Some More on School

So now that school is out, we'll probably be getting a lot more chances to blog about our experiences here. Three times a week we will be going to my mom's school and helping out with some of the kids there. In a week we are going to Northern India and will meet our Grandpa, Grandma Dee and Aunt Ellen. We'll be up there for a week and a half. We will see Delhi, Agra (The Taj Mahal), Jaipur, and Shimla (in the Himalayan Mountains). I've heard that it's a lot of fun.

School here was a lot different than the one at home. First off, when the children go home, their parents make them study for most of the rest of the day (which has its advantages and disadvantages). They take the exams much more seriously and begin studying at least a month before they start to take them. The work is about as tough as it is back home. There is hardly any homework (because the kids are expected to study) and I could do most of the exams without a problem.

As far as class schedules go, there is also a difference. Instead of doing chemistry one year and physics the next, they do physics, chemistry and biology all at the same time. They have about an hour to an hour and a half each week of each class. We rarely have the same class two days in a row. Math is also different. They have 45 minutes of math each day and go over some of the basics on each topic (algebra, geometry, and trigonometry). They don't go into as much detail in each topic, but each year the topics get more and more complicated; whereas the school at home goes over only one topic in one year.

Overall, the teachers were very nice to me and so were most of the students. I had a different teacher for each subject and because there were only 36 kids in my class, they came to us instead of us going to them. The teachers seemed to be very strict, but the students just as rowdy. The kids who went to my school were very wealthy. Some of the kids laughed when I told them the I rode to school in an auto-rickshaw. They said they had never ridden in one before.There was a rumor, which is largely believed to be true, that the grandfather of one of the kids in my class owns the Delhi cricket team. I went to an end-of-the-year party on Friday night at the most expensive apartments in the city (because you can watch the cricket matches from the roof).

It was a different but helpful experience for all of us and is probably a way of schooling I will never forget.