The Prestige

Part two of the two part saga. The Prestige. What made last week such a great week? One word - kids.

To remind my millions of viewers, my project has two goals - to teach English to kids in villages and to educate these same kids on health issues in India. It appears, however, that more and more, our project is veering towards acknowledging the former and ignoring the latter.


So, we left early in the morning to Kalpakkam and arrived at around 11:30. Once we arrived, a teacher at the school help us get settled into our hotel. We grabbed a bite to eat and eagerly went over to the Eureka School. Look at me - I don't even care about lunch...

The school was literally amazing. We were teaching 3rd, 4th, and 5th Standards (read: 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades).

The first day, we just sat in a circle and went around each classroom and said, "My name is ______. What is your name?"  We also had the teacher control most of this class just so we could objectively gauge what the students' levels were.


We made a few quick observations.

First of all, 3rd standard was a little slower than 4th and 5th standards, but nothing we didn't think we could deal with. We had created week-long curriculum's to match what we though would be their level. We found out 3rd standard created problems for us all week.

Also, we realized that there was huge variations within each grade between the smartest and least proficient students. Oftentimes, some students would understand things in just one explanation, whereas others would take the entire class.

Some pictures from Day 1:

The School from afar. 

 Close up.





3rd Standard - That's Ashwinth on the left, Vignesh in the middle, and I think, Mouli on the right.

4th Standard girls (3 of 4 of the girls). From left to right, it's Priya (she was pretty bossy), Aarthi, and Saranya (probably my favorite girl in all the Standards).

5th Standard doing a Science experiment. Ravi on the left, teacher, and Nishanth.

Karthik - one of the most helpful kids at our school. He also has an extremely magnetic smile which just made everyone happy! One of my favorite 4th Standard kids.

Nishanth, again. Also, Nishanth is Ashwinth's (from Standard 3) older brother. Once we found out, we literally couldn't tell the difference between either of them.









Day 2:

Today, we decided to move forward with animals for all the standards.


Taught who, what, when, where, and why to 5th Standard.

Again, amazing. We found that 3rd standard struggled, and was mostly memorizing, instead of actually learning.

Day 3, 4: All great. Taught new stuff, like directions (left versus right) and colors, and reinforced old stuff (like animals).

Day 5: Tried to play Jeopardy, but they didn't understand it. So we switched to a team game (two teams). Then they got bored, so we switched to a fun game of duck, duck, goose. it was really funny cause they called it "dock, dock, poosh." haha, again, a great day though - prolly the best day.


Pictures!

Vinod was one of the best 5th Standard kids and one of the best behaved kids. He wanted to be an IPS police officer, which is a really high, well respected position for people in India. He was extremely intelligent and really competitive.

 Above is Jeeva, the smartest person in Standard 5, along with Vinod. She was also similarly competitive and very nice. She would get visibly upset when her team was down. She also hated when she lost a board race to Vinod on Day 5.

This is Standard 5, just enjoying the day. In the foreground, you see Nishanth jumpin up. 










Below is one of my favorite pictures of our kids. From left to right, their names are Vignesh, Hemathkumar, Surya, and Karthik. They were all fourth standard and so much fun! Vignesh was probably the best behaved kid in the school, but still enjoyed playing around. Hemathkumar was a lot of fun as well, and would always joke with me that I understood Tamil and he understood English. Surya was a little mischievous guy. He always wanted to take pictures with the camera and probably had the smallest attention span of anyone in the class. Karthik, as you can see, has such a magnetic smile that he instantly became one of our favorites. He was extremely helpful if we ever needed chalk or a duster or anything really.

This is all of the 4th standard boys. This is where they eat lunch. It's a circular concrete block with a metal umbrella above. You'll see Vignesh, Shakti, Kishore, Hemath, Karthik, and surya from left to right.












Below is another great picture of some of the 4th standard boys. It's Vignesh, Shakti and Surya.

Here, you'll see Danashree (I think I'm misspelling her name!).  She was the Surya of 5th standard, in the sense that she was extremely mischievous. She would randomly leave the classroom and when asked about it, she would say "bathroom, miss." Also, all the students would politely ask before coming back into the classroom, and she would walk in as if she owned the place. It was hilarious, especially, because she had no idea how funny she was!




Below if my favorite girl, Saranya. She is in 4th Standard and is literally awesome. The smartest girl in the class, and probably one of the smartest people we taught, she was very funny and very cute! Many of the girls wouldn't get too close with me (me being a guy), but she wasn't too shy and we became really good friends!

Hope you enjoyed!! Sorry this is so late!