Wordless Wednesday

When parents and grandparents come to visit, they sign their names, in Tamil, in English, or by thumb print. I love how we're a story of progress: even our five-year-olds can do all three.

Family portraits

 

Wordless Wednesday

Year in review

It's been another year in my India, my beautiful, haunting, needy, laughing India.

After last year's revolutionary-sized changes, this one has seemed far less dramatic. I no longer needed to hold back a quarter of the students or replace most of the teachers. The library was now already in good working condition. Kids are reading, slowly but surely. Students in grades 2-4 are a year ahead in math. Second-graders blurt out their times tables with rapid-fire delivery, everyone.

Other than that, recent growth comes in more subtle forms. The children are writing unassisted, letters to their American sponsors, in daily journals, in summaries of what they've read. There is far less fighting, fewer enmeshed fists for me to disentangle. This surely has much to do with the school cosmos making more sense to them, and having a purpose (as opposed to the previous mindless repetition). 

Repeated visitors tell me that the children's spoken English has improved over the course of the year. I see the kids far too frequently (=always) to notice a difference, but let's add that to our list. (Incidentally, I have long since stopped hearing any trace of an accent when the kids speak. Then I'll listen to a recording and suddenly realize how thick their little accents actually are.)

Many of them love books. I would be happy even if that were our only accomplishment. There's not much of a reading culture in rural southern India; I'm pretty sure we possess the only children's library south of Chennai. Children will sometimes check out books that are far too hard for them to read, just for fun. They like to hold them and admire all the pages and all the words. None of them have any books at home, and it awes them that anyone could read one as thick as Harry Potter.

And then we are developing discipline, inch by inch by inch. My third-standard kids have been doing between forty and sixty minutes of math homework a day. They do it at school, and are not permitted to leave before it's done and done correctly. Almost everyone has cried at some point, and many have suffered through a bad day when it took two hours. But they are much better than much older kids at accepting the mistakes and trying it all again.

To quote my nephew, who was quoting someone else, we're headed towards infinity and beyond. 

Overread

"But there is no such day in school. No one got the instructions. That is the secret of life. Everyone is flailing around, winging it most of the time, trying to find the way out, or through, or up, without a map. This lack of instruction manual is how most people develop compassion, and how they figure out to show up, care, help and serve, as the only way of filling up and being free. Otherwise, you grow up to be someone who needs to dominate and shame others, so no one will know that you weren't there the day the instructions were passed out."

"Some aching beauty comes with huge loss, although maybe not right away, when it would be helpful. Life is a very powerful force, despite the constant discouragement. So if you are a person with connections to life, a few tendrils eventually break though the sidewalk of loss, and you notice them, maybe space out studying them for a few moments, or maybe they tickle you into movement and response, if only you have to scratch your nose."

Wordless Wednesday