June 18 after my first hot shower in 5 days at the Regency Soorya in Malapurram

Many happenings in India.  Over the last two days, I have made cultural presentations at three different schools, had a traditional dinner (as in 6 men ate while at least 12 other children and women watched) at the home of a teacher, taught my lesson on Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust and was greeted by a marching band and showered with fresh cut flowers at Sacred Heart School.  Just like home!  I am sure that Sara will have the Detroit symphony orchestra and the Detroit Lions cheerleaders on hand for my arrival back in the U.S.

Too many incredible moments to even list. 

I learned today about the tragic church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina.  Beyond horrible.  After learning of this human disaster, I was haunted by a question and answer session I had at Aura Edify School yesterday.  We visited what is essentially a private, for profit charter school on Wednesday.  Beautiful building.  Small class sizes.  A dynamic principal.  We met with faculty for a short presentation and a question and answer session. 

One man, a French and social science teacher, challenged Erik and I from the beginning.  “What do you do when American students voice anti-establishment views in school.”  Alright buddy, game on!  There was some harmless banter about the political and economic philosophies of Noam Chomsky but then he went for the solar plexus.  “I heard from a reliable source that there are more guns in Houston than there are people” he began.  From that point he suggested that the aura of violence in the world emanates from the U.S. and it starts with gun violence on our streets. 

Ouch.  As some of you may know, this is a real issue for me as my daughter was the innocent victim of a drive-by shooting and thankfully received only superficial wounds. 

It is important to spread the global message and be ambassadors of good will and global understanding.  It is also important to know what the world thinks of you. 

Something deep to think about.

And the shower was incredible.  Turns out that for four days when I was turning the shower handle to hot it was actually going to cold.  When I turned the handle to cold, the water gets hot (well, warm).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Interesting points for the last couple of days

*Students are amazed that we have a separate parking lot for student vehicles.  At our school in India, only 5 teachers come to school by car.  One in 20 Indian adults own a car.

*Indian students certainly know what a selfie is.  I have taken numerous selfies at their request.

*At Sacred Heart School today, a student asked what teaching strategies we used in the U.S. to illicit maximum cognitive results.  Well, those weren’t the exact words but pretty close.  Good question!

*We have been the focus of numerous cultural performances including classical dances, folk dances and beautiful singing.  Incredibly talented students.  Today, we were treated to a vocal performance of a Michael Jackson song and a solo dance number by a young man worthy of an American TV dance competition show.  Also, talented, just different.

*Attended my first class in the Hindi language today.  Very interesting and learned a tremendous amount about the Hindi alphabet and the various language families.  The students start learning Hindi, which is their fourth language after Malayalam (their mother tongue) English and Sanskrit in grade 7.  I clearly needed the beginner section of Hindi.  Maybe I should learn to speak English gooder first.

*Unfortunately, I have not improved significantly on picking up the accents of many Indian adults and students who speak excellent English.  Erik is way better at it than me and I often look to him for help.  Awkward and embarrassing. 

*Google my name in Malayalam.  My picture was in the local Malapurram newspaper.  Not sure what the article says.  In fact, I have no idea.

*The principal at Aura Edify School is very excited about classroom exchanges for students using technology.  He also has an internship program for American university students who are studying education.  He will provide housing and a small living stipend.  Wow!

*Ramadan begins today and 80 to 90% of the residents of Malapurram are Muslim.  We are going to a Muslim teacher’s house tonight after sundown for dinner.  I am really looking forward to this experience.

June 15 from the monsoon struck Soorya Regency Hotel in Malapurram

Incredible day as we experienced our first full day at Kendriya Vidalaya (translates to Central Government) School in Malapurram.  It was a unique day in many, many respects and parts will be unforgettable.  I will resist the temptation to give a play-by-play account and try to focus my thoughts and remarks.

Respect or tradition? 

Tea served to me twice.  An impressive and welcoming ceremony by the 1,000 students and staff at the school which include being presented with a garland and bouquet of flowers, lighting the traditional lamp, being referred to as a distinguished scholar, a beautiful Hindu classical dance performed in our honor, bows from teachers—I have never felt so warmly received.  Both Erik and I spoke to the assembly for several minutes.  I mentioned Gandhi and got a round of applause.

Great instruction or well-trained students? 

