School day in Pattiveeranpatti!

Today was a very nice day in Pattiveeranpatti. As we were having our breakfast (Chandra knows we like sweet food so makes us sweet French toast and kaseri along with our sambals and burri) we heard the kids arriving. They have their whole school assembly at 9 in the morning. All the kids stood in perfect lines on the concrete in front of the main school building, with the sign "Lakshmi Nursery and Primary School." Because it is Friday, they wore their "sports uniforms"- a red, green or blue colored collared shirt with the school logo, along with white shorts or skirt. The kids looked so cute and neat in their perfect lines and bright uniforms. They start the day with their "school prayer" in English and Tamil, some announcements, and morning exercises. The kids knew the exercises by heart, as the head teacher counted "One, two, three..." the kids put their hands above their heads, out to the sides, down, in front of them. It reminded me of taichi. Good way to wake up the kids in the morning! Then the girls that everyone had been staring at the whole time anyway (guess who?) were introduced. We were handed the microphone and introduced ourselves. It seemed like we probably should have talked a bit, but couldn't think of much else besides "My name is Kelsey. We are from America... It's nice to be here with all of you!" Hoping the language barrier hid some of the awkwardness of our unprepared speech to 200 nursery and primary school students, plus staff. I fought the urge to start off with "You're probably wondering why I called all of you here today..." when I was at a loss for words and first handed the microphone with a few hundred little eyes glued to my face. Paige appreciated the comment at least. Good times. Good times.
Kelsey held the microphone too close to her face and basically screamed her name, while I held it too far and no one will ever know my name...it's Paige by the way.

After our assembly speech with ended with an awkward round of clapping, after the teachers told the students to welcome us, we took a tour of the school. Starting with the nursery school, we stopped in to every one of the 11 class rooms. We introduced ourselves in a similarly awkward manner each time. At the nursery school we were greeted mainly with perplexed stares. Some of the older kids sang rhymes for us that they knew. Itsy bitsy spider was quite fun. After, we prepared a game and went to teach the fourth and fifth graders. Not knowing their level of English, we had prepared a pretty simple game. We made cards with a word for each kid. The words were in pairs of either antonyms or synonyms. We had the kids get up and try to find the other student that had their card's corresponding synonym, then repeated it with the antonym set. The kids had fun running around and making sentences from the words, but found this activity pretty simple. They knew what every word meant, and had no problem forming basic sentences. It was such a difference from the kids at Bethania. At Bethania, most of even the high school kids wouldn't know all of the vocabulary, and can't form grammatically correct sentences at all. Its a drastic difference. This is a good, private school that has the kids even learning other subjects in English from a very young age. The Kanivadi public schools that the Bethania kids go to have no where near this level of education.
The teachers here are very well educated as well. The vast majority are women. For the most part, they are very well educated with masters degrees and such, but stopped working once they became married. Teaching is a popular and socially acceptable professions for well-off married women here. We met one nice, young teacher who had just started working here three days ago. She had just gotten married and moved with her husband here from Bombay (Tamil is her mother tongue though), where she had a good corporate job in a large Indian paint company. This quite village must be such a change from a huge, modern, North Indian city. She was very nice and friendly, and we enjoyed tea with her and the other teachers.

The rest of the day was relaxing, we spent fun time with the kids as well. Its a bit overwhelming to try to talk and play with such a large number of kids after just getting used to being with our 33 Bethania kids! Awww. We miss them.