Every week, each of us fellows teaches at three different schools. The railway school, where all three of us spend the most time, feels unique in many ways – for one, it is the only school where the students can actually (almost) understand our language. And even then, there is certainly a lot that is lost in translation. In the other two schools where I teach, New Nallagutta and Audiah Memorial, I have actually been teaching my classes in Telugu. I grew up speaking Telugu at home with my family, but teaching a two hour class where I have to catch teenage slang and correct written essays and stay witty and with it the entire time, that is certainly a huge challenge. But after three weeks at New Nallagutta and Audiah Memorial, I have found that the struggle to understand them in Telugu has certainly been worth it. For one, it’s a relief to note that the only person who ever looks dazed and confused at the end of a class is me!

At Audiah Memorial, in addition to learning about photography and storytelling, we have been setting aside a little bit of time every class for an ongoing debate regarding the different chances of success for boys and girls studying in India. The class was divided into three groups, each of which was assigned an argument . I have hardly been able to contain their excitement, the kids have so much to say about the topic and they have all really embraced the side they were assigned with strong arguments and stronger passions. In the early phases of the discussion, when the groups were discussing the issue amongst themselves, it was interesting to note that in every group, the girls began by asserting that there were equal opportunities for success while the boys took to explaining the ways in which girls may not have as much opportunity. The girls seemed to need some prodding before they were willing to set aside all of the encouraging statements they had heard about equality and to actually think about the world they observed around them. For the boys, on the other hand, the reality of the matter seemed to be much more readily on their minds. I would have imagined it would be the girls to have the issue on their minds, and I wonder whether the difference may be due to a tendency at home to discuss such issues with boys but not girls. I will prod the students for more details on this and report back. For now, I am trying to get them to follow some debating etiquette so I can actually hear what they have to say!

Such experiences seem to indicate that language is a huge consideration when thinking about the kids’ education and output. Quite apparently, the use of English, which is a third language for most of these children, is a significant limitation on what they can say and what they dare attempt to say. But almost more inhibiting seems to be another language problem, their unfamiliarity with the language of self-expression – in any language. At railway one day, in the course of explaining some assignment, Stella and I used the verb “to experience.” Unsurprisingly, the girls didn’t know what it meant, so I resorted to our normal solution – I translated into Telugu. But what I did find surprising was that the girls still didn’t know what the word meant. When the language needed for reflection and expression appears so foreign to the students in their first language, it is no wonder that such activities are a struggle in their third. Hopefully, the little victories of today will turn into giant leaps six months from now.

In Hyderabad, we’re teaching at a railway school. My mother went to a railway school. When we discovered this cosmic congruence we looked at each other and giggled.

A railway school is a government institution for the children of railway workers. During the worst times of her life in China, my mother went to the People’s Railway Second Middle School. She wasn’t the child of a railway worker—her parents, my grandparents, had been physicians at a city hospital in Guangzhou. But it was the Great Cultural Revolution, the start of the Down to the Countryside Movement, and my grandparents were thrown out of the city by Mao Zedong’s officials for re-education. They were separated from one another, each sent to a distant rural village to work as farmers and to administer medicine in the countryside.

My mother spent her days as a kid barefoot, catching frogs from swamps and cooking rice on tree branches in a stone stove and squeezing past water buffaloes in rice fields. Her parents sent her away to be adopted by family friends, railway workers, so she could go to middle school. When she was twelve she wore a dress with flowers to class. The teacher asked the students to write essays condemning capitalistic acts of narcissism and posted the essays on the classroom walls. Other teachers ostracized students who were bored in class, who weren’t obedient, who had other ways of thinking and different ways of doing and didn’t like to follow suit.

But there was one teacher at the school who noticed my mother’s penchant for math. He thought she had potential. He gave her extra math problem sets to work on after school, and asked other teachers to do the same in their subjects. He encouraged her to join the school orchestra, and convinced the schoolmaster to let her. She became very busy. There were suddenly many things to learn. In her last year at the railway school, she unexpectedly passed the national high school entrance exam with high marks, and was able to attend the top high school in the city.

In her twenties, my mother moved to America. In her forties, she became a doctor in San Francisco. She still remembers her math teacher, thinks about him from time to time, tries to look him up to find him and say thanks.

—

The Railway Girls’ School in Hyderabad is, of course, rather different from the one my mother attended in communist China. Amongst government schools in India, I’d say Railway is exceptional, with authority figures like Mr. Prabhaker and Headmistress Jayathi—energetic, devoted, full of good humor. Stlll, at its heart, the pedagogy of the Indian government education system focuses on rote memorization and test-taking preparation. There seems to be very little emphasis on questioning sources, literary analysis, and the kind of individual critical thinking that is so essential in an American liberal arts education.

