The End

This is my final week at Kodai School. I have begun saying my farewells and packing up my things. On Sunday I will fly out of India, headed to Amsterdam, where Cory and I will spend three beautiful weeks tooling around Europe.

This entire experience has been so much more than I expected. It has been jarring and disorienting, beautiful and rewarding, and most of all mind-broadening. I have realized things I take for granted that I would never have thought of. I have met amazingly dedicated teachers and kind-hearted students and administrators who are doing awesome things with minimal resources. This experience has helped me to really experience the global community that everyone blathers on about. The people I met here barely have a homeland. They travel, they work all over the world, and they speak so many languages that this ignorant American feels like its time to get it together and broaden my horizons.

I am grateful for everything that has happened here because I feel like I am a stronger and more creative person for it. I am also very excited to be returning to somewhere "easy". I'm excited to be able to wear shorts in public and sit alone at a cafe. I know these may seem like small things, and they assuredly are, but the lack of gender equality and personal freedom that I have experienced here has made me infinitely grateful for what I have back home. It has also given me such respect for the strong female friends that I have made here.

It is ironic because for the last month and a half (approximately) I have been ready to leave this place. I have been homesick and restless and craving the things that weren't an option here. Now that the time has come to leave, I find myself nostalgic. I will miss the kids who helped me go from an unsure preservice teacher to a confident one, capable of running a classroom and thinking outside the box when encountered with one of many odd situations. I will miss the brilliant friends I have made here. I am only sorry that it took the majority of my stay to really find a group that I feel comfortable with. Now that I have established a good network here, its time to go. I will miss the teachers and admins here who helped smooth my transition into Indian culture and gave me so much authority to run my classes.

Most of all I am sad to leave my eleventh graders. They are an amazing group of young people who will do incredible things with their lives. I know right now they all think they will be doctors and lawyers and actuaries, but even if they become artists living on the beach in Goa, I am confident that they will do it well and with passion. I wish I could stay to see them become seniors, leave for college, and take the world by storm. I have complete confidence that they will do it.

So though I have one more week here, this seems like a fitting place to say goodbye to my blog followers. Thank you for following me through this crazy, emotional, exciting journey. All the best.

Love
Alex

A Last Look

Its the end of my time here. So here are some pictures to bid this place goodbye.

Baking brownies in a pot (being resourceful).

Golden KIS Awards are where the students announce the winners of "most likely to succeed", "best dressed", and "best couple". They run it like the Oscars with hosts, musical numbers, awards envelopes and waiters to serve your table.

Pretty flower on the tree outside my house.

The spring choir concert in the chapel.

This is what happens when I run after school biology tutoring.

Science Days

Some of you will know that the last couple of weeks have been a bit tough on me. I have been tired and cranky and suffering from a good bit of homesickness. Luckily something happened yesterday and today that validated this trip and my decision to become a science teacher in general: Science Fair.

It all began yesterday with "Group 4 Science Project" presentations. These are projects conducted by grade 11 students that are supposed to span the science curricula and focus on solving a specific problem. The students this year needed to focus on alternative energy. The group that won produced ethanol from potatoes. They may have blown up a couple containers, spewing fermented potato mix all over the lab, but they were ultimately successful and able to burn their fuel to spin a turbine.

Here are the kids accepting their award:

Today was the primary and middle school science fair. As a judge I spent the entire day moving around, hearing presentations, and assessing exhibits. The kids came up with some amazing things. I was a pretty proud student teacher since I spend a good portion of every Friday in the 7th grade, and we have been working on Science Fair for the last month. My only regret is that I failed to get photos of all of them.

As luck (and careful calculation of incubation period) would have it, the egg began to hatch on Science Fair day!

These guys constructed a potato flinger.

And of course one group made a rocket. 

Some pretty impressive results. 

I had such a great time and was so pleased with the work all of my kids put in. This made it so clear that I am making the right decision. Who other than a science teacher would love geeking out on two straight days of science so much!?

School Stuff

Sorry guys. I have been pretty bad about posting lately. I start to think of this as a kind of journal and forget that there are people on the other end, waiting for me to write something. Cory reminded me that people actually check this and that I haven't been writing much lately.

Things have been busy at school. I only have three and a half more weeks until I leave and there is so much to get done both for my classes here and my university requirements back home. While I am getting really excited to head for Nepal with Cory, I know I'm going to miss these kids like crazy. They are all amazing people who have great things ahead of them and I will be sad to be leaving them. Here are some photos from around the school.

The students made closed ecosystems in PHL (11th grade) biology. Fond and Dominic are working on the terrestrial one here:

 Teddy likes to watch the fish:

The chapel is pretty at night:

The Ganga campus kids (elementary school) had a talent show. Adorable:

A photo of some of my 9th grade boys taken by Letay, one of the 9th grade girls, when she took my phone:

A school assembly in the Arts Block. Celebrating the Taiwanese, Tamil, Malayalam, and Nepali new years:

Rain coming down outside of my classroom. A fairly common occurrence:

East Coast West Coast

A couple amazingly fun trips to Kerala in the west and Pondicherry in the east. Details later but here are some (out of many) highlight photos!

Kerala:

Spice shopping

Riding and feeding the elephants

Driving through fields of tea

Amazing meals (so fresh)

House boat living

Chinese fishing nets in Cochin

In Pondicherry:

Beachside promenade at 4am

Pretty church

French food!

Banyan tree

Meditation in the gold golf ball at Auroville. A very cool experience

The beach! (Bay of Bengal) fully clothed. A new beach going experience for me but one that is typical in India.

Out on the town. Low alcohol taxes here.

Mangos

Welcome to my favorite season in South India: mango season! I'm planning to spend my day being completely unproductive, eating my weight in mangos, and reading a book. Lesson planning can happen tomorrow.

Half Way

Last Monday was the half way point for my time here in India. I cannot believe that I have already been here more than two months and have less than two months to go. Being in India has stopped feeling like a vacation and has started to feel like home. It is finally setting in that this is where I live.

While there are things about India that I find frustrating or exhausting, as a whole this has been an amazing experience. I am learning so much about myself as a person and an educator. I am learning how to do more with less and ways to be creative with my resources. I have revised my idea of what it means to be culturally sensitive and am incorporating that into my teaching style, I believe for the best. I am also being forced to recognize my perspective as only one of many, and not always the best or most appropriate for the situation.

In my time here I have been exposed to a truly global community, full of amazingly talented people from all over the world who talk casually about the myriad places they have lived and languages they speak. I am learning that for this community, taking a job in Tanzania is as natural as taking a job in Frenchtown, MT. I have also learned what it is to be the minority. This has its positive and negative facets.

I hope you will forgive this anomalous post because I wanted to give you all a peek into how much living abroad has opened my eyes to other ways of seeing the world. I thought that living in India would teach me about other cultures and religions. I even anticipated the staggering poverty. What I didn't realize was how much working in an international school would impact my experience as a whole. The lessons I have learned and the experiences I have had so far have been staggering. I can only guess what the next two months will be like.