I became a teacher in the Fort Worth Independent School District with a single goal: to give students what I was so lucky to receive. After emigrating to Texas from India in 2000, I graduated from Fort Worth’s R.L. Paschal High School in 2008. But Paschal’s best resources—teachers with more than 20 years of experience, weekend and summer SAT/PSAT prep classes, AP exam prep—are reserved for its small white and Asian student population, not the Black and brown students who comprise over 60 percent of the school body. I benefited from an educational apartheid that persists to this day. When I became a teacher, I vowed to help bridge this gap.
After graduating from New York University, I worked a variety of odd jobs. Eventually, I moved back to Fort Worth and lived with my mother, who was approaching 20 years in the district’s employment as an ESL teacher to elementary school students. Inspired by her, I joined the district, working as a tutor and eventually becoming the freshman study skills teacher at Amon Carter-Riverside, a high school in north Fort Worth where 92 percent of the student body is Black and Hispanic.
The job gave me purpose. It distracted me; it structured me. Ten years after starting my battle against severe depression, my new job required I care of myself because that’s how I could do my best for my extraordinary students. Whenever I broke through to a student I celebrated quietly, knowing I’d have to reinforce the bond every subsequent day. The only way to earn their respect was to respect them first. On the last day of school before winter break in 2019, my principal offered me a job in the English department. A longtime teacher was leaving, and I’d take over his classes in January 2020. I accepted immediately.
