February, 2008 - Tamil Nadu, India

The George Foundation – Shanti Bhavan

I got caught up in office politics today. It was horrible- at least, I found it really awkward- and it really shouldn’t have been a big deal at all.

The grade 6 class that I was helping with was doing a special project - building landmasses. Each child received an amount of dough (all from 1 Rs worth of Chapati dough) which they then had to turn into either an island or a plateau or a mountain or an isthmus (geography reminder – isthmus: the small piece of land connecting two larger pieces of land)… etc. I happily played with the children, and created a couple of chapati ducks to swim in the various bodies of water around their land forms, and didn’t think much more about it. The teacher who organized it was actually really funny, she thought the kids were sticking their grass too randomly on their land forms (we were poking bits of rock and grass into the dough for a more ‘realistic’ effect, at any rate the teacher was going around and when the child wasn’t looking she’d snip the tips off of the grass growths they’d planted. Some were insulted, as I would have been, to have their artistic license so callously treated, but it was funny to everyone nonetheless. There was a certain vim and vigour to the snipping that is hard to describe.

The resulting projects were put out on display for the school. People were asking who’s class it was that did the projects and it was passed on that it was the grade 6 geography class that I help out with, and the regular teacher. Well. Somehow this got convoluted and so in the assembly next day the principal thanked the class and me for coming up with the idea and making the projects. I’d already told numerous people that it was the teacher who’d come up with the idea, and I yelled it out at the assembly when the principal said that it was me, but it didn’t seem she heard. I went up to the teacher afterward and we laughed about it, I thought - I apologized and said I didn’t know what happened but that I’d yelled it out and would continue telling everyone, as I’d already told everyone, that it was her idea and I’d just been helping out. I thought she understood and it was all fine but then at lunch the teacher came up to me and said something along the lines of ‘you’re taking credit for my work’ - with a smile, but still. I felt very guilty and decided that I would announce the next day in assembly, when I was to be speaking anyway, that I hadn’t originated the idea, and would further explicitly explain to the principal that a mistake had been made.

The day continued, a busy one, and that evening, on our way to meet with the principal, we ran into the teacher again. ‘Make sure you tell the principal about the credit.’ At this point, I was kind of annoyed, both because I felt badly about the whole thing and because now I was feeling a little harassed as well. It ended up being the first thing I mentioned to the principal and vice-principal when we met up, and I apologized profusely. Fortunately it seemed they understood the position I’d been in as well, and I think agreed with me that the whole thing seemed a little childish. As it turned out, they too had each been individually approached by the teacher.

I’m consistently impressed with the principal’s knack of managing all the situations that arise here – she is a consummate principal, with a truly impressive knack for keeping a finger on the pulse of the entire school. When she made the announcement the next day she also apologized for the embarrassment it caused me - which was embarrassing in itself but at least it made the teacher realize I hadn’t done it on purpose. Oh the debacles of small schools. I suppose that especially in enclosed communities such as this one, feelings run much higher than in other places and certain things get given a higher meaning than they might somewhere else. All I know is that I’ve had enough of the whole office politics thing! Give me children to help any day - someone else can deal with the adult insecurities!

I should mention that I think that, as native English speakers, we tend to get ourselves into slightly more convoluted situations here. This is because even though all the teaching is done in English here, not everyone understands the way we speak, or, through different word & sentence choices, exactly what we mean. When it’s in regard to the weather or how nice someone’s outfit is, that doesn’t create any difficulties. It’s only when we want the precise meaning of what we’re saying to come across that we sometimes realize how often one or the other party makes do with a semi-translation.

Assumptions are made and not always corrected, making for at times serious miscommunications. As a minor example: the other day a teacher was asked the meaning of ‘house-broken’, with regard to a new dog in a story the class was reading. She thought it meant that the dog was still running around breaking everything in the house - a completely understandable definition, but also completely inaccurate. The students got a good laugh about the actual definition, but if I hadn’t been there they’d have happily kept on thinking that it meant what the teacher thought it meant - and suddenly there’re that many more people that believe that. Rather like the word ‘bungalow’ - for us it means something small, like a cottage or shack, whereas here it’s used for movie star mansions… When Evy heard Minti use the word bungalow, she assumed (naturally) that it meant something along the lines of a cottage. I’d heard the term before however, and so we were able to clarify. Not a big deal, but when you think of all the intercommunication that goes on in a system like a school… suffice it to say, it can get a lot more confusing and a lot more awkward…