Sitting on the rope cot in my grandparent’s home near Kodumudi, Erode, listening to Rainbow FM staring at the laptop screen is where I am, when I write this. Very far away from anything related to school, students and teaching – Physically. Teaching is a job that grows on you and you grow over until both becomes indistinguishable from one another. Looking back after one year of being the worst possible teacher in my own rating, I think I have also become the worst possible blog writer in many people’s rating.
The first blog post was written well before I became a teacher and it turns out it has been 364 days (so not 1 year really). I have written about 5 posts excluding “Hello”, of which only 3 during the Fellowship. This points to the very obvious fact about the Fellowship itself – it is hectic and mad at the same time. It also points to the fact that I never took time to unload myself as often as I should have done.
So, I am going to write down a summary of what all I can possibly remember in a subjective manner. This blog was not meant to be subjective in any way, it was supposed to be a place where things will be recorded as is without analysis or perspective. But with such a big backlog of about a year, I doubt I can write anything objective as-is here.
The Setup
School
ECI Matriculation Higher Secondary School, Tondiarpet – that is the name of the school where I was placed as a Teach For India Fellow to teach a set of 37 students in 4th grade. The school is run by a trust run the Evangelical Church of India, hence ECI Matric. It has about 900+ students studying from Pre-KG to 12th standard. There is a church in the middle, the Academic block is to its left, the Office and the hostel are to its right. The standard size of the classrooms is about 30×30 ft (guessed never measured), which is kind of crampped when you consider there are 77 students, desks, bags, cupboard, and a divider wall in the middle to distinguish Section A and Section B.
My Class
My class was made up of 38 poor souls who did not know what they were doing, which included 1 adult trying to make sense of whatever was going on. The class had about 19 boys and 18 students from middle class backgrounds, so wide and varied that I actually don’t exactly remember what middle-class is now.
Timings
The school opened at about 8.30AM and the staff are supposed to sign the attendance register before 8.55AM. There is a morning prayer meeting at 8.55 in the church for all the christian teachers and at least one staff member of each grade are to be present, if they are non-christians. So I experienced more religion in my one year of fellowship than what I have seen in my 25 years of existence. The School gets over by 3.30PM and the tuition(s) are over by 4.30PM. Generally I left the school by 3.30PM.
I lived about 90 minutes away from the school, so my day generally started by around 7.15AM when I got out of the house and ended by 5.30PM when I got back to the house.
………………….. to be continued .,