TI Club

I could hear laughing and giggling and happiness all around me. It was amazing, I was having the time of my life ! The kids were enjoying the After School Club ! I was enjoying it because they were all handling it amazingly.

So, the job I got had taken me to Sachse High School, Miles Road, Texas. I was all nervous about what we were going to be taking in the first instructor class. We had planned what we were going to be doing, made a rough agenda of what we could teach the students today. I, specifically, had even attempted a detailed agenda explaining every little thing that I was going to be discussing in the lecture. I had to be fully prepared to anything that was about to come my way. I went to the university from where the team had decided to start the journey for the school. It took about 45 minutes to reach the university from where I live.

Where I live is about 10 minutes of walk from the bus stop. It is officially the end of summer in Texas today, but the Sun is happy being where it is. The Sun has grown lazy, as have all of us ! So, the 10 minutes walk to the bus stop is actually the stairway to hell this time of the year here. Still, we try to make it as fast as possible and usually end up sweating a lot. So, I caught the 12.50 PM bus and was at the university by 1.15 PM. My team mates had made plans of writing out the code if they were not able to teach anything there. I took a look at the codes, and thought to myself that I could show them the planning I had done for the day, but kept it to myself. As we got ready for taking the journey to our new jobs, I booked the Uber using the corporate Uber account provided to us by the University of Texas at Dallas. The account is in order for us to get free rides to where we would be going to work. If we book it by our personal accounts, the university does not reimburse the cost, hence we always go for the corporate account to book the cab.

We reach the school in about 15 minutes and check in, get the visitor tags and take seats in the waiting room, where Dave and Fred are already waiting to give the talk to the students. Dave and Fred are employees of Texas Instruments and were the ones making the agendas and running the club. They were also the ones who were going to be the people giving the instructions for the day. This was a relief, but our mentor had warned us about the consequences of not being prepared, and in any case we had to be prepared with whatever was going to be done at the school. Around 2.30 we started moving to the classroom to take the session. The school was amazing inside, nothing like what we have in India. There were lockers on both sides of the corridoor, and lots of corridoors, we had to actually ask for directions to the classroom we had to go to.

As we reached the classroom, the bell rang, all doors of the classrooms around where we were standing sprung open and we had to move to a side. There were so many Americans trying to move out, or rather run out, of the classrooms. Little kids, teachers and everyone else, just waiting for this moment to be able to go home and I couldn't help but smile at the new place I was in ! The place suddenly felt so lively and so mind-blowing, and this was probably the first time that I felt I was in The United States of America ! At this moment of time, every moment meant so much to me, every second, I felt, I was living a completely different life I could have never imagined ! There was so much to the moment.

The class filled up in about 10 minutes and the session started around 2.45 PM. All of us had placed around the calculators and the TI Innovator HUB boxes which were going to be used during the club proceedings. After a brief introduction of everyone to the students, the students were instructed to take seats on the bigger lab tables instead of the classroom table-chairs, which created a ruckus around the lab (yes, it was a lab which I was assuming as the classroom since the beginning) for a while, but everyone settled down in a bit. As usual, the smarter and ahead of the classroom group of students right at the back and those who want to keep up with the instructor(s) right at the front !

The session starts, and there is a lot of giggling and cheering and happiness around me. I left my calculator at the table for the mentors, where no one was sitting now. None of the mentors were seated, all were in the process of helping everyone around them out so that we could keep moving with the session with everyone learning and becoming experts on the subject. I stayed put, stood at a single place and just observed. The kids were so full of life, so creative, so beautiful (yeah, there were girls too !)  and I just kept looking around trying to realise that this was what I was missing in my life. The element of creativity and life and excitement. Kids were experimenting with the calculators on their own too. One of the kids tried to play with the colors being shown on the LED in the HUB, while someone else was just trying to find what frequency of sound would produce no sound (or just high frequency sound inaudible to the human ears). Everyone was doing something with the calculators, coming up with new and amazing things to excite even us, their mentors !

This went on for a while, and then (unfortunately) the session ended. I could be nothing but amazed and powered up for the rest of my day. As the mentors were discussing how they and us were going to be taking up during the next sessions, we just listened to what they had to say. The teacher at the school who knew most of the students told us they were trying to impress us, the people from University of Texas at Dallas as they themselves wanted to get into the university (yeah, I know bad choice of people to impress). Some more discussion and we get back to getting to the university for our lectures and keeping up with the classes.

I am just keeping up with telling everyone about how excited I am about being a part of this club !