When I began teaching high school, one of my most delightful discoveries was the sense of community among the staff. I’d been teaching on the university level for 7 years, and I had made some wonderful friends there–and we certainly shared professional interests, but it was actually a bit counter-cultural within the university system where professors are independent operators, each with a research area in which they invest their time. And while I believe this has changed a bit at at some colleges, I do think it is still the standard to worry more about your discipline, your content and your research & writing than about pedagogy. After all, the general model is that college students are adults, and as such are responsible for paying attention and mastering the material. High school students are still considered children and thus there is an implied obligation, I guess, to demonstrate to them how compelling the work can be (I’m SO tempted to insert a smiley-face here. Niladri, look what you started!) At any rate, among the high school staff I discovered a group of people who did several things I was not accustomed to. They were present in the institution all day (college profs teach their classes, hold office hours, then disappear–researching , writing, sailing… JUST KIDDING all you hard working profs. The rest of you–admit it.) The teachers on the high school level shared a vested interest in pedagogy. We spent a great deal of time together worrying about how young people learn and about how young people learn best. I found a community like that here, too.

The teachers at St. John’s are terrific. I feel like I belong there. At my table in the staff room are Anuradha Banerjee, a lovely, gracious and intelligent woman and gifted teacher who goes by the nickname, A-Ban. It cracks me up. It sounds like she should be partners with Mr. T! Helen Sarkar (I’m her only friend because everyone else pesters her about her diet, while I share fried mo-mo’s with her) who obviously commands both the love and the respect of the students, Angela Naik who shares her food and her wisdom with me on a daily basis, my friend and mentor, Subha, quiet, smiling Sunit, the who teaches computer & Hindi, and I’m not sure how to spell her name, but the new psychology teacher, Schompita who wonders at Americans who go home from work to more work. She can’t imagine it as she has a cook and a maid and a driver and someone to do her laundry, as many middle class people do in India.

I love these women. They share home and school stories, food, and advice. We have had conversations about education, politics, child-rearing, and cultural similarities and differences. I absolutely love the students at St. John’s, but I’m pretty sure it is the staff I will miss the most. A-Ban, Schompita, Ashu and I were deeply in the middle of a discussion of discipline in education (meaning rigor, not behavior) when we decided to carry the discussion on and develop it online—perhaps producing a cross-cultural paper on the topic.

A-Ban and Angela grading:

Teachers on the other side of the staff room:

There are four tables, each with eight seats, so the upstairs staff room accomodates 32 teachers, each with an assigned seat. I believe I displaced a poor teacher who has been relegated to the downstairs staff room until I leave. She gets her seat back in 5 days!

They have been my rescuers during the daily tiffin break. Tiffin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiffin) is a light meal—we’d probably call it a substantial snack or a light lunch. Teachers bring theirs in from home (except Helen who often buys fried mo-mos or other yummy, unhealthy items from the commissary!) A-Ban usually brings in sliced cucumber and almonds (which she soaks in water overnight, making them plump and fresh-tasting. At first I thought they just had way-better almonds in India.) Angela brings in pomegranate seeds, sliced fruit, something different nearly every day. Sunit often has delectable food in his tiffin box that his wife has prepared.

Sunit hard at work correcting papers:

Mrs. Chrestien very kindly made arrangements for something from the commissary to be sent up to me and Ashu each day during our tenure here. I had my first tiffin break in her office the first day of our arrival, and I was jet-lagged and starving, and the small sandwich tasted okay to me. In subsequent days, I discovered that it was dark chicken meat and butter—I don’t eat dark meat, and I cannot (as in, I’m not able to) eat cold butter. It gags me. (Mark can testify—if there is even a dot of unmelted butter on my toast, I cannot eat it. I know it makes me sound like a petulant six-year-old, but what can you do?) I also don’t generally eat white bread. (I think this is the point where I lose the right to say I’m not a picky eater. I’m really not…. I just have a few issues.) I managed to choke the sandwich down one or two more days, but then I simply couldn’t. Of course the teachers noticed and word was sent to please send me something different, so they sent me cucumbers and tomatoes on white bread—with butter. I really couldn’t handle it. Angela called down for them to send me some bread without butter and helped me wipe the butter off the vegetables (it doesn’t all come off!) and they sent up four more pieces of white bread. In Kolkata, where you walk past the poor and homeless every day, I felt like an ungrateful, petty, spoiled prima donna. (I also shouldn’t eat the tomatoes—we only eat peeled fruit. Vegetables that are washed in unfiltered water, even when they are dry, may be carrying the bacterium that makes so many foreigners ill.) I was at a loss. And it kept coming. The teachers kept sending messages. The next day it was just a pile of sliced white bread! I could not stop laughing.

As this went on day after day, and I watched my friends bringing in their tiffin boxes filled with delicious Indian delicacies, or buying samosas or fried mo-mo’s from the commissary, I confided to them that I had loved everything I’d eaten in India so far except for these darn white-bread-with-butter sandwiches. They confided that they would not eat them either. The next day Helen bought me a mo-mo, and I asked why I keep getting these sandwiches when there is such delicious food available. Because, they replied, that’s what they think you want. Aaargh.

Tuesday and Wednesday I got mo-mos. Happy day.