The Final Blog! Trekking in Pokhara. Oh and some paragliding

By the end of the LRTT course the team was exhausted! They had all put so much effort into the normal course and more so as they planned and tailored it to how they thought the Teach For Nepal Fellows would benefit the most.

On our last night in Kathmandu, we visited a stone-baked pizza restaurant and ate until we felt ill. The food was lovely and exactly what Kay had been dreaming of since she arrived in Nepal.

Early on Thursday morning, we got up and jumped in taxis to the bus station. It was the day we were travelling to Pokhara so everyone was super excited! Most Nepali people ask if you have visited Pokhara within five minutes of starting a conversation with you so we knew that it was somewhere special.

The ten hour plus bus journey was not that special. It was sweaty, sleepy and bumpy. As we were rolling into Pokhara, we saw the whole of the Annapurna range; a series of snowy mountains that stretched across the horizon with Annapurna itself sat in the middle at over 8000m (One of the tallest mountains in the world!).

A friendly face greeted us off the bus. We saw Hom as friendly because he looked and behaved just like his older brother, Sree, who organised our tour of Chitwan National Park. Hom took us to Hotel Crystal Palace, where we were staying and ran through our weekend’s itinerary. The group were overjoyed with the views of Annapurna from their hotel balconies but even more overjoyed at having a hot shower after three weeks of cold ones.

 

Dinner was another lovely experience. Pokhara is sat on the edge of a lake and Lakside is the touristy strip along one edge of this lake. Hom took us to a restaurant on the edge of the lake just as the sun was setting. Cocktails and thali (Nepali meal) were on the menu, as was a traditional Nepalese dance and all this was in the garden of a place that overlooked a starry sky reflected off the lake.

On Friday, we woke up to start our two day trek. As we travelled out of Pokhara, the views became even better- cloudy ravines, snow-capped mountains- but the cloud quickly moved in and one hour into our hike, we were walking through wispy vapour from the incoming bad weather. The trek that we signed up for quickly turned into a gentle walk in the rain and made everyone reminisce about the Lake District. By early afternoon, we had found our hotel for the night. We soon found the bar and had a heated game of mafia and “Whose squinting eye is this?”

 

Somehow, Kay persuaded everyone to get up at 4.30am to see the sunrise over the Himalayas. Sadly the clouds beat us to it so we didn’t see anything! Dan, Clare R. and Nazia stayed out to run round the forest catching leeches in their socks whilst the rest of us went back to bed.

Later that morning, the rain still did not subside so we put on our North Fake waterproofs and trudged our leechy way down the hillside in surprisingly good spirits! My Nepalese leech count ended on this day at 16.

Back in Pokhara we had time to kill so I got a cut-throat razor shave (leaving the moustache of course) then we all cycled round the lake in search of the best sunset, beer-in-hand view. The cycle back was pretty exciting, Rich was pretending he was in the Tour de France and Dan tried to pull off a backflip down a ledge but miss-timing sent him over the handle bars.

Most people ate fajitas at dinner that night and we stood on the balcony, linked arms and serenaded the restaurant to end the night. On the walk home, the monsoon really hit. We were soaked in seconds and the roads became rivers. Dan became an eight-year old and ran around jumping off curbs into these puddles/rivers.

 

Sunday was our final day in Pokhara. Most people left for Kathmandu at 7am as the had to collect tailored clothes. Dan and I decided to stay for the morning so we quickly went down to the lake and hired a boat. Before 9am, we were back-flipping off the boat in the middle of the lake with views of the Annapurna range in the distance.

 

Perched on a hill at the lake’s edge was the Japanese Peace Pagoda. The steps up were exhausting but there was a dense blanket of calm at the top. The garden around the pagoda was lovely and the pagoda itself was bright white with four gold Buddha statues in each side.

At lunch, we got the call we had been hoping for all weekend- paragliding was on! After a quick snack we rode through Lakeside on the back of Hom’s motorbike to the paragliding office. We signed our lives away then jumped into a pick-up with the other thrill seekers to the top of a mountain. The mountain was 1700m high and the place we would be jumping off. Each corner in the pick-up made me that bit more anxious, excited and scared but I kept chatting and reminding myself to stop thinking.

At the launch site, we had no time to stop. I was assigned the owner of the centre, Jochen, as my pilot and he clipped me into his harness and drilled me on take-off. In reality, I had no time to be nervous but watching the other paragliders in the air and staring at the cliff we were about to run down did not help. Finally, the right gust of wind came and we stepped forward. The kite rose above our heads. It pulled us back one step. Then we ran. After only three steps I was being pulled up and away from the cliff. Initially we dipped slightly and I thought we were going to drop but then we rushed forward, clearing the tree tops. I settled back in the seat and felt so comfortable and serene.

