DELHI, India — For Jessica Cooper, a 2011 Howard University law school graduate, going to work means putting on a shalwar kameez (means ‘Indian suit’), reporting for duty at 7 a.m., and taking lessons in Hindi.
It’s all part of her nine-month stint as one of 15 English Teaching Assistants, or ETAs, stationed here in India through the Fulbright Scholars program. Ten of the ETAs, including Cooper, are based in Delhi, while the other five were assigned to schools in Kolkata.
Cooper, who plans to join Teach for America upon returning to the United States in the spring of 2012, said her decision to teach here in India stems in part from her regrets for not studying abroad while still in college.
Teaching the eighth and ninth Standard, or grade, at Kendriya Vidyalaya — a government-run school for government employees here in the Andrews Ganj neighborhood of this nation’s capital — not only helps mitigate those regrets, but it also achieves something else.
Specifically, it greatly enhances the practical experience that Cooper says is a prerequisite for achieving her goal of working in the field of education policy.
“I want to understand what teachers deal with before I try to make laws telling teachers what to do,” Cooper said during a recent interview with Diverse in the school library. “If lawmakers took more time to specifically talk to the people the laws would affect, laws would be better,” she said in a general broadside aimed at education legislation that teachers have criticized as impractical.
Her belief is built in part upon her experience working in education policy at the Washington, D.C.-based Children’s Defense Fund (CDF). At CDF, Cooper said, the individuals with the most insights into the workability and practical effects of education bills were those who had been school teachers themselves.
