21st November, 2009 En route to Toronto

May I have your kind attention prefaces the PA announcements as we wait in Coimbatore airport for our flight to Chennai. It hardly seems possible that we are on our way back to Toronto after five intense and jam-packed weeks.

At the end of our last blog we were on our way to the TEDIndia conference in Mysore. What an amazing experience this was! – starting with our four hour trip from Bangalore airport to the Infosys campus in Mysore. Several buses picked up participants at the airport and we travelled the highway led by an army escort with sirens blasting and soldiers waving red flags out of the windows clearing the road of all traffic. The Infosys campus is like nothing we have experienced in India with its stately buildings complete with Grecian columns and high domes; green lawns (forbidden to walk on) and lush flower beds tended by an army of gardeners. All one thousand participants were housed on the campus along with a similar number of students and employees. We heard a wide variety of speakers from all over the world, a large percentage being Indian or of Indian origin. Many of the speakers focused on the topic of education, in one way or another, as the key to success in India. At Infosys, getting from one location to another involved miles of walking – no cars are allowed on the campus, but bikes were plentiful. We made many important contacts including Cisco and Infosys who are interested in helping us develop our teacher training programme.

One interesting person we met was a 17 year old headmaster from West Bengal, Babar Ali, who had started a school in his village when he was nine years old. Each day, after arriving home from school, he would gather the children who could not afford to attend school and teach them what he had learned. There was no classroom, just the shade of a large tree. Eventually some of his friends started to help him and now they have 800 children up to grade eight, have acquired land and hope to put up a school building and go up to grade twelve. His dream is to start schools all over the world, a remarkably humble and special person.





After Mysore we went to Colombo, Sri Lanka to observe the IBO teacher training sponsored by the NGO Sarvodoya. Early Childhood teachers are brought into Colombo from surrounding village schools and given a two day workshop on teaching methods, classroom management and leadership. These master teachers then go back to their areas and teach other teachers in nearby sister schools. These women were amazingly gracious, friendly and open to learning. The two presenters were Karen Baird from St. John’s Kilmarnock in Guelph and Rob Kiddell from Glenlyon-Norfolk school in Victoria. These two presenters worked very hard and with enthusiasm and energy. We were there as observers, but couldn’t resist getting involved and the presenters were accepting and gracious of the two “elder stateswomen” – fortunately Rob knows us from past Junior Heads meetings! The workshops were conducted with the help of Singhalese translators, remarkable women who were experienced and highly qualified educators. As one of them said, she was “retired, but not tired”.

One of our goals is to buy land and build our own school; to that purpose we toured 10 properties around Chettipalayam. There are three properties that we have earmarked to do due diligence, the first choice is a former poultry farm consisting of 6.5 acres with 20,000 square feet of buildings which were former chicken coops. These could easily be converted into classrooms and we thought they could be appropriately named “Rhode Island Red” or “Norfolk Whites”. Of course, the minute local people know that the only people in town with white faces, the GPS directors, are looking for land the price doubles and sometimes triples; however, we are hopeful of obtaining property relatively soon. In India that could mean anywhere from a month to two years.



We spent a long weekend visiting one of our favourite places and favourite people – Geoff Fisher, the principal at Kodaikanal International School. We talked to the teachers who are in charge of service learning there with a view to having their students volunteer at GPS. They will visit in March to see our project and consider what they might do. We visited the Junior School and met with the Elementary Coordinator to plan a Level 2 PYP workshop. Kodaikanal has the IB Diploma and the Middle Years Programme and is a candidate school for the PYP. The person who pulls all this together is the vice-principal Kaiser who exemplifies international-mindedness. His mother is Tibetan, his father, of Chinese heritage, from Taiwan, he was born and grew up in India and his wife is from South India. Like most Indians he speaks three or four languages including English, Hindi and Tamil.




Our final big event, or auspicious occasion as the Indians describe it, was Sports Day. We had Distinguished Guests, a March Past and a real Olympic Flame all master-minded by Sunbeam our administrator. It started at 8:00 a.m. to avoid the noon day heat and was well-attended by our parents and attracted a number of the villagers. Our chief guest, the local Commandant, of the para-military security force, a very nice man, was attended by his bodyguard of four in camouflage uniforms complete with rifles. The children were thrilled.



The children impressed everyone with their marching, precision drilling acrobatics, and yoga demonstration. The display ended with a performance of the parachute we brought from Toronto, to music. The races included Bursting the Balloon, Fill the Water Bottle and a game of musical blocks. There was an elimination game for the parents with prizes of kitchen containers which were received with much laughter and pleasure. The event ended with a competitive game of Throw Ball between two teams of teachers including the Directors, which delighted the parents and the children.



The day ended with our teachers taking the Directors out for a Chinese lunch. The following morning, we had our final workshop with the teachers who, we feel, are well-prepared to continue for the next few months until we return in February.