Thursday, March 22, 2012

FAQ #1 - Why India ?

Map of India - With Mumbai circled in Red
In the next few posts I will be dealing with some of the questions people ask about our upcoming adventures: Question #1: Why India ? Many people seem to think that we deliberately went out and decided to go to India. Actually, we really feel like we didn't really pick India - we picked the American School of Bombay. Hes's what I mean: We went to the International Schools job fair after deciding to commit to teach overseas. We had determined that we probably did not want to go to South America or Africa, so we were looking mainly at Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Obviously, we wanted to go to a school where we could both work , so we were looking for a school in the need of an elementary teacher and either a librarian or a technology integration person. When we met with the interview team from ASB, we found they were looking for an elementary teacher who was excited about reading and writing workshop and who had experience with open classrooms, team teaching, and possibly same staff development activities. Those are exactly the qualifications that Nancy brings. They were also looking for a school librarian for a one-to-one technology school: that is, a school with lots of high technology. Having been both a school librarian and a technology director, and believing strongly in the need to integrate technology and libraries, I felt I could be the high tech librarian they were looking for. When we talked about living India, we realized a couple of things: First, if you are not happy at work, you won't be happy at home, and second, that living in a cosmopolitan major city like Mumbai is not the same as living in a small village in rural India. It will be interesting to see how India has changed in the 45 years since I've been there!

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