Entry Three: Eat, Pray, Love... To Teach

"People tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will descend like fine weather if your fortunate. But happiness is the result of personal effort. You fight for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly" - Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

Eat

Unfortunately, the fruit season has begun to come to an end, so it’s been awhile since I’ve climbed a tree to have some fresh fruit. I do, however, wish to talk a little more about the actual food that is served.

When I wake up in the morning, have my SINGLE CUP OF COFFEE FOR THE DAY (I know your shocked but to quote a decaffeinated Abby Scuito, I sleep now!), and go to 8 am breakfast what can I assume to see on the table?

The traditional American breakfast of eggs, bacon, hash browns, cereal (I don’t actually eat breakfast at home so I really don’t know what is considered “normal”)? Nope!

Here breakfast usually consists of either docha and chutni (rice pancakes with an orange spice sauce), putt and caudal curry (rice cylinders with chick-pea mixture) or SPICY NOODLES on Thursdays (my fav).

Lunch is often some type of curry (potato, egg, beef, chicken, fish) with rice and veg. Dinner is the same just typically with the addition of chapati.

Dinner is eaten much later here than in the US, sometime around 8 o’clock. So there is tea time at four which is served with snacks or a small meal to tie you over until then.

Tea time snacks can be really different based on where you are. If you are just having tea at the seminary, biscuits, jack fruit fries, and tapioca chips (my fav) are common.

If you go over someone’s house, depending on the notice you give them, you could be given jackfruit bread (similar to banana bread but made with jackfruit), coconut dough balls (not the actual name of these delicious sweets), Bombay toast, also known as French toast, the list goes on…

Sometimes teachers bring in food to school

Onam Feast!

Pray

It’s hard to be living at a seminary without considering prayer but besides adjusting to the slight differences of Indian Catholicism, there are two things that I wish to call to your attention.

The first is that I ask you to pray for (no matter who your higher being(s) is/are) or think about the people of Kerala. As you may have seen on the news there has been horrible flooding here, flooding they haven’t seen in 100 years. People have run out of food, water, and were rescued from their roofs by helicopter. The death toll is somewhere around 300 but more than that people have lost their lives, everything that they have held dear, their homes, their belongings, everything.

As in most times of peril the people of Kerala have banded together to protect each other. They are rising up.

A quick video for those interested:

If you would like to donate supplies Amazon India has teamed up with organizations like Habitat for Humanity, so that people around the world can assist in the relief effort... details to come as soon as I figure out how...

We went to some relief camps and handed out tea biscuits to some of the kids

However, on a better note I would love to talk about Onam, a Hindu harvest festival that originates from Kerala. Onam observes the Vamana avatar of Vishnu and the subsequent homecoming of the legendary Emperor Mahabali and other mythologies related to Hinduism.

It is celebrated with boat races (Vallam Kali), tiger dances (Pulikali), flower arrangements (Pookkalam), worship, music and many other dances. Seeing the celebration despite the destruction has been very uplifting to say the least.

Love... to Teach

Teaching has always felt like my calling and being here I don’t feel that anything has changed. I love my students and despite the, sometimes very apparent, language barrier, I have formed some great relationships with them. We have fun, singing and dancing to American nursery rhymes (for the little ones), line dances for the older ones (they love Cotton Eye Joe). I love going to work every morning and I am absolutely exhausted by the end of the day but I wouldn’t have it any other way

In a previous blog post, I mentioned a nerdy fascination with international education systems… let me explain (and apologize in advance for my upcoming nerdy ramblings) …

I can distinctly remember this moment when I was in Dublin with my sister, an experience that was a post-Denmark revelation. We were on a free walking tour, our tour guide was great, really funny, had good recommendations, and a solid knowledge of the places we were seeing, but near the end of the tour, in an effort for us to feel more obligated to tip he told us that he was a history teacher, and after that point all I wanted to do was ask him to talk about what Irish education was like. Knowing that I was probably the only one of the tour that was curious about this I refrained… but why was I so curious in the first place?

Throughout my education about education at Stonehill, I was informed that education is different depending on where you were in the world, a fact that I saw in a very practical way while studying abroad. In fact, in my opinion looking at a country’s education system is one of the best ways to understand the culture of that country, as the primary (yet often overlooked) job of schools is to train the future citizens of that country. In visiting different countries, I hope to gain a better understanding of how their education ticks as a better way of understanding the culture as a whole.

So what has my in-depth immersion in Indian education unveiled? Well to name several…

1. Teachers are strict. Elders (Teachers, Parents, Priests) are very respected here, in fact this is a point that is even mentioned in their pledge. Students are very quick to respond to a raised, stern, low octave voice.

2. Boys and girls are separate. They sit on different sides of one classroom, have different staircases, play different sports during games period (gym). Separate.

3. There is a huge focus on multi-lingualism. Students at Holy Cross learn two languages starting in LKG and UKG (preschool and kindergarten) and three languages starting in standard one. They learn English, which is made to be the primary language of the school, Malayalam, the regional language, and Hindi, the national language.

4. They are very conservative of resources. You see this in the use energy sources in the everyday (conservative with water and turning off the lights) but also in the lack of what we consider common in an American elementary setting, anchor charts, worksheets, and manipulatives to name a few. In every classroom, there is a chalk board and the students have a small bluebook type notebook for notes, that’s it.

5. The school is very uniform (part of which, I have to assume is part of catholic education, though never experiencing it myself growing up). Students wear uniforms, are instructed on how to wear their hair, are expected to look clean, walk in line, hands behind. Classrooms are inclusive. Lessons are not typically differentiated for different learners, it is one size fits all in almost all aspects.

6. There is a huge emphasis on community. Anecdotally, a 1st standard student passed out and hit his head during an assembly this month (he is okay, no concussion, and returned to school after missing just one day). But, while he was home, a couple of his teachers went to go visit with him at his home to check on him, an action that is perfectly acceptable here but would be seen as abnormal back home in the US of A. Parents and teachers often know each other within the community and visiting homes for tea is not exclusive to the two Americans.

Honestly, I could keep going… but I think this is a good start.