We will observe more classes today, but have seen way more example of memorize and regurgitate than of challenging higher level thinking skills.  In Thomas’s economics class yesterday, the students were reviewing the law of diminishing returns.  When asked for students to recite the concept, students were all able to do so in a rote fashion.  I asked the students to give me examples of the law and they did not other than the one that Thomas had given them.  I suspect they were very shy and were hesitant to participate.  The students are very well trained and show tremendous respect to their teachers.  I think I will learn more today when I visit some science classes.

As I may have mentioned earlier, students stay in their own class and teachers rotate.  We learned today when a teacher is absent, there is no substitute.  The students remain in their class for the 40 minute period unsupervised and catch up on work.  Interesting.  No supervision and the students just work.  As an experiment, may be would try this with American high school students or not!

Does respect = compensation? 

Thomas works at a Central Government school which would be like if the U.S. government had its own system of schools in addition to private schools and state run public schools.  His wife works at a private school which pays significantly less money.  We were very generously invited by Thomas to dine with his family at their home yesterday with their two daughters.  Because he is transferred every 5 years, he explained, he rents a house.  The meal was fantastic.  It was a traditional Indian meal with fried rice, chicken 65 and a number of other side dishes.  Of course, Thomas served french fries first playing to our American tastes and displaying his knowledge of American cuisine.  At any rate, Thomas mentioned that he pays about $100 U.S. a month for his small, simple but very clean two bedroom rented home.  He does own a car, he mentioned that only 1 in 5 Indians own a car, and he got his driver’s license when he was 35.  He does a smart phone and his wife has a regular cell phone but his teenage children do not.  At any rate, Thomas received a $75 stipend per teacher from IREX ($150 total).  For us, would be nice.  For him it is a month and half of rent.  It appears that the respect that teachers receive here does not extend to significant compensation.  Kind of sad.

I am typing this at 7:41 on Tuesday morning.  The monsoon we have been warned about is on us.  Absolutely torrential rain is falling outside right now. 

June 13 from the Lake Residency in Ooty in the state of Tamil Nadu

Dorothy, you’re not in Kansas anymore…

*driving in India makes New York City traffic at rush hour seem like a stretch of Montana interstate.  Most roads we have traveled on have two lanes and no sidewalks or shoulders.  Sharing these road are pedestrians, bicycle riders, motor cyclists, auto-rickshaw drivers, cars, buses, trucks and a variety of animals.  Plus, every one appears to be late for where they are going.  Drivers are aggressive and highly skilled.  No texting and driving here as 100% attention is on the road.  Untapped pool of NASCAR winners here for sure.

*animals seen today include dogs, cats, monkeys, horses, goats, sheep, cows and Bison.  Most are roaming, seemingly without owners.  We did see several Beware:  elephant crossing zone, but no elephants.  Maybe tomorrow.

*saw exactly 8 white (as in people of suspected European origin) people today including 4 from our group and one when I looked in the mirror.

*here is a riddle—two teachers and an IREX program coordinator walk into a bar in India.  Only two are admitted into the establishment and one is not.  Who gets admitted and why?  Respond and if you get it correct, consider yourself culturally aware.  Full disclosure—no one actually went to the bar because everyone wasn’t welcome. 

*most students attended school today even though it is Saturday. 

*summited the tallest mountain in southern India today which is taller than every U.S. mountain east of Colorado.  Full disclosure:  our driver drove us to the top.

*ran into another group of IREX Fellows at the Botanical Garden in Ooty.  With 1.2 billion people in this country what are the odds of running into someone you know, especially when you only know 19 people in the entire nation?

*most meals eaten with fingers, not utensils.  This includes the garlic chicken in sauce I had last night.  My grandmother would not approve.

Oh, I also saw the Tinman, Scarecrow and Lion in an auto-rickshaw.

A beautiful picture from Ooty which is where the Eastern and Western Ghatts meet.

Malapurram, India

June 12 from a very hot and muggy hotel room in Malapurram, India.

We arrived in Malapurram in the state Kerela today about 1:00 p.m.  The plane ride over was a little too exciting for me.  If you love roller coasters, you would have loved this flight!  The Indian system of airport security was interesting to say the least.  I was detained at both airports briefly.  One was my fault for not understanding which items needed to put in the tray for scanning.  The other was because the total weight of the luggage among the 6 people traveling in the group was overweight and I had to pay for the overage for everyone.

My teaching partner Erik and IREX coordinator Emily were picked up Thomas V. who is my host teacher.  Thomas was part of another State Department Fellowship program (ILEP) in 2014.  Thomas spent five months at Kent State University in Ohio where he studied American teaching theory and practice and had a teaching experience at McKinley High School in Mantua, near Canton, Ohio.  I have corresponded with him via e-mail over the last 6 weeks but it was good to meet him.  He drove us from the airport in Calicut to Malapurram which took about an hour.

Malapurram is much different than Bangalore.  Located in the state Kerela, It is far less densely populated (there still are people everywhere) but green and tropical.  There are palm trees and vendors selling fresh fruit including coconut which they open with a machete and put a straw in for you.  The terrain is hilly,   even mountainous.  It reminds me of western North Carolina.  Today, Erik and I will be taking a side trip to a mountain city called Ooty so we can enjoy and see the scenery.  On Monday, we begin our observation an d interaction with students and staff at the Central Government school. 

Thomas took us to the school when we arrived in Malapurram.  We got a chance to meet and have tea with the principal.  Seems like a nice guy.  There were several murals inside the building that were interesting.  On the outside of the building there was a hand-painted mural of Abraham Lincoln.  The writing was a list of advice given by Lincoln on why school is important.  On the inside there were murals of Lord Buddha, Jesus Christ and several Hindu Gods.  It was very interesting to see this acknowledgment of religion as would not see tis in the U.S. 

As I reflect back on the two school visits we have already completed in Bangalore, I cannot help to be even more curious about my research question; how is the school experience different here for students than in America and at Waverly?

My initial observations are that they are quite different.  Many of the teachers in our group are drawn to parts of this experience.  For example, students here are extremely well behaved.  They settle down in class when they arrive, they refer to their teachers as sir and madam, they do not socialize with their peers in class.  In general, they are very attentive, much more so than American students, and seem so much more eager to learn.  On the other hand, the methods and outcomes are not very appealing.  In the classes I observed, the vast majority of learning that took place was over factual information.  Teachers read information to students.  Students followed along.  Students repeated what they heard out loud mostly in choral response.  I have seen virtually no cooperative learning and no emphasis on higher level thinking skills.  Granted, I have observed two classes where students were learning English and one where they were learning geography.  Lots of memorization.  Of course, I don’t think that our students in the U.S. do much memorization at all.  I see this when ask students what 7 x 6 is and they reach for their calculators or when they ask with horror if they are going to have to know dates in history class.  Perhaps out students need more memorization of facts while Indian students need more higher level thinking content.

It is now Saturday morning here in Malapurram.  This is the one Saturday of the month when school is not in session.  Normally school is Monday through Saturday. 

That is all for now.  I am currently out of the wifi zone so including pictures is a little bit of problem right now.  I will include pictures later. 

June 11 from my desk at the Lemon Tree Hotel

Anyone who knows me knows that my proficiency with technology is, well lets say I am significantly behind the curve.  At any rate, I had a self-inflicted technological challenge which prohibited me from posting on my computer so I am in catch up mode now.

As  I mentioned in the previous blog post, I took a stroll the first day in Bangalore from the very western and comfortable hotel down St. Johns Road.  I took another stroll later that evening and observed a cow (among the many I have seen subsequently).  The cow was standing on the side of a busy street grazing n what was clearly garbage.  Below is the picture I took.  To be honest, I was initially bewildered, perhaps repulsed and saddened.  The standards of neatness just do not approach our standards in the U.S.

Ethnocentrism is the practice of judging other people by the standards of your own culture.  In theory, it is a pretty easy to expound on, especially in the classroom.  I get the idea and so do the students. Like most things, theory and practice are sometimes a mile apart.  This seems to be one of those times.  All week, I have been working hard to apply the theory of resisting ethnocentric thinking to this situation.  Why don't they just pick up all the garbage?  I don't have a good answer, but I am starting to get the idea that while it may bother me, it just doesn't seem to be important here.

June 8 from my comfortable desk at the Lemon Tree Premier in Bangalore

Bonus!!!  Double blog post

Blog Post 1

I have arrived!  Safely and soundly.  I am checked and had an excellent night of sleep.  I arrived in India at 1:30 a.m. in a big modern airport and proceeded through customs and on to our hotel…all in the dark.  So, I have not much in the way of observations at this point.