The thirty girls that Srilekha and I teach are intelligent and full of life. Some are avid talkers, others are quiet and more reflective in writing. Last week we asked them to write stories about their ambitions. It looks like we’ve got some future pilots, fashion designers, doctors, and school principals here in Hyderabad—below, I’ve posted a mini photo story featuring a few of the girls’ responses.

We want to encourage the students to pursue their ambitions. But we want their ambitions to be true ambitions—not dreams, wishes, fantasies. We’ve tried to push the students to think about exactly how they might achieve their ambitions. And what if they fail a test? Or they’re told by a teacher that they can’t succeed? What if their communities disapprove, or their husbands prefer them not to work?

The girls learned how to use a camera last week and are beginning to work on their photo stories. One group is making a photo story about a fictional girl who reaches her goal to become a doctor. We’re asking them to think very carefully about how she will respond to obstacles she might face.

—

When my mother became a doctor in America, my family became very comfortable. They gave me a liberal arts education. The things I’ve puttered over in my life include structuring an essay about The Sorrows of Young Werther and learning how to make French onion soup on the burners of my dorm room kitchen.

In India, we’re often asked why we came here to teach in a program like The Modern Story. In America, I’m rarely asked why—many are comfortable enough in their own lives to be able to work for others’ social equality, and cultural tourism itself is taken as a manifest value.

My family, though, did ask why. Why I’d run toward a place that was anything like what they’d run away from. They had run away from the effects of the Great Cultural Revolution in China, the stunting of opportunity and free thought and individual autonomy. Away from a country straining between tradition and modernity, extreme poverty and extreme wealth juxtaposed in the same city. Or perhaps it was that I had the luxury of running away, only temporarily, from what they had worked toward. They had worked for comfort, to live in a place with ubiquitous showers and clean streets, to offer a liberal arts education to successive generations.

And it’s with that education that I began to want to go to India. I felt a kind of restlessness, a large ambiguous attraction to the country.

My mother is fascinated by the western canon. She’s making her way through audiobooks of the Odyssey and the Divine Comedy. I take pleasure in seeing the wooden street carts outside Railway Girls’ School with rusting pastel paint and thin spokes on big wheels. That way, when my grandparents tell me stories from their childhood about buying sugarcane from street vendors, I can picture the scene.

What is your ambition? from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

Hi! My name is Srilekha and I am extremely excited to be one of this year’s three new fellows with The Modern Story. Although I grew up entirely in the US, mainly around the DC area, I spent a lot of time in Hyderabad as my family is actually originally from the state of Andhra Pradesh. So I have always really loved the place, but I never really got to know it. And so here I am, looking to get to know the place through the stories of the children growing up in it…and hoping to to lend guidance and support as they find and tell those stories.

To tell you a little bit about myself, I recently graduated from Columbia University, where I studied History, Math, and Economics and also cultivated a deep interest in the fields of health and education. As college came to a close, I was looking for an opportunity to learn something about these fields while hopefully contributing something important to someone somewhere. And that is when I discovered The Modern Story. As Piya, the director, said, the goal of the organization is to teach people to use technology to convey a message. For those of us that have been making powerpoints since middle school and have been blogging since college, this is something we routinely take for granted and yet it is something we do consistently with pride and confidence that our ideas are being ushered into the world. This is a feeling that is sweeter when it is shared, so these kids, who have new stories to take from and new messages to share with the world, they just have to know how to find those stories and to use the technology! I know I have found something important to do, and it’s a cool feeling.

The TMS experience actually began today, as the three of us fellows, along with Piya, the director, and Asma and Neha, the teaching assistants, made our way to the school where we will be teaching. The trip there was actually quite the ordeal. I began the day by fiercely haggling with auto drivers, only to choose the one that would ram into a motorbike and throw off its two occupants and would later get the auto stuck between two giant buses, freezing us a mere stone’s throw from when I would be able to thankfully get out. And upon my exciting removal from this mad vehicle, I promptly got run over by another auto. The crowds and traffic in Secunderabad were utterly overwhelming, and yet the moment we could even see the school, all of the chaos and stress completely evaporated. The kids gave us the warmest of welcomes, and were followed by the greeting of a very friendly and supportive administrative team. I hadn’t really thought about what to expect, but I will never forget our first day with the kids that will consume our minds for the next sixth months…and I couldn’t be more eager to get started!

Srilekha’s Story from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

As a high school English teacher in Brooklyn for the last three years , I have learned a great deal about myself, my students and the power of education.  My name is Samantha Love and I am excited to be one of the three fellows participating in the Modern Story for the 20011 semester.  As my third year of teaching was coming to a close, I began to think about transitioning schools and carrying out another of my goals – to live and work abroad with students in another culture.  I have been fortunate in my life to have had the opportunity to travel and learn in other countries and these experiences have opened my eyes to the world and shaped me indelibly as a person.   This desire brought me to the Modern Story fellowship and I am so excited to embark on this journey with them.

