Grade Six, and ONE GIANT WATERFALL

After a long absence…

I’m finished teaching in the middle school and have gone back to my beloved elementary school. The kids are lovely, and they’re doing relatively well with their projects; however, I still don’t know if I’m actually teaching them anything, and they are constantly finding new ways to frustrate me. Case in point: Grade Six.

The grade six class is split in two – 6A and 6B. Strangely, 6B is far better than 6A in almost every way. I’m not sure what causes this difference – I wish I’d taken more psychology classes, and then I could probably beat you over the head with a fancy group dynamics theory that explains why one randomly selected group of 13 grade six students can end up being snobby, melodramatic, lazy and selfish, whereas another group randomly selected from the same pool of students can end up being helpful, cooperative, enthusiastic, and good-humored. I’m being a bit harsh on 6A, and some days the roles are reversed, but generally speaking it’s true. Perhaps it’s due to the dominant personalities – 6A is ruled by an extremely talented, but extremely dramatic and flamboyant girl, and a self-important know-it-all boy. The girl is – quite frankly – a huge diva. The boy is disrespectful and arrogant. They set the tone for their entire class. 6B’s dominant personalities are less clear-cut; there’s the inseparable Korean duo of boys who are intelligent, charming wise guys, but it’s difficult for any of the Koreans to rule the class, due to the language barrier and the fact that they’re often separated for ESL lessons. Then there’s a sweet, big-hearted, unselfconscious Tibetan boy, and it’s his demeanor that sets the tone for 6B. Or is it the quiet loveliness of one little girl, a wise child who doesn’t say much at all, but is marvelously talented and has all the boys wishing she’d sit next to them? Who knows.

Anyhow, I’ve been teaching painting to both classes; they’re going to collaborate on painting a huge mural all over the wooden castle in the playground. I started off teaching them about mixing complementary colors, but soon discovered that about half of them didn’t have their primary colors straight, and about a quarter didn’t know that red and yellow make orange. So after two classes of struggling with complementary colors, I had to step back and have them make color wheels. This is the sort of thing that frustrates me hugely; if I were a better teacher, I would’ve talked to them more and realized that I needed to start with the color wheel. And I could’ve done a better job of teaching complementary colors, so that I didn’t end up with kids doing yellow-green instead of yellow-purple (or red-green). When I have to spend three classes with 6A doing nothing but mixing colors gradually from yellow to purple, I wonder what I’m doing wrong.

They’re delighted when they finally get it, though, and I silently thank them for putting up with my incompetence and doing the relatively boring exercise for three classes in a row. One girl – who’s been having a lot of problems with the whole concept – came up and told me, shyly, that she’s been practicing mixing complementary colors at home. So something’s getting through.

Something they all have trouble with, though, is cleanup. Perhaps this kind of persistent laziness and thoughtlessness is a problem with children everywhere, but I suspect that it’s made worse because they’ve been raised in a culture where most people have servants (ayahs) who clean up after them. Certainly, we’re lucky enough to have a lovely woman – Teresa – who mops the floors and wipes off the crayon marks at the end of the day, but she certainly doesn’t come between every class, and floods of scarlet paint all over the tables don’t make a very good working environment for the next class. They’re resentful and selfish when it comes to cleaning, leaving their palettes and brushes in the sink for someone else to clean, doing one task and then obstinately lining up, as though there weren’t dozens of other obvious messes to clean up. It gets worse as they get older, and the middle school was worse than the worst elementary school class; luckily, the middle school students are coordinated enough to make only small messes.

Change of subject:

My tabla lessons are going well! I love the instrument and I’ve always wanted to learn some kind of percussion, and my teacher is great. He’s also helping me with my Tamil. Which brings me to… My Tamil lessons are going well! My teacher – who is also teaching Lowri Hindi – is a fearsome woman who treats us like we’re 9 and is incredibly unhelpful in teaching us pronunciation. “Dha?” “NO. Dha. Dha. Dha.” (All sounds the same to me…) “…Dha?” “NO!!! Dha. Dha. Dha.” “Um… dha?” “NO! WRONG! Dha! Dha! Dha!” “How do I move my tongue? D-d-dha?” “WRONG! Dha! Dha! DHA!” But she’s giving me the vocabulary and structure I need, and everyone else in Kodai that speaks Tamil is willing to help my pronunciation. Unfortunately there is such variation even within the small town, that I’m stuck on words like “ombathu” (nine) that are pronounced, variously, “om-bah-tu,” “om-bah-ru,” and “om-bah-zu.” (It is hard to write down Tamil sounds using English letters!)

