I woke up at dawn this morning to the apocalypse. Roosters and bells and slamming garage doors and dog fights and yelling salespeople.....all before 6 am. At 8 am there was a Scottish marching band that trekked through the area (no joke) with full on bagpipes and those big drums. The sound if it was seemed very much at home here.
The practicum was nicer than I expected. The boarding school is Montessorri based and caters to both rich and poor students. Many of the students come from orphanages or group homes and have had rough childhoods so far. When we got there the principals wife, Mauda Mam, gave us dal baat for brunch. We then took a tour of the school and all of the 17 classrooms. We watched some of the children practice thier dances for the up coming Parent's Day festival. It was quite the experience. The children are very good dancers and very excited for us to be here. At that point we asked if there was anything that we could be doing to help out. Mauda Mam sort of did this little head wobble that people in Nepal do instead of nodding and showed us to a classroom. She ushered us in and shut the door.
Here we were with zero preparation, and no teaching degree to speak of in charge of teaching a grade 4 class. We went over some English words with them out of the text book and then fell back on singing campfire songs. Isha brought out a song about a moose that drinks juice and I taught them about Joe and his button factory. After that we worked one more English class and a class about social studies that became very Canada-centric.
When we got home at 4:30 there was a Nepali language instructor waiting to teach us Nepali. It has been a very long and tiring day, I can tell you!
The bagpipes went by again at 8:30pm, I'll be asleep by 8:40!
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