Our Experience at Mentor International School, Magarpatta: What We’ve Learned So Far
The first time I saw the “quiet space” at Mentor International School on Magarpatta Road, my daughter was sitting in it with a stuffed orange bear, looking not upset but thoughtful. It was the second week of the school year, and I had come in early to volunteer for the reading circle. She hadn’t wanted to join the story session, and instead of forcing her or making her feel bad about it, the teacher simply said, “That’s okay. Do you want to stay here for two more minutes, or would you like to come back and sit next to Riya?” My daughter stayed for exactly two minutes, then walked over and joined the group.
At first, I assumed the quiet space was just a nicer name for a time-out corner. But over the next few months, I noticed something different. The children used it as a tool, not as a punishment. If a child was crying over a lost drawing, or getting too loud during free play, they would sometimes go there on their own, or a teacher would suggest it as an option. The language was always the same: “Would you like some time in the quiet space?” and “What do you need to feel ready to join back?”
That small shift in wording matters more than it sounds. At home, I started doing something similar. Instead of saying, “Go to your room and calm down,” I set up a little corner with a cushion and a couple of books in the living room. I told my daughter, “This is a place you can use whenever you feel like your body is wiggly or your mind is loud.” She used it maybe three times before deciding it was boring, but the important part was that she had the language to tell me, “I need a quiet moment,” rather than having a meltdown.
What this taught me is that Mentor International School’s approach is less about strict discipline and more about helping children notice their own states. When I asked the class teacher about it during a parent-teacher meeting, she explained that they use the quiet space as part of their “self-regulation” routine—not as a way to isolate a child, but to give them a chance to practise making small choices. That is a very different philosophy from the school I attended, where a child who was crying would have been told to stop crying or sent to the corridor.
But I didn’t choose this school just for the quiet space. There was a moment about halfway through the year that really made me understand how they view learning. My son, who is in the third grade, came home with a “learning journal”—a notebook where he draws or writes about something he learned each day. Most of the entries were scribbles, but one day he drew a lopsided rectangle with a cloud on top and labelled it “my brain”. When I went in for a conference, the teacher brought it up. “He told me the cloud is the things he knows, and the inside of the rectangle is the things he’s still thinking about,” she said. “We’re trying to help him see that confusion is part of the process.”
That comment stayed with me because it showed that the teachers actually read those journals and use them to understand how each child makes sense of the world. Not every school would take a messy drawing and turn it into a conversation about metacognition. For a parent, that level of attention is reassuring, but it also comes with a practical lesson. I started asking my son different kinds of questions at home. Instead of “What did you learn in school today?” which always got a shrug, I began asking “What confused you today?” and “What did you make that didn’t look the way you expected?” Those questions opened up a lot more conversation, and they normalised the idea that not knowing something right away is okay.
The school also does something with homework that surprised me. In the first term, they sent home a note saying that weekend homework would not be a stack of worksheets. Instead, the children were given tasks like “listen to a song your parent loves and tell them what you think about it” or “help cook a meal and notice how ingredients change when they’re heated.” My first reaction was that this was too loose—how would they measure learning? But my daughter came to me very seriously and asked if she could interview me about what school was like when I was a child. We sat at the kitchen table with a notebook, and for about twenty minutes she wrote down my answers in a mix of Hindi and English. It was one of the most engaged I’ve ever seen her at home.
That kind of homework doesn’t work for every family, of course. It requires a parent to actually participate, which can be hard after a long workday. And I noticed that some kids in her class didn’t do the tasks because their parents were too busy or just didn’t see them as important. The school didn’t penalise them, which I appreciated, but it did mean that the divide between kids who have involved parents and kids who don’t becomes more visible. That’s a real challenge for any school, and I’m not sure Mentor International School has a great answer for it yet. In the classroom, they try to balance it by doing group discussions of the homework so every child gets to speak, but it’s still not a perfect system.
The facilities themselves are quite good—the campus has open corridors, a decent amount of green space for a school in Magarpatta, and classrooms that don’t feel cramped. The student-teacher ratio in my daughter’s class is about 18 to 2, which is much better than the school I went to as a kid. But what I’ve come to appreciate the most is the way the teachers communicate with parents. They don’t wait for the annual parent-teacher meeting to raise a concern. A few weeks ago, I got a message on the school app saying, “Today Aanya had a tough time sharing during group work. We talked about it in class, but we thought you should know so you can talk to her about it if she brings it up at home.” It wasn’t alarming, it wasn’t dramatic—it was just informative. And because they framed it as “so you can talk to her if she brings it up,” I didn’t feel like they were expecting me to punish her.
That kind of communication is rare in my experience. Most schools only contact you when something is wrong enough that they want you to fix the child. Here, the message felt more like “we’re all adults in this together, and sometimes kids are just figuring things out.” It helped me understand that my daughter’s social struggles are normal, and that the school sees her as a person who is learning how to be with others, not a behaviour problem to solve.
There are still things that worry me. The school has had some teacher turnover this year. My daughter’s Hindi teacher left in November, and they brought in a substitute who was young and soon left too. That kind of instability is hard for adults, let alone children. I’ve asked about it, and the administration explains it as teacher growth and personal reasons, but I can’t pretend it doesn’t affect the classroom rhythm. Also, the school’s emphasis on self-directed learning is great for some kids but perhaps not for all. My youngest, who needs more structure, often comes home saying “we got to choose our activity” with a slightly lost look. The teachers are attentive to this and do step in to guide him, but it’s an ongoing adjustment.
What I’ve learned from this year at Mentor International School is that the real value isn’t in the facilities or the curriculum on paper. It’s in the small, daily decisions—the quiet space, the learning journal, the homework that requires a conversation, the message that tells you your kid had a hard day without making you feel like you have to fix it. Those aren’t magic solutions. They’re just practical ways of treating children like people who are still figuring out how to handle their feelings and their thoughts.
At home, I’ve borrowed a few of these ideas. We still have the quiet corner, though it’s mostly used by the cat now. I still ask about “confusing moments” at the dinner table. And I’ve stopped treating school communication as an assessment of my parenting. That’s helped the most, honestly. The school isn’t perfect, and I don’t think any school is, but this one has given us a vocabulary for talking about learning that I didn’t have before.
As the year winds down, I’m still not entirely sure if this is the right place for us in the long run. The teacher changes concern me, and I want to see how the school handles the pressure of exam years. But for now, I’m holding onto the small moments—my daughter walking over to the quiet space on her own, telling her teacher “I need two minutes,” and then walking back into the group. That’s not something I ever learned at school, and it’s already proving to be a lesson that matters far beyond a classroom in Magarpatta.
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