that there's a 20-minute break between blocks. So I could go downstairs and have a snack at the outdoor cafe, or I could go to the school travel agent in the next building to discuss winter break travel plans, or . . . I could just stand there and be amazed. Which I did.

So the second block starts - I have prep, which is 1 1/2 hours, and I go to talk to the high school librarian about videos - my colleague has told me that the school has very few and if you order them you can't get them until next year, so I figure that I'll start the process early. She tells me that if Amazon has them, she can order them right away for this year. So I send her a list of AP Euro favorites: Sister Wendy of course, and Simon Schama, and the foppish James Burke. And then I go back to my classroom and look at a blank map of Europe, readying myself for the Western Heritage map ID game. After another 1/2 hour, a bell rings. But it's just the lunch bell. Every day the whole school has lunch at the same time, for 55 minutes. So there's time again to do those little errands, make a phone call, and then go eat lunch at the staff canteen, where a good hot lunch with an Indian entree, rice, yogurt, and dal costs under $2 every day. And on the way to and from the canteen, I see lots of middle schoolers awkwardly standing around in the rock garden near the lunch facilities, and I see elementary schoolchildren next to me in the restroom washing their hands, and it seems like real life. Teachers here with young children go home at lunch to eat with their kids. After lunch I talk to students in the cafe, or joke with the students at their lockers, who amazingly seem to like talking to me.

Today I had two prep periods and two classes. I saw a total of 30 students. One of them is the son of the newly-appointed US ambassador to India, which is a bit scary (but somewhat Edina-ish) and one of them is the daughter of the head of the World Health Organization and two of the Korean students don't know what their parents do (!). And after school I worked for a bit in my classroom and then walked for 5 minutes to my apartment, where I walked in to see that it had been cleaned carefully and opened the refrigerator to discover tonight's dinner (which always feels like a surprise treat) - tonight it was chicken wrapped in chapatis and sauteed eggplant with spices. And, as she has done every day since I hired her, the housekeeper left a blended lassi (yogurt drink) in the refrigerator, today made with mangos but always refreshing and not too sweet.

How could anyone NOT be happy in this environment? People may hesitate to teach abroad because of children, but let me tell you - teachers here with kids of any age get to be around them or near them all day if they want, the child care is great, early childhood classes are great, and there are two pools to which you can take children, not to mention the playgrounds and grassy areas where they can play with other faculty kids.

Ok, enough of this smarmy stuff. But it really is great here. And by "here" I mean the school, Delhi, and India in general.