about my school and its students

several people have pointed out that i have written almost nothing about my school and all my experiences there.
perhaps it seems i am on some sort of holiday?
no... i just feel like my work-a-day world is just what i do, and that blog-readers will have little interest in a little school in the suburbs of big bad bangalore.
so forewarned is thousand-armed (as they say in india). anybody not interested in details about teens and colleagues ought to skip this post...

the students are a deeply international lot: around a quarter are korean, about a quarter indian, and the other half are widely spread, with more than a handful from france, germany, japan, australia, brazil, holland, singapore, USA, australia, etc etc there are even a few canadians! it is actually surprizing how few canadians there are here, because i am teaching at the CANADIAN international school of bangalore. the photo shows one of my seventh grade classes. notice how small the class is. my eighth grade classes are a little bigger: 16 each.

the kids are great, for the most part. just like in any collection of teens, there are a few lazy kids, but nobody is mean nor openly disrespectful. it is a weird challenge to teach math to a group of kids knowing that a third of them cannot understand the language, and that their biggest challenge is learning english, not the subject matter itself.

i am reminded of how far advanced asian curricula are in math compared to the US norms. the canadian math curriculum is even SLOWER than the US!! in the eighth grade we are just introducing the basics of algebra, while koreans got a pretty thorough dose of algebra in grades six and seven. so for them there is NOTHING new in the normal course of studies; it's all about language-learning... and wild & crazy enrichment provided by yours truly.

my colleagues are also widely international, but with a greater concentration of canadians. they are a great group, but i usually like teachers!

during multi-cultural week a few weeks back, several teachers got together and did a bollywood style dance routine. i was a big hit in the revue: to think that an old white guy can actually do those moves! it was great fun. i might be able to find a photo of that later. in the meantime, here's the trailer of the film whose title track we danced to. notice how much i look like the big star amitabh bachchan (called the "big B"). so i was indirectly cast as an aging hippy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNX9V4xUCDs

i think you'll have to cut and paste this, or do a search for jhoom barabar bachchan or some such.
it's great music and a fun dance style.