Goverment School

The Goverment School over in Pattalam is situated at No 4/2 on Sheik Mohideen Subedar Street. This is an older part of Chennai, and the streets around here are quite narrow and winding. The school is right in the middle of it all. It’s a small place compared to some of the others, but it serves the local families well. We have a few classrooms that are always full. The noise from the street—vendors calling out and bikes zooming by—is just part of the background music for our lessons. We don’t have a lot of extra space, so every corner of the building is used for something, whether it’s storing old books or hanging up student drawings. The walls could probably use a new coat of paint, but the kids don’t seem to mind. We start early in the morning with an assembly in the small corridor. The teachers here are mostly from this side of town, so we know the local shops and the neighbors. It’s a very grounded kind of place. We spend a lot of time just making sure the kids are attending regularly and that they have their uniforms in order. There’s no big mission statement on the wall, just a clock that’s usually a few minutes slow. It’s just a normal neighborhood school doing its thing and trying to keep the students focused on their books while the world passes by outside the front window in the 600012 area.