To The Motherland: My Trip to Shanti Bhavan: First Week and School Day Performances

My first week of school is over, and it culminated with a free day today to celebrate the founding of SB. Before talking about that, here are some thoughts from the week.

Teaching here is incredible, frustrating, rewarding, and inspiring all at the same time. I have a group of nine 11^th graders for both commerce and economics, and they are so earnest that I can’t help but smile even when they’re doing something wrong. They offer to erase the board for me, ask nonstop questions, and do adorable things like write me the note below (one of the girls has nicknamed me Kit-Kat, presumably because my name starts with a K…)

I had to discipline them for the first time yesterday – we were playing a review game over the first chapter of commerce, and they got a little too rowdy. I told them to pick two kids from the class to go apologize to all the neighboring classrooms and tell me when they had done it, otherwise we wouldn’t be playing any more games. Instead of two people, the entire class came up to me over the next few hours to individually apologize and say they had talked to the other teachers. It was great to see.

My 12^th grade group is tiny, only four students. One of them is struggling and needs additional tutoring, but she works so hard that you can’t help but admire her dedication. I looked at her desk the other day and she writes motivational phrases to herself on the tabletop; in my public speaking class, she also gave a speech about how she wants to change the world one day to make it better for others.

Public speaking is really important at SB, and a different group takes these classes every week. On Wednesday, we practiced extemporaneous speaking, and some of the stuff the kids came up with legitimately made me tear up in the middle of class. One girl talked about her newfound drive to work hard in school to make her family proud, and one kid talked about his favorite birthday, when he got special food in the dining hall and won a basketball game. The simple happiness that they take from everything, even the most minor daily events, really prompts serious introspection and makes you reevaluate the things that you worry and complain about on most days.

Anyway, today was School Day, and the kids had most of the Friday class schedule off. There was a special assembly with dance performances, skits, and jokes, and we had a volunteers vs. students basketball game in the evening (which we won). As far as Fridays go, it doesn’t get much better than this.

I have about a million pictures to share but here’s a selection of pictures and videos from the day. One of them is a dance performance I did with a group of girls who were really enthusiastic about trying something new – they were incredible, picking up the whole routine in one night of practice and performing for the whole school today. Other groups danced to songs like Waka Waka, Danza Kuduro, some bhangra songs, and then the volunteers all joined in for DJ Got Us Fallin in Love Again. In this case, pictures tell a thousand words, so enjoy!

Bhangra at School Day!

The girls learned this in literally three hours the night before