Activity Week - Dehra Dun with Grade 7

I spent last week with fifty seven grade students during activity week. To be honest, I wasn’t really looking forward to activity week for a multitude of reasons – one being that going to Dehra Dun seemed kind of lame compared to what other students and teachers were doing for the week. BUT I had a great time with the students and our trip was better than I anticipated. Many of the other activity week trips focused on hiking or adventurous things. Our trip was service based. Apparently our students had been doing some research on different disabilities within their advisor and homeroom groups. The point of our trip was to visit and interact with students from Dehra Dun that a variety of disabilities. The seventh grade class was divided into four groups and each group traveled to a new school during the week. The schools were the school for the blind, early childhood intervention center, Karuna Vihar School and Karuna Vihar Vocational Center. The school for the blind is pretty self explanatory, but the other three might need a little explaining… They are all schools/centers for children and students with a mental disability. The early childhood intervention center is a place where young children – toddler-aged- can get one on one attention and therapy from trained teachers and physical therapists. Karuna Vihar School is for elementary and middle school-aged children. There are four or five different rooms and several different teachers to work with various ability levels of the students. Karuna Vihar Vocational Center is a place where young adults can come to learn numerous life and vocational skills.

Our students went to one school/center every day. I went to both of the Karuna Vihar centers and the Early Childhood Intervention Center. It was necessary for the chaperones to go to certain places more than once so that there could always be one leader that was familiar with the particular place. That is why I went to the vocational center two days In a row and did not go to the blind school. For the most part, the Woodstock students did a fantastic job of playing and working with students at the schools. At the beginning of the week one of the goals was to go back to Woodstock having made some new friends. Towards the end of the week I asked some of the kids if they had some new friends and each student I talked to told me some names of the other kids they met. I could go into more detail about each place and what the kids did there, but instead I’ll just post some pictures. The pictures I have are from the walk down to Dehra Dun, the first place we stayed – TorchBearers, the Karuna Vihar School and the Vocational Center. The other two big hits from the students point of the view was the trip to the water park and eating dinner at McDonalds.

I really enjoyed getting to know the students of grade seven a lot better. I only have five or six seventh graders in band and woodwind lessons. I had to learn lots of new names, but it was great to hang out with some new kids. There were also six other teachers along to chaperone the trip – three of the ESL teachers, the religion teacher, computer teacher and the head of the middle school. The music department is almost like its own school at Woodstock, so even though I am technically a middle school teacher, I rarely see or get a chance to chat with the other middle school teachers. It was great to be able to get to know my colleges a bit better. I also had the chance to witness several different courses of mediation between students. When seventh grade girls are “forced” to stay in a hotel room with their peers the drama starts to unfold… Sanjaya is our head of middle school and she dealt with most of these “dramatic” situations. I learned so much by watching her interact with kids and help to fix each problem as it arose. It is obvious that she really cares about her students and it seems like she is able to find a solution to anything!

Well, I had a great week, but I was certainly ready to be back home on Friday evening! This week was supposed to be a “normal” week of school. BUT today, mid morning, all of the students were called to an assembly and then released from school back into dorms. Apparently there is a political group protesting and all of the schools in India were called upon to not be in session today. The students were all very happy be get a day off school, but I really wish we could have continued with the normal schedule for the rest of the day!

Oh, I should also mention that I enjoy reading the comments that you all write on my blog and I really enjoy them! If you ever want to send me an email, I will definitely respond back!

Diwali and Halloween

This past week seemed pretty crazy… Probably because it was Diwali on Tuesday and then Halloween on Friday! In case you’re not sure what Diwali is, it is one of the most celebrated Hindu holidays during the year. It is referred to as the festival of lights – it marks the return of Lord Ram after defeating the evil demon kind Ravan. Everywhere you look there are decorations, lights and candles burning to symbolize the victory of good over evil (light vs. darkness).

