Hi. I’m Yadav.
In all likelihood, we have not met. So, I’ll give you a bit of background on what I’m about. Not enough for you to be able to track me down (unless you show up at Pamplemousses on a Tuesday) but enough for you to get a sense of who I am.
Actually, scratch that. I’ll let my classes (and class reports?) speak for me. (hey, V!) As far as readers of the blog go, that’s the only part of me that matters. The rest…well, I guess I’m just mysterious like that. It also adds this aura of coolness to my persona.
I have multiple auras. How awesome is that?
Each now and then, I will be posting about my Tuesday class at Arche de Noe. Nothing fancy. Just how things turned out, what we learned, what we did. Regular stuff.
Without further ado, I present to thee….
*drum roll*
***
The last time I had been at Arche de Noe was back when I was Brittany’s aide in her art class. It was pretty fun hanging out there. My role as an aide consisted of translating Creole to English and English to Creole, helping Lauren and Britt clean up the art equipment while trying to not make a mess of everything , annoying Lauren, and generally being awesome. Easy peasy. Like tying shoe laces. Except for that one time where I nearly ruined Britt’s artwork. I’m also not very good with shoe laces. I can tie them just fine but I can’t get those cool knots down.
I’ve never been a big fan of buses. At least, not local ones. The seats are generally too small to contain my legs and I’m too tall to be able to stand without a sun roof. Good genes, what can I say? After some months of pain, I found that sweet spot in Mauritian buses. You guessed it. The backdoor. Right in front of it, is a little step, on which I can comfortably stand. Sure, my feet are still a little too big, but it’s nothing that a little tilting can’t fix.
The ride to Pamplemousses was okay. It’s not very hard for me to fall asleep in a bus. Especially if I have two whole seats to myself. The bus had some 20-ish people in it. More than enough space for the 15 school kids at the bus stop, right? But no, to the bus driver, that’s just around Rs225 less to be made. “Why pack my bus with a bunch of students when I can – hopefully – find some paying passengers a few stops ahead?” (assuming that it costs Rs15 to go from Pont Praslin to Pamplemousses) I don’t even know why this still surprises me.
The younger students didn’t turn up today but I will make it a point to discuss this with them next week. Some things I have in mind:
– How common is this?
– Is it the same drivers? (as far as I know, the same driver will be assigned to a particular route at a given time)
– Is there an underlying issue? (i.e, have the students done anything that might have angered certain bus drivers?)
– Going with the students to see what they’re up to in the bus. (I’ve traveled with them before and there was nothing insane going on)
While waiting for more of the guys to come by, Adish, Kevin, and I played some football. It became quite clear to me today why I was often the last to be picked in high school. I got rolled over by two 12-13 year olds! Still, it was good fun and if I keep at it, I know I’ll pick up a few things.
Today’s class took a while to pick up. I didn’t know who’d be there and whether there’d be new students. As it turned out, all of them were familiar faces. It was a mix of people I’d met at Mongout – Adish, Sonam, Eminem (the real slim, hehe) – and those I had met in Britt’s art class, like Laetitia and Ricardo. I brought along some children’s books but it was quite obvious that no one wanted to read about “Bubbles being honest” or “Biff and Kipper’s Magic Key (much to my dismay – I loved those Magic Key stories!). I then tried to teach a little about nouns and adjectives but the students weren’t very responsive to that either. At this point, the voices in my head were going craaaaaazy. All I heard was “Think McFly, think!” spoken in different voices and lots of weird accents. And then I heard Sal Khan (not the Bollywood actor) going on enthusiastically about which of a brick or feather would fall faster.
I wasn’t going to explain physics, but that thought did remind me of his awesome math videos! So, what started off as some geometry exercises (I asked them how to find the area of a sector of a circle) turned into an intro algebra class. It was easy to identify what they had covered in class and what they had problems with and I moved on from there. I explained integer operations “geometrically” and then played around with some find the unknown equations.
With the class being so diverse, I will have to work on different things for each age-group. I’ve talked to the students and we’ve agreed that I will be helping them with math, English and French. I’ll be back next week with an update.
Until then…
Yadav.
(I should really think of a cooler way to end my blog posts)