The first thermal we caught rushed up past my face and we were already above the launch site. Jochen had a GoPro camera and was really enthusiastic about me lying back and spreading my arms to pose for pictures. I was terrified of doing this and went through waves of realising I was 2000m high. The mantra of “Don’t think,” came in handy. We were lucky enough to catch two more thermals and found ourselves in the clouds. This part was completely surreal but also the scariest part. We couldn’t see more than 2m ahead of us!

25 mintues after take-off, we were flying over Pokhara Lake and Jochen said in my ear, “We are going to do some acrobatics. If the is anything you don’t like, just say stop.”

We took one big swing to the left then went spiralling down to the right. All I could see was the lake screaming towards my face! Finally we stopped, about 20m from the lake and flying in wide loops to wait for a clear landing patch. Dan landed soon after me and we were buzzing with adrenaline.

Thanks for reading the blog posts. This LRTT trip has been an experience of a life-time for all of us. Please keep in touch with LRTT about future trips (www.llrt.org).

 

 

 

 

 

"Will you join in our crusade!"

The past three days have been the most challenging and exciting so far in terms of the LRTT course. We have been delivering our sessions to the 32 Teach For Nepal Fellows; the first cohort of their kind in Nepal. They are such a dedicated and skilled group of teachers so we had to raise our game for these sessions!

Following our relaxing break in Chitwan National Park, Saturday evening saw us up until midnight preparing for the start of the second round of LRTT training, which we would be delivering to 32 Teach For Nepal fellows. These 32 teachers are considered to be some of the best graduates in Nepal, having been selected from over 800 applicants.  They had already completed a six week summer institute and been teaching for three months, and LRTT formed the final four days of their Mini Learning Institute (MiLI), so we felt a lot of pressure the night before.

The tension was relieved when, during Tom’s opening speech, his height conflicted with the low Nepali light-fitting, smashing two of the lamps in front of the Teach For Nepal Fellows, resulting in a lot of laughter and setting us off to a fantastic series of training sessions.  Half of us remained at Teach for Nepal House, training 16 teachers from the comfort of cushions on the floor, while the other half had the unique experience of training in the local monastery, watched over by golden statues of Buddha in his many forms. At the end of the day and Tom's second, very public collision with the light fitting, both groups headed out for drinks and snacks next to a temple in Patan. The stories that the TFN Fellows were recalling about their schools were stunning us- two day walks from the capital and a rickety cable car over a river were some highlights.

The next four days were a great opportunity for us to share everything we’d learnt from our first two years of teaching and for us to learn much more about the daily challenges faced by the inspirational fellows. One session involved a discussion of the soft-skills that their students needed then molded them into play-dough; this resulted in some bright red graduates and a figure of Buddha!

We were excited on the final day to be able to adapt the LRTT training and deliver tailored sessions designed to help the fellows maximise their effectiveness in the classroom.  We have set up Action Research groups with the fellows and ourselves so that we can work across our contexts to improve our practice across a range of areas, from differentiation to how to improve the independence and motivation of learners. This idea is a brave step and it might not work at all but it is one of the most important parts of the LRTT course that we ran. We're hoping that this will have a huge impact on the sustainability of LRTT and guide future courses.

As well as this, Jack gave us a brief introduction to coaching on Tuesday evening so that we could coach the fellows during a one hour session on Wednesday.  We spent Tuesday evening practising the skills Jack taught us on each other, which gave us a lot of food for thought, as well as helping us to form action plans to problems that we didn’t even realise we had! Specifically, we learnt how to say "So, what is bubbling up inside you?" with just the right amount of intonation to get a response! Coaching the fellows on Wednesday was a really interesting experience and hopefully valuable for the fellows in terms of addressing some of the very real challenges they face at their schools. We could not believe how exhausting the coaching process could be!

We then filed into the restaurant next door for the LRTT closing ceremony.  Speeches were given by Jack, Tom, Shisir, Swastika and the District Education Official, and the LRTT team continued the great LRTT tradition of closing with a song – this time the Les Miserables finale beneath the Nepali flag that Shisir had provided us with especially for the occasion!

We’ve had a really rewarding experience working with the Teach for Nepal fellows: four enjoyable days of work that didn’t seem like work; new friends made and inspiration for us to take back to our own classrooms in the UK.

There's rhiNO chance of being bored in Chitwan!

Our weekend started with a mammoth drive out of Kathmandu and following the mighty Trisuli river. We were following this monsoon-powered river for one reason; the LRTT tradition of white water rafting. We jumped out of the bus at a remote shack that seemed to be made of buoyancy aids and paddles perched between the river and the road. Our guide and pro-paddler for the day was Deepak and he showed us down a cliff to a sandy beach that lay alongside the river. After an incