Teaching at Bapu Dham Middle School

Despite all the recent efforts to make India more modernized, its still pretty much a developing country. A lot has changed in the last few years, from highways, schools, buildings, hygiene and almost everything, but still there are parts in India where this change hasn't yet taken place.

One of these parts is the Bapu Dham Middle School in Chandigarh, India. Located a few miles away from my high school, its situated in the heart of the grain market of Chandigarh. Theschool system and faciliteis being provided there are far from what we call "21st century equipment". The teachers don't show up half the time, even if they do, they're least interested in teaching. There are way more students than there is actually room for in the classroom, the washrooms and water taps are cleaned very seldomly and the student uniforms are in the same shape.

So you do get the picture, right? An old school with very less funding and a lazy administration and faculty. My high school collaborated with their high school administration to try to make that scene a bit better. Our school introduced a program that each class would have volunteers going each week to that school, after we were done with ours, to teach them for a couple of hours and just sit and interact with them and distibute sweets at the end of each session.

When I heard our school was doing this, I quickly jumped on to that and wrote my name on the list of volunteers. Due to the high number of volunteers, I only got to go and teach for just 4 or 5 times during the whole semester, but whatever I got, I made the full use of the time.

My job was to teach middle school kids elementary level English and Math for about an hour and then talk with them for another hour. We usually exceeded our time, but the students didn't mind. It was so amazing to see them happy like that, we were greeted so well by the children, they used to run around us, listen to whatever we say, it was like they were looking up to us and that just felt so awesome.