My Teaching Experience

I could feel the sweat drip down my temple as we drove down the bumpy dirt road. I was thinking about how easily the dust entering the van through the windows would stick to my skin. We were heading to the village for our second day of teaching the 4th and 5th graders at Nirman, our partner school. The first day didn’t go as well as we had hoped but we had a more solid plan going into day two. Luckily, it did end up going much better than the day before, and for the most part this trend continued for the rest of the week.

A large part of our study abroad was about designing and then integrating a lesson plan for some Indian students. Kaylah, Dibbya, and I were assigned to teach 4th and 5th graders about keyhole gardens that can be used for composting. We were surprised to discover that most if not all the students didn’t know what composting was. As someone who is interested in environmental issues, it was a privilege to be able to work with the students on this project.
Although we began with a lesson plan for each day of the week, we ended up having to do a lot of revising and improvising at the end of every day. We found that often times, we didn’t get to doing some of the things we had planned for the day because we had to spend more time than anticipated on classroom management. For example, after Monday we always split the class in half, having some students working outside and some working inside, which worked really well since there were three of us. Another key thing we discovered was that educational games as a learning tool worked really well for the age group we had. After doing a “what is compost and what’s not” game with much success on Tuesday, we decided to incorporate more activities like this into our lesson plan for the rest of the week.

Creating the garden was really fun for both us and the students. Our plan for this stayed the same for the most part, although we had to move some things back due to lack of time. Fortunately we were able to complete the garden with seedlings planted. There is work to be done with the garden still, but for going in with so many unknown factors I’m happy with how it turned out.
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Being able to introduce kids in India to one sustainable practice was meaningful in the fact that kids learning about these kinds of things can make all the difference in the future of the health of our planet. I’m so grateful I had this opportunity. In the end, I think the kids may have taught us more than we taught them.