Over the summer of 2020, I was able to participate in a program called “Leora Trust” that was dedicated to teaching children in India conversational English through one-on-one calls between an assigned mentor and a student. The program lasted about 4 weeks, and I ended up starting a branch of this program at my high school to spread this organization to a wider audience. Although it is difficult to communicate with someone who barely knows the language you are most comfortable with speaking; I found this experience enlightening and rewarding.

The first student I had in this program was very young and relatively quiet. I found it almost impossible to carry a conversation with him, considering his minimal English vocabulary and introverted personality. Since I was assigned to this student during the summer cycle, I was able to dedicate more time to formulate a detailed lesson plan for our 45-minute sessions three times a week. To be completely honest, I do not think my teaching improved his English that much. However, I believe I was able to make him more outgoing, confident, and comfortable with trying new things. These are also qualities that I myself was able to work on through my time with him, and our personalities were more similar than I had thought at first. With him, I was also able to be introduced to the realities of teaching someone a new language, including all the awkward parts such as the long pauses between sentences when he got stuck with speaking the English language.

The second student I was matched up with was the cousin of my previous student but a little older. This was a completely new experience since he was a little more extroverted and spoke English better. Something I had come to realize he enjoyed doing during our sessions was to play online games –the type I used to play when I was his age; for example, the ones where you groom a puppy or bake a cake for a bakery. Through this, I was able to see that there is always a level of connection between any two people. For example, despite our completely different backgrounds, both of us enjoyed playing the same type of online games.

Finally, my current student was by far the most different that I had had so far. She came to our first session and started asking me questions, which is something I had not been used to at all from my past students. Her personality was extremely interesting, and she had this sassiness to her that I found quite funny. At one of our sessions, we had started discussing barbies and play dolls, when she suddenly got up and came running back with dolls in her hands. I promptly fetched my old Barbies, and we spent the rest of the call showing and complimenting each other’s Barbies. After the session was over, I had a sense of joy in the fact that we were able to bond so closely over such a simple thing.

If there is anything that being in this program has taught me, it is that no matter where you are from or your gender, everyone is the same on some level. These kids are just like everyone else, including you and me, which I just found fascinating considering our age difference and difference in background. Sometimes people make judgments based on differences, but I believe that differences can bring people closer together, and can often even lead to finding similarities.