Teacher's Day

After recovering from a bout of dengue fever (which I don't recommend to anyone), I happily returned to school on a holiday. . . a holiday that celebrated me, in fact! Although I was a little weak, I sat on the stage with the other teachers during the morning assembly. Speeches were made about the value and importance of teachers, and then each teacher (and administrator and staff person, I might add) was called up individually to receive a flower and a fancy pen from their "replacement" for the day. Yes, that's right. Students in classes 10-12 were going to be taking over the classes for the entire day, and the teachers were to sit in our cozy teachers lounge and bask in the glory of being gurus.

Although you might scoff at my use of the word guru, I was actually warned during the Delhi orientation that this is exactly how students view teachers. There is an often told story about a student that stands before God and a teacher, and the student asks, "Whose feet do I touch first?" And the teacher answers that the student should touch God's feet, teaching that one should always give respect to others.

So I went up in front of the school and received my flower, and my replacement teacher bent down to touch my feet before standing and shaking my hand. Then the whole school burst into applause! I was a little taken aback, but then I realized it was probably because I was wearing a salwar kameez for the first time to school. It was a little embarrassing, because no one had clapped before, but I managed to humbly wave, bow, and look sufficiently awkward as I went back to my seat.

The rest of the day was full of cards and flowers and general appreciation. I think it's safe to say that you don't feel unappreciated until you truly feel appreciated, if that makes any sense.

At this point in the blog I think it would be appropriate to report a bit about what I heard from the Academic Joint Commissioner of the KV (government) schools during our orientation in Delhi. He began by getting our attention with a few statistics about government schools. Seventy-five percent are multi-level schools, which means that many classes are taught in the same room (classes 1-5, for instance). All of the Fulbright teachers are placed in big cities, so this was an excellent reminder about how many children are living in rural communities. He also gave a staggering statistic: 53% of primary students drop-out or are forced out of school. By forced out, he meant that they were needed to work and therefore could not continue schooling. This number really shocked me. In fact, I hope I heard him wrong.

His tone was quite hopeful, however, and he convinced me that India is on a new path when it comes to education. He complained about the old system inherited from the British that puts too much emphasis on uniformity and rote learning. He asserted that too much importance is on the tests, and that he wanted education to be more connected with life and more inspired by the child.

It's very interesting. Here is India moving away from a standardized national curriculum and away from emphasizing testing. . . And on the other side of the world America is picking up a more national curriculum and encouraging testing. Our two countries could learn something from each other, I think.