As an inner-city teacher, I realized how lucky I was to have been exposed to these different peoples, places and cultures, and I truly believe that traveling has an enormous impact on our education and development as citizens of a global community.  All too often, however, these opportunities to learn from different cultures are not available to the youth I’ve worked with.  As an educator, I hope to work to create opportunities to learn and travel for my students and to constantly open their eyes to the myriad possibilities of the world around them.   I am committed to the ideals of experiential education, social justice, and travel and I’ve tried to introduce my students to different peoples and places as a teacher.  We traveled to Washington DC in 2010 and have recently started a project to learn more about the culture of India. Our first excursion was an Indian lunch which was a huge success.  For these reasons I am setting up a virtual exchange between my students in Brooklyn and the students in Hyderabad in hopes that they can learn about each other’s cultures and use the technologies that we must embrace in the 21^st century.  I am so excited to bridge these two very different worlds as I maintain my connections with my former students and foster new bonds with students in India.  I can’t wait to begin this project!

Samantha Love’s Digital Story from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

Hello!

I’m Stella, and I’m one of the 2011-2012 teaching fellows for The Modern Story. I’ve posted a short video below to introduce myself and tell you a little bit about why I’m so excited for our digital storytelling program and its mission.

I’ve spent the past four years as an English major at Columbia, thinking a whole lot about what exactly makes up a story, the different ways of telling one, and the many things that a story can do. I’ve loved studying literature, but it’s a bit of a paradoxical activity in college—to be thinking hard about scenes of war, or grief, or family reunion, but to be doing it all insulated in a dorm room. Storytelling does involve a set of techniques and theories, but at its heart, I think, is the process of living and experiencing things openly, thinking about these experiences, and then trying to create something that rings true.

I’m really happy about getting back to this heart of storytelling, by collaborating with a group of students every day to work out our thoughts narratively, and utilizing technology to contribute to a global conversation.

I just flew into Hyderabad last night, equipped with a bottle of pepto bismol and many, many stories from friends and family about what it’s like to be in India. But I still have no idea what this city will become for me over the next six months. I’m looking forward to learning those things about a place that you can only really know by experiencing them for some time—a city’s different moods in the morning and evening, or during sunny days and monsoons.

Introducing Stella from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

Hello Readers!

TMS is back from summer break, and our new Fellows, Sam, Stella and Srilekha are settling into Hyderabad and ready to begin teaching next week!

Stay tuned for the Fellows’ Intro Digital Stories and their initial thoughts from the classroom! This semester, they will be working at the Railway School and at four American India Foundation DE/Dell Centers of Excellence.

You can check out last semester’s final projects here and here. Kara and Ilana rushed off to their next endeavors, but their students are remembering them fondly and they just might make a reappearance on the blog!

Let the Stories Begin!

When I was younger, I counted Ms. Frizzle, the zany teacher from Joanna Cole’s The Magic School Bus book series, as one of my personal heroes. She’s smart, unpredictable, fun, intelligent, and loves taking her classes on wild field trips. Sitting at my desk, coloring in diagrams of the human body, I’d dream of floating down the blood stream on purple cell inner tubes, or being blown out of a nostril when someone sneezed (see Inside the Human Body if you need this explained). While my own elementary school field trips to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, or the Baltimore Aquarium were cool, they were nothing quite like what the “Friz” offered her class.

Now that I’m a teacher, I idolize Ms. Frizzle even more. My reasons are the same, if perhaps a bit more nuanced. To begin, she gets her students involved in their material – every day she pushes them to ask more questions, poke around, try daring new methods of learning. She approaches subjects in many different ways, tailoring each lesson to the evolving needs of her students, and doesn’t dumb down material; she has faith in the nascent genius of her kids and trusts logic and clear explanation to help her students connect the necessary dots. Finally, she always  encourages her kids with the mantra “take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!” words I’ve always taken very much to heart. I’ve thought about this phrase a lot over the past six months, and about how necessary it is to encourage my own students to overcome their fear of “wrong answers” and rigid test structures. Watching our students at Railway slowly shed their anxiety and inhibitions, as Kara, Asma, Neha, and I pushed them to take small creative and inquisitive leaps, has only reinforced my belief that the Friz provides an exemplary teaching model.

On Friday, January 21st, I had the wonderful opportunity to put into action not just the Friz’s classroom methods, but also her out-of-class methods. That’s right, we took a field trip, and not just any field trip, but a field trip to beat all other field trips: we went to Google.

With the fabulous organizing efforts of our friends at Google, Suchi, Vignesh, Rohit, and Raji, TMS was able to accompany our students at Railway Girls’ High School to Google’s headquarters in Hyderabad for a day of exciting learning. Accompanied by our “multimedia storyteller” friend, Daniel Schwartz, Kara and I helped the girls document their experience at Google. Below is a small photo essay of shots taken by Daniel and me, an interview that the girls conducted with Suchi, and a link to the entire album of photos that were taken by the girls throughout the day.

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

9:20 am – Dressed in their “Saturday” best (the girls wear blue uniforms the other five days of the school week), our students line up in the school’s maidan, each equipped with a notebook, pen, water bottle, and a prepared list of questions for the Googlers. In creating our interview sheets, we focused on questions we could ask about the choices and decisions Googlers had made which brought them to the jobs they currently hold. This line of query connected to our final project on “Choices and Decision Making.”

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

9:30 am – As Ms. Frizzle says, “Class, to the bus!” Google sends a lovely luxury bus to pick us up, and the girls are giddy as they settle into their comfortable seats. Along with Kara, Daniel, Asma, Neha, and myself, Mr. Prabhaker, Shailaja (the computer teacher), and two other Railway teachers join us on the field trip.

Photo by Ilana

9:30 am – Neha boards the bus!

Photo by Ilana

10:15 am – About half way to Google, our students plead with the teachers sitting in the back of the bus to sing them a song. Preethi (left), Sara (center), and Monika (right,) were among the most vocal proponents. After some debate, Kara and I decide to teach everyone the old Girl Scout tune “Make New Friends (But Keep the Old)”. It’s a hit.

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

11:00 am – Arriving at Google, we are greeted by Vignesh, Rohit, Raji, and their Googler friends. The girls are agape with wonder at Google’s impressive, colorful foyer. Vignesh helps us get name tags, and we enter the google offices.

Photo by Ilana

11:10 am – Mr. Prabhaker poses with students as we wait for everyone to get name tags.

Photo by Ilana

11:15 am – Students and teachers marvel over the intricate rangoli-style art made by Googlers to celebrate Pongal and Sankrati. The students of Railway Girls’ High School make lots of handicrafts for school programs and events, and really appreciate lovely art.

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

11:20 am – Students settle down in one of the Google office rooms.

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

11:40 am – After a great introduction by Suchi, we all participate in an icebreaker activity: everyone writes his or her name on the top of a blank piece of paper, and then puts the paper down on his or her chair. Walking around the room, we stop at each person’s paper and write down something positive about them. In this photo, Nikhila adds to the long list of positive things others have already written about one of her peers.

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

12:15 pm – After our icebreaker activity, the Googlers lead us to the wondrous Google lunchroom. Each girl grabs a tray and investigates the variety of lunch options – salads, a pasta bar, a sandwich bar, veg, non-veg – although most girls settle on the good and familiar: rice, papad, sambar, and some curry. The girls sit in small groups at scattered tables, with one or two Googlers per group, and Kara and I are delighted to hear them bravely chatting and laughing with their new Googler friends. The biggest hit at lunch, by far, is the ice cream freezer. Above, R. Monika, Firdous, and Divya (left to right,) enjoy their ice cream.

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

12:50 pm – Back in the Google meeting room, Preethi and Kara (right) discuss the morning’s events, while Sandhya, Amreen, and Nikhila (left to right) chat and sip some Diet Coke (soft drinks and fruit juice were another big lunchtime hit.)

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

1:10 pm – Eager to learn more about what Google does, and everything it can offer us in the classroom, the girls listen attentively to Sri Laxmi explain a few things about the company and its products.

Photo by Ilana

1:45 pm – A Googler assists Sara in a demonstration about how to create  a gmail account.

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

2:15 pm – Sandhya, R. Monika, and Firdous (left to right,) pay close attention to the presentations on YouTube, YouTube EDU, Google Maps, Gmail, Google Earth, and more. They each hold gifts given to them by the Googlers – a Google notebook, a pen, and a beautiful decorated box to hold notes.

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

2:20 pm – We conclude our day at Google with two interviews conducted by our students. Here, Jayashree works the Flip camera as Firdous interviews Sri Laxmi about her job at Google,  how she decided to become a Googler, and any advice she has for us.

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

2:30 pm: R. Monika (back to camera) interviews Suchi, as Srilekha, Pravalika, Lalitha Vani, and Shailaja (left to right,) look on.

Railway Girls School’s Field Trip to Google: An Interview with Suchi Kumar from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

2:45 pm – Vignesh answers a question asked by Preethi (standing).

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

2:45 pm – Our Googler friend Vignesh.

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

2:50 pm – Our day concludes with a group photo of our teachers and our friends at Google!

Our field trip to Google was a wonderful experience – something straight out of one of The Magic School Bus books. We are all incredibly grateful to the Googlers for hosting us and teaching us about so many things.  As a token of our appreciation, the girls made their own digital thank you to send to the Googlers:

Thank you, Google! from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

For more of the girls’ own photos from the trip, click here.