Day 1- Mental Detention

While I was trying hard to make up my mind to teach them and I had given my fiancé` the whole and sole responsibility to train me then is when I had to have a fight with him!

So they had called me to teach in a school, International school! MIND IT!! Was going to teach the kids some English! Well, I wondered loud and in my mind if they required any training! “International” has a very reflective ring to it. Fiance` was bored of me continuously testing on him the various ways of imparting English grammar knowledge. There I was with my headset glued to my head, which I hate from the deepest depths of my heart, talking to him while he rests in his flat in Tufailand! It’s a rainy day outside, constant drizzle visible from the slide-in window screen fitted perfectly on my 6x5 windows. Its easy for him to say: Stay calm! Stay clam! As if I m a domestic animal being instructed to stay calm at the veterinarians’! Wish I could take him by his collar and shake him till he feels dizzy and shout on top of my voice into his ears, “It’s school kids for heavens sake and I’m the latest addition to the Community-of-the-paranoid.” But I cant do any of this, considering the fact that he is 6 feet above and I’m 5 feet above. I don’t degrade myself by trying to hurt giant mammoth creatures!

While I was in school I have reminiscence of hearing loud voices in my ears instructing me to do things in a particular manner, set by set, rule by rule, explanation of certain activities which adults want the kids to conduct there own ‘mature’ way and here again I could hear the voices in my head but this time the voices were of kids asking me questions from the word ‘go’ till the time I break my head against the wall asking for their mercy.

International School. I pondered and wondered. Aloud and silent. While I walked and while I talked. What do public schools produce as their product? Do non-international schools have kids with lesser brain? Or they cannot apply at the eminent higher educational bodies planet Earth boosts of? Or is it only the minor fact that International kids have International parents with International money!

There I was about to witness my doom when I heard another teacher in the lobby tell yet another one that some other International school takes 28 lacs for the 11th and 12th grades. After hearing this my above evaluation and analysis of the International schools with imbalanced parents solidified. Here they were. Mothers in shorts, hair coloured into blond and with the UK-returned accent. They paid special attention to their p, t, k accentuation.

I met a teacher who tried talking to me in the lift while the floor indicator blinked towards my floor of devastation. She quickly commented that I had a very UK accent and my mind reeled back to the lobby full of mani-pedi-westminster ladies. Was I being counted? Was I being complimented or complicated? I wish my head stopped thinking but if it stopped then I automatically would count myself as one of THEM. I needed a fire exit. An alarm had gone off in my head. They with their talks of EU holidays. They with their talks about wild African safari. They with their talks about having invited SRK for dinner wherein Gauri wore a pink sleeveless shirt which completely contrasted with her dainty tan.

I wished that I would find solace in my class and marched right into it.