The normal sights and sounds of the hillside were replaced with flashes of fireworks and booms of fire crackers going off at all times of the night. The actual holiday of Diwali was on Tuesday. Megan and I were invited to our friend, Jeanne’s ayah’s house for dinner. Her name is Shivchandi (I have no idea if that’s how you spell it…). Anyway, the three of us walked down to her house at about 7:00 on Tuesday evening. Shivchandi’s husband came to meet us part way to lead us to their house –he is an employee of the school, so the family lives in a building that houses several other Woodstock employees. There were people, especially children, everywhere outside lighting fire crackers and playing in the paths. We entered Shivchandi’s house and took off our shoes. We introduced ourselves to her and her two daughters, Sarita and Sangeeta. They lead us into the main room of the house. Shivchandi has five people in her family, herself, husband, 2 daughters and a son. For five people, they have a closet sized kitchen and one room – their whole house is about the size of my bedroom at my parents house. That’s smaller than my bedroom here!!! But this is “good living” on a typical Indian standard. They don’t have a bathroom (or at least they didn’t have one for their family, maybe there is one for the whole group of employee families that live in that area). The main room was taken up by a larger bed and one small bed, pushed together. Sarita told us that Momma, Papa, Sangeeta and herself all sleep on the big bed and then their 23 year old brother gets the small bed to himself. Sarita is 16 and Sangeeta is 20 and they are both in grade 10 at a school in Mussoorie. We mostly talked to the girls, because they could speak some English and Shivchandi was busy cooking and preparing dinner in the kitchen. Sarita showed us her school books and we even looked at her English book – one of the “stories” she had read was the Christmas Carol. Sangeeta served us dinner on the big bed (there was no dinner table and not even room to sit on the floor to eat). The food was amazing. Shivchandi had prepared paneer (like a cross between cheese and tofu) pumkin, salad (which does not include lettuce – it’s usually diced cucumbers and tomatoes), puri (the really puffy fried bread – but it was way less greasy then when we have it at school!), rice, raita (a kind of yorgurt – it helps to cut down on spices) and of course chai and for dessert we had Divali sweets. We convinced Sarita and Sangeeta to eat with us, but Shivchandi was going to wait and eat with her husband later. After dinner the girls played some of their music for us, this included some Bollywood songs and Akon as well as some good old Backstreet Boys! It was pretty entertaining! I think we ended up leaving around 9:00, because we had school the next day. But before we left we invited the girls to come eat dinner and watch an English movie at our house. All in all, it was a pretty sweet Diwali and I had a blast being invited to Shivchandi’s house!


Friday was Halloween. The holiday is not really celebrated in India, but Mandy decided that some of the teachers should create a haunted house for the kids in the high school boys old, abandoned dormitory. She had this idea a while ago, but everyone has been so busy that we really didn’t have time to put it together until Friday evening. There were about 7 teachers that showed up and we pretty much just dressed in black and put on some face paint. I did rat Megan’s hair, so it looked really creepy… We all hid inside the dorm and Jeanne had the job of bringing kids through the haunted house. I’m not really sure if all the kids (they were high school kids) got scared, but at least they all enjoyed it. We even let some of the first group of students stay and help scare the rest. Hostel (that’s the dorm’s name) itself is pretty creepy – it’s really old and no has lived there for a year. My job was to stay behind a door and scream at kids as they walked by, but soon it evolved into grabbing their legs and eventually trying to take off their shoes. It was pretty fun, because none of the students could figure out who I was – I had my hair over my face. We guessed that about 80 students came through the haunted house and I think it was a success, even if it was rather last minute! Next year we’ll have to plan better and make it REALLY scary!

This coming week we do not have school, due to the fact that it is activity week. All the students and teachers go on an activity week trip somewhere in India. Some of the trips include places like Rajasthan, going to a village, Rishikesh and Corbett. I am going with the 7th grade to Derha Dun – that is the capital of our state. The kids will be staying in a hotel and doing different services projects during the week. Megan went with a group of ninth graders to a village, they will be camping and experiencing real village life in India! Megan’s group left this morning and my group will leave tomorrow morning. It should be fun, although I wouldn’t mind having a normal week of school this week… Some of my students have music exams coming up at the end of November and I would appreciate another week of rehearsals. But it will be fun to spend time with students outside of Woodstock!