And now – millions of photographs.

Loch End Annex, take two. More decorations. You can see my underwear, drying like a strange interpretation of prayer flags, and my mobile (the result of a persistent obsession with origami!) floating in the air.

Hiking knot. The KIS hiking program marks its trails by tying flexible young wattle trees into knots. They've been doing it for decades, and so you occasionally come across trees like this, that were tied years ago and grew contentedly into their contortionist loops.

The rest of the photos are from the amusement park to rattail hike. "Amusement Park" is in fact a random spot on the side of the road, where an unmarked trail begins and leads you off into gorgeous pristine shola forest, along an old, old trail that was used to transport goods before paved roads and motorized vehicles arrived on the scene. There are tombs and shrines dotted along the trail, reminding you that the skinny little track was once the rough equivalent of a highway for the Palani Hills. It was a beautiful hike, my favorite by far - now that we're getting into the C and D hikes, they're more wilderness and less civilization. They're also getting longer - this one took 12 hours, and I had to play in the musical ensembles concert afterwards, which resulted in me giving an absolutely atrocious performance. Oh well. Here are the images from the hike, which was - as I told another chaperone - more fun than I could handle, all in one day.

Most of the gang. One of the nice things about the group of young teachers is that we all like to hike, so we go en masse every saturday and have a wonderful time together. This is a highly flattering picture of all of them... not.

The students plus BB, the hike leader. She's telling us about the traditional burial ground we're stopped at.

Frangipani flowers - or "temple flowers," planted at places of religious significance. There were frangipani planted over each tomb of the burial ground. The tombs were marked by piles of rocks.






A large portion of the hike was rock-hopping along the river. There's also a path that runs vaguely parallel to the river, and about half the hike chose to use the path instead of the rocks. I went along the rocks and had a fantastic time leaping from boulder to boulder, wading and swimming and generally messing around as I went.



So beautiful! Every bend of the river revealed a new tapestry of vines, native trees, giant tree-ferns, and overhanging epiphytes, all woven into the smooth rushing and pooling of the water, gushing between boulders and fallen logs, eddying into deep potholes and sandy backwaters, flowing in slick sheets over the rock.















COOL ANTS! Building their nests out of leaves. I can't find what their proper scientific name is, but they were busily pulling the leaves together and gluing them into a lovely nest with a kind of cobwebby material.





Unsuccessfully trying to climb a boulder. Ben is pointing out a handhold that I couldn't quite reach.


















We stopped to swim, shortly before reaching the top of the falls. Here's one of the students, a grade 9 boy.







A vine trapeze that some of the boys discovered.










And me, teacher Ruskey, hanging from the vine and making a monkey face while the boys laugh at me. I am the role model to end all role models.






















One student slipped and fell on his face on the rocks, giving himself a bad cut above his eye and a very mild concussion. Here he is lying down.







The approach to the falls! The drop... Enormous. The view... Rapturous. The vertigo experienced at the edge... Truly terrifying.








We had lunch at the cliff's edge.










Kids at the edge of the falls.





























Tipping over the falls...











Shrine near the top of the falls - it had been visited recently, which I find amazing given its isolation. It was assembled around a holy tree - this astonishing forest character had fallen over, exposing the root ball you see in the photo, and then kept growing - starting a new trunk that grew straight up, and continuing to branch off of the fallen trunk. Much respect to that tree.














The height of the falls.

















We were right there at the top!











Muslim tomb along the trail.


















The view down to the plains. We ended up hiking down to the plantations below.
















And with that... Goodnight!