I do want to talk about language, however.  Like many (most) Americans, I am for the most part proficient in English and can say a few lines in several languages.  At no point in my life, did I ever even approach fluency despite short by but specific language training in Latin, French and Russian.  At no point was I particularly interested even in becoming proficient (or likely wasn’t willing to do the work).  Although this was never my thought, it has come to pass that this was actually okay because most people on earth have decided learning English is a good idea.  So nice for me!  And other Americans who have been historically isolated geographically and empowered economically such that everyone else on earth is better off learning my language.

As I travel, I often wonder if and how long this advantaged position will last?  As the world changes quickly and dramatically, will Americans need become fluent in other languages?  The internet and high speed airplanes have made the U.S.’s geographic isolation mostly irrelevant.  The U.S. is no longer the sole economic power in the world as it was in the 2^nd half of the twentieth century.  From my course work, I learned that 200,000,000 people do not live in the countries of their birth.  This number is expected to increase steadily.

In America, we regard most people who speak English and something else as intellectual giants if they are Americans and with wonderment and even suspicion if they are not.  Is the world changing so quickly that even the teens I work with daily will be at an economic disadvantage by being unable or unwilling to learn a second language?  Will everyone eventually learning English or some other common language for economic purposes?  Do populations on earth lose important aspects of their own culture when their native languages become secondary? 

To be honest, I don’t know.

I do know however, that in most countries outside the U.S. you cannot get a job at McDonalds, be a flight attendant or sell anything without speaking more than one language.  Perhaps this gives some insight into the answers.

At this point, I am just thankful I can walk down the streets of most other countries and be very confident that I can get what I want and need without learning their language.  What an absolute “privilege!”

Quick Notes

*Flight times from Detroit to Washington was 58 minutes, from Washington to Frankfort was 6 hours 58 minutes, from Frankfort to Bangalore was 8 hours and 45 minutes

*6 hour layover in Washington was spent with Sander, Dorian and Mara.  Very nice of them to come out to the airport to take me out to lunch

*6 hour layover in Frankfort was spent hanging around in the McDonalds seating area

*I am getting ready to go out for the day and spent some time looking out the window and it appears that Indians do not wear shorts!  Yikes!

*Our first seminar starts at 4:30 this afternoon with insights into the Indian education system. 

*Hoping to get my body acclimated quickly to the nine and half hour time zone difference

*Internet is spotty.  Well, actually it’s probably pretty good for people who know how to connect to it.

Blog Post 2

June 10 from back at my desk at the Lemon Tree

Observations form my first walk in Bangalore.  I talk a 40 minute walk alone on this hot, sunny, dusty day from the hotel up St. Johns Street until the street ended and back.  The man at the front desk gave me a list of “sightseeing.” Here is some of what I saw.

Sights, sounds, smells are unique and I have never seen, heard or smelled anything like this.  A completely new experience.  A bit overwhelming.

Cars, motorcycles, auto rickshaws, bicycles, people walking everywhere.  Total bustle.  Dodged the vehicles whose drivers seemed pretty focused on getting wherever they were going.  People dressed in all sorts of attire.  Most in shirts and long pants, some women (saw very few women on the street) in traditional saris. 

Approached on the street in front of the hotel by a gentleman (very persistent) wanting to give me a tour on his auto-rickshaw.  After that, no person approached me during my walk. 

Beeping of horns everywhere.  I saw three schools, all in buildings with no traditional American school yards.  One was a Montessori school, one a primary school and one an English high school.  Saw a number of young children in uniforms going to school.  Saw many shops selling everything from motorcycle helmets, to food, to beauty products.  Saw a place to have your motorcycle washed. 

Saw people sleeping on the streets.  Saw dogs (all seem to look the same) and cows.  Saw my first cow (very large) laying in a driveway under an awning in the most urban place imaginable. Saw four cows “grazing” in an empty lot which I can only describe as littered and small.  Saw a combination of manicured lawns and secured gates at our hotel and a few other buildings, but also saw litter and garbage and unattended lots filled with trash and debris. 

Saw a cricket club with pictures of some of what I can only guess are cricket stars and nearby a large barren field where a couple of young boys playing with a cricket bat and ball.

As I had been told which is supported by my impressions, India seems to be a place of interesting and stark contrasts.  A list of these contrasts at this point would serve as what I am sure is an over simplification of the truth so I will refrain from listing them here at this time. 

More later.