The classes on my schedule for this afternoon – I have already had the privilege of finding out – are classes in which I am completely useless. That being the case, and today being a friday, I took the only acceptable course of action: I left early.

I’m leaving tonight at 9:00 on a night bus for Pondicherry. (“Situated on the Coromandel coast, about 160 kms south of Chennai, lies the Union Territory of Pondicherry. The French ruled this territory for 300 years, and today it stands as a living monument of the French culture in India. It is bound on the east by the Bay of Bengal and on the other three sides by the South Arcot district of Tamil Nadu .”) I am very excited to get out of Bangalore and see a bit more of India. Won’t be too much to see for most of the bus ride, but I think I will be arriving after sun-up, so I hope I’ll have some interesting stuff to watch roll by tomorrow morning from the bus window.

Y’all best like the pictures, cuz it’s taking forever to load them and I could be off playing football right now.

The class that I spend most of the time with (VII Standard B – or grade 7B) is really frustrating at times. They have to take the same state-mandated standardized test as everyone their age, which is bad news because many of them really aren’t that advanced. So, it ends up being stuffing things into their mind which they really don’t understand. They were doing simple algebra, but some of them really can’t even do basic arithmetic. To be honest, some of them are not just deaf but definitely have something important missing in the mental machinery. You can imagine that it’s super-tough to try and explain something to a retarded kid, but then when he’s deaf and has forgotten his hearing aid and his spectacles… whew.

The chalk dust is killing me! I’ve never been allergic to it before, but I’ve never before been around such awful clouds of it. Perhaps the Indian chalk industry is full of Shiva worshipers.