Trading places Teacher, family heading to India
Trading places Teacher, family heading to India
| Michael Cook, his wife Rebecca and their children Quinn, 15, and Grant, 13, will travel to Delhi, India, this fall where Michael will teach English as part of a Fulbright Teacher Exchange grant that he was awarded recently. In exchange, Rashmi Chopra from India will teach freshmen English at Marquette Senior High School. (Journal photo by Miriam Moeller) |
By MIRIAM MOELLER, Journal Staff Writer
MARQUETTE — This fall, local high school teacher Michael Cook and his family will undertake an adventure other families may only dream of.
Cook, an English teacher at Marquette Senior High School, recently was awarded a Fulbright Teacher Exchange grant to teach English in India, and the whole family — his wife Rebecca and their children Quinn, 15, and Grant, 13 — is accompanying him.
“We were looking for an opportunity to basically share a little more of the world with our kids,” Michael said. “We wanted something more significant.”
The mission of the Fulbright program is to promote mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries in the world. So in late August, the Cook family will travel halfway around the world to an apartment in a Delhi neighborhood where — according to Rebecca’s research — monkeys in search of food attack people in their houses.
“Delhi is going to be overwhelming, it’s crowded, a barrage on the senses,” Michael said.
At the same time the Cooks head to India, Rashmi Chopra will pack her bags and travel to Marquette where she will teach a semester of freshmen English at MSHS and live in the Cooks’ house.
Chopra was raised in a highly educated family; her father was a colonel in the Indian Army and her mother an anthropologist. She is married to an officer of the Indian Army and has three grown children.
In an e-mail she writes: “Though I have traveled extensively all over India, the only foreign countries I have visited are the neighboring countries of Nepal and Bhutan, which do not even warrant a stamp on the Indian passport! You can understand I am very excited to come to America.”
But before Chopra arrives in Marquette and the Cooks leave for India, a lot of preparations need to be made. The Fulbright grant provides a free flight for Cook but not for his family. The Cooks also discovered that apartments in Delhi are quite expensive — and they had to look for a place with a built-in generator to guarantee an electrical supply. Quinn and Grant will be able to go to the school Michael will teach at for some of their lessons, but they also will be home-schooled.
“We are going to study world religions and the Indian culture by going out and visiting places,” Rebecca said.
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Besides home-schooling her kids, Rebecca plans to volunteer in an orphanage in Delhi and explore Indian medicine. While Rebecca decided to give up her job as a nurse in Marquette to be able to travel to India, she said she’s not worried about the future.
“For me I know things work out for a reason; there’ll be something for me,” she said. “It’s such an opportunity, I can’t pass it up.”
Although the adventure will not only be more expensive than the Cooks had initially thought and it will change their lives in ways they don’t even know yet, the family expressed no fear.
“It’s time for a little challenge, something more than a ski race,” Michael said.
He added that his high school students ask why he would ever want to do something like this. For Cook that answer is easy.
“I am investing in this because it’s worth it,” he said. “I think that it’s easy to sort of fall in the trap of complacency and security, but I think that this fear of what might go wrong has forced a lot of us into small and scary boxes. We have lost the ability to see the world clearly.”
Cook will be teaching at a school that is funded by the Indian government and educates children of military and government personnel. Classes are conducted in Hindi, the country’s official language, but also in English.
“It’s also a school that highly values the Indian culture,” he said. “(They) teach Sanskrit, practice meditation.”
He said that he is expected to teach nine classes per day, six days a week, with 50 students in each class. Classes last 35 minutes and are scheduled between 7 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. He asked Chopra when she has time to sleep with such a tight schedule. However, from what Cook gathered, the curriculum is a lot more prescribed and lecture-based than in the U.S. Chopra said that Indian teachers leave the school at 1 p.m. and generally don’t take work home.
To Cook that is new territory, since he is used to assigning papers and often grading them at home and on weekends.
For Chopra, Cook said he thinks teaching in America will give her more freedom.
“I wish I’d be here when she is here. I wish I was sitting in her class,” he said.
As for Quinn and Grant, they have mixed feelings about the trip.
“I have honestly no idea what to expect out of this. I don’t really have a choice,” Quinn said. “I am sort of going along.”
Quinn also said she does not like to leave her friends behind in Marquette. She is not expecting to make very many friends in India due to the lack of opportunities to meet English-speaking kids her age.
“I guess my brother will be my best friend there,” she said.
Despite her skepticism, Quinn is getting more acquainted with the Indian culture.
“Because of the religions there you’re not allowed to wear clothes that show your shoulders and knees,” Quinn said. “Rebecca has been trying to make some Indian food. We have been experimenting with some recipes.”
Quinn also said that they will have a driver in Delhi, and that they may even be able to hire a cook.
Michael and Rebecca are curious how their children will react to life in a city with nearly 14 million inhabitants in a climate that calls for daily temperatures of 90 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit. However, they are optimistic that the trip will be important to them in the end.
“Even though they might not be looking forward to it, it will resonate with them for a long time,” Michael said.
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