I remember researching this fellowship and reading over Kara and Ilana’s posts about last year’s Teacher’s Day. As a teacher myself at the time, I was struck by the pomp of the celebrations the previous fellows described in their blog posts. I read about the origins of teacher’s day, a holiday that is a tribute to the legacy of a great educator and statesman, who asked that on his birthday, people recognize their teachers instead of celebrating his personal achievements.

This stands in stark contrast to the view of many back home in the US. We need only look to the current debate about our education system to note that teaching can be a thankless job. Teachers are currently under fire at the center of a debate about a system that has been allowed to fester and fail countless children over the years. What people seem to continually overlook is that fact that teachers are only a part of this broken system. Various other factors come into play to explain the failure of our public schools, yet we have focused nearly all the attention of a long over-due reform movement on teachers. Thousands of miles away from my old school district, at a time when I would normally be setting up my classroom for a new school year, sleeping little with anticipation of meeting my new students and building a positive and nurturing culture in the coming weeks, I was at Railway’s Teacher’s Day function with a jumble of different thoughts and feelings running through my mind.

Focusing on the here and now, it was what I have come to know and expect of a Railway function. Our introduction to the formalities and the importance of Indian “functions” was Railway’s Independence Day performance. The program was full of honors for chief guests, the girls had rehearsed for weeks, the school had purchased costumes for thousands of rupees, and the HM and Prabhaker had been talking about it all month to make sure that we would be there with cameras to film the girls’ performance. You could not overlook the importance of functions for the girls and the school community. This emphasis on performance and school-wide celebrations has a lot to do with the palpable community culture at the school. The girls take pride in their school and work together to represent it favorably.

View from the roof of the girl's Independence Day performance.

Our program began with the customary arrival of the “chief guest.” He was greeted by a tunnel of pom-pom waving girls, and a smiling HM Janaki. Prabhaker hustled us into the computer lab to showcase some student work from TMS class, and then we all marched through the girl-tunnel to take our seats by the stage.

girl tunnel

The first act of the program was an amazing kuchipudi dance performance by our very own, Srilekha! After she blew us all away, Prabhaker commented that “although she was raised in the US, she made many Indians in the audience jealous” of her dancing skills.

The second highlight was a choreographed dance to the pop hit, “Sheila” by the tiny-tots. It was almost too cute.

tiny-tots!

It has felt strange to be here the past week, as my friends and colleagues are going back to the classroom. I’ve heard from some students as they head back to school and I’d be lying if I said that I never second-guessed my decision to leave all that behind and travel to India to embark on this experience. However, the warm reception by the students and teachers at Railway, as well as their kind words and gifts lifted my spirits. To Piya, past fellows, and my wonderful co-teachers, Stella and Srilekha, I wish you all a happy teachers’ day!

With the completion of the photostory unit at nearly all our schools, we’ve begun to lay the groundwork for the first video project. It is exciting to plan these classes as I am learning along with the girls and experimenting with the different video editing skills I plan to teach them. I am also fortunate to live and teach with Stella, whose aesthetic and video-editing skills are far superior to my own. Here is one of my first, very humble experiments with Windows Movie Maker…

Pedestrian’s Guide to Street Crossing from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

Aside from experimenting with the software myself, it’s also exciting to start the video units to learn more about what the girls have to say about the topics. We are exploring subjects that ask the girls to explain their world to an outside audience that is unfamiliar with certain aspects of their daily life in India. We’ve introduced the girls at Sultan Bazaar and Railway to the concept of audience and I’ve told them that my students in the US will be watching their videos to find out more about what life is like in India. With that in mind, our first video project at Railway will describe the Telangana situation and explain how it affects the girls’ lives. At Sultan Bazaar we are exploring the practice of three-medium schooling and the multilingual nature of India. Hopefully, the Brooklyn students will be able to make one or two videos in response to give the girls over here a sense of what life is like in Brooklyn. They were thinking about making a video that showcases the contrasts between the world-famous New York City that tourists see and their local community.

So far we have only dedicated one or two classes to beginning the film-making process at Sultan Bazaar and Railway due to holidays and exams, but we are off to a great start. Stella and I have a solid plan for our language film which we started drafting with the girls and put the finishing touches on ourselves to show them the creative possibilities for their next film project. We plan to teach them how to incorporate some short stop-motion animation to spice up the ordinary voice-over–visuals – interview format. The small class-size and eagerness of the girls at Sultan Bazaar gives us confidence that they will be able to pull this off while sticking to our tight schedule.

At Railway all thirty girls have divided into teams of 4 -5 to take on different roles in the making of our film about Telangana. An interview team drafted questions and interviewed a couple teachers about their opinions and the impact of the political situation on their lives. The photo team searched for images from the web to help explain the Telangana issue to a foreign audience. A research team began reading articles and writing a voice-over introducing the issue. A video team searched Youtube for news clips that could be spliced together for an engaging intro that conveys the importance of the situation and pulls the audience in.

The last two teams are looking ahead to our final project where students will hopefully go through the process of identifying a community issue they would like to research and address by making a film and perhaps designing a community-action project to help solve the issue. All students wrote a newspaper article about a community problem and the remaining two teams are typing up the articles, formatting them into a newspaper and photographing the various issues. The majority of students seem to be concerned with water scarcity in their communities. I think that my next step will be to identify a local NGO working to help those who don’t have access to clean water to see if they would be open to speaking with the girls.

The team-work approach has worked well in helping to get a lot done at a quicker pace. My hope is to let the girls rotate through each team so they are exposed to each task and learn all the requisite skills to make a video. Hopefully all goes well this week and we make significant progress on the shooting and compilation of the footage. Wish us luck!

It’s Sravana Masam (the month of August) and as everyone here knows, this means holidays! For our Muslim students, this whole month is Ramzan (Ramadan), which means they fast during the days and break their fast in the evenings with festive family gatherings and yummy Haleem. For our Hindu students, there has been an endless slew of holidays celebrating each of the many different Hindu gods. This past week, we missed a day of school for Krishna’s birthday and next week, they are all looking forward to Vinayaka Chavithi, a huge city-wide celebration in honor of the elephant headed god who is known as the remover of obstacles – probably a good holiday to come as we start the students on video!

The energy of holiday season is palpable, and the kids clearly look forward to each day eagerly. In class the other day, one of my students was showing us how to create the music of the boisterous street parade-dances  – he was one kid drumming with his hands on the side of a desk and he sounded like the entire percussion section of a band…and he was dancing at the same time! As loud and fun as the festivals are, it is clear that they also mean something deeper to the students – the word “belief” is the one they keep throwing around. This is the part they don’t talk about, and apparently can’t really articulate. They responded quite readily to questioning and challenging when it came to issues like education, the use of chewing tobacco, or the uneasy political climate in the city. But the word “belief” was supposed to explain all when it came to religion, and they just didn’t understand what more I could possibly want with my prodding and questioning. Coming from a world where we are taught to question religion and are expected to be able to articulate some sort of rationale for our faith, it was very difficult for me to figure out how to explain what I wanted. The culture around religion is clearly a given around here – Sravana Masam means street parades and deities all around, and Ramzan means evening Haleem at Iftar (fast-breaking.) But beyond that, “belief” is also a given for a lot of our students, and I am still trying to figure out what that really means to these kids that have grown up with it. How does it shape the way they think about the world and their place in it?

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.