Travel Blog
Follow my travel on my blogger website:
True disclosure, I took an iPad to India and it did not support my adding to Google Sites, so I continued my blogging on Blogger and Facebook. I wish now I could have written more, but honestly had too much to see and do that stopping to write seemed hard. It was important to be in the moment.
June 20, 2017
Not quite 2 weeks and I will be in Bangalore, India. In the meantime, there is a part of India in Chicago. In the picture of above you can see me and reflections from Cloud Gate, Anish Kapoor's sculpture in Millennium Park which is an icon of Chicago. It doesn't take long to start to see the connections between Chicago and India. Devon Street on the far north side houses a little bit of India in restaurants, shops and bakeries. The Art Institute has a surprising connection. It was built as the Parliament of World Religions for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and one of the star appearances was by Swami Vivekananda to teach the world about Hinduism.
March 2017
How does a librarian prepare for a trip? Reading of course! I compiled a list of books I wanted to read and share it with my cohort on Padlet, All About India. My first books were by popular authors, Golden Boy by Shipla Somoya Gowdi and Before We Visit the Goddess by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. They were quick, interesting reads and drew me in the heart of Indian culture. Both brought in the strong family culture, the dichotomy of extreme poverty and wealth, the rich texture of it's history and brough out the overall dignity of the people of India.
But I became obsessed when I started to read Pramila Jayapal's Pilgrimage to India. Pramila was born in India, but her family moved to Indonesia when she was four and at the age of sixteen she came to the United States to attend Georgetown (at a great expense to her family.) She goes back to India on a fellowship and travels the country. Her observations of the geography and people are well written and intriguing. I wanted to know more and it made this journey to India for me even more special. After I finished reading I did some research and found that Pramila was elected in November as the first woman of Indian descent to the United States Congress. She represents Washington, and the work she is doing is inspiring.
I'm struck by the blending of our two countries. At the heart of the discord in our country is the fear of being left behind or being 'lesser', and yet when you read these stories you see examples of hate and fear against people from India. I also see examples of citizens who we all aspire to be.
February 2017
Ms. Norwood and I arrived on cold Thursday in Washington. It was freezing cold, windy, and snowy. By Saturday the weather had shifted and it was sunny and warm. We had come for the Global Studies Symposium and had met my cohort of fellows and attended many meetings about the upcoming international experiences and global studies implementation. It was heady to meet these professionals, they were advocates for their students and the importance of education.
I learned about the Indian Educational system, which is more of a hierarchical system. All students attend school through 8th grade, but in 10th grade, at the completion of secondary school, they choose a path that will determine their future careers. The gentleman who shared this information was in a sister program to TGC, but instead he had come from India to learn about the United States educational system. He is a Sikh from the northernmost part of India and talked about how the partition between India and Pakistan was signed there. I asked him how it was possible to decide a student's fate by the age of 15. His answer was that they knew their students very well and this system worked. He went on to talk of how flexible US schools were and that we did not know our students at all. It would be easy to be taken back by this statement. But if I reflect on our equity work in our district, many of our discussions are about building better and stronger relationships. How teacher/student relationships are formed will be one element that I will look at in India.
On that warm Saturday afternoon at the Gandhi statue it is inscribed from one of his statements during the salt tax march. In February, African American history month had focused on peace, and I read and researched about his march with 3rd graders. Instead of paying a high tax on salt, Gandhi and his followers took a 24 day march to collect the salt from the sea, rather than pay the tax. The statement on the statue is, "My life is my message." Could it be that global studies is about getting to know our students better, our world better and building connections? Is that our message?
(Picture taken in front of Mahatma Gandhi Memorial, near the India Embassy in Washington DC)
December 29, 2016
Some years the week between Christmas and New Year’s is long and a little unsettling wondering what will happen. This year, it has been a great holiday. All of the things you hope for. My sons were home (from California, Michigan and downstate Illinois). We saw both families over the holiday and everyone was in a good mood. The tree looked great. It would have been nice to have snow after Christmas, but loved being able to get out on some warmer days. Well, you get the idea, things are good.
The best news was the formal offer to travel next year with Teachers For Global Classrooms. The place…India...never in my wildest dreams did I think I would get there. It is the basis for so much literature that I’ve read…Kipling’s Just So Stories, The Secret Garden, hmm I’m not sure it will be the British Empire India that I will be seeing, so more reading to do!
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