Friday marked the last day of my two-month volunteer teaching gig at the Vikaasa school in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India. In a very short time, Madurai has become an indelible part of my life, and the kids that I worked with will be one of life's great, cherished memories.
I told them that when asked about Indian children, I will answer, "Well, they are excitable..." as you can see in many of the pictures.
It was a joy, pleasure, and honor to learn from these students, and hopefully they picked up a thing or two from me.
It has become rather patently clear in my life that my career decisions have been based upon trying new things, stretching my teaching abilities to the limit, and this was no exception. I had never taught this young of an age group, so there were many new levels of learning that I had to go through to be able to even have a modicum of success with this new challenge. They challenged me, and I challenged them back, and somewhere, we met in the middle and I believe that education did happen.
Walking through the halls, I spotted the "If" poem by Rudyard Kipling that I have written about previously, and I paused to do a mental checklist of my time spent in Madurai, and I believe, that with a not-undue measure of confidence balanced with a caution against pride, that yes, "I am a Man" from this.
My thanks to the wonderful kids at Vikaasa, who provided me with the best salary that I teacher could ask for, gratitude and enthusiasm.
I addressed them at the morning assembly, and had been asked to incorporate a bit of Tamil into my valediction, for which I selected a saying from the celebrated Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar's Thirukkural:
Kanakkum yilakkanamum Makkalukkuk-kanakalaakum
which means, "Letters and Numbers are the two eyes of a man." To which I challenged the students, that if the language arts and sciences are our two eyes and make us a complete human, so that if we are given the seeing gift of education, then why should we ever choose to be blind?
And, in turn, they have surely opened my own eyes to a new world, the world of India.
Romba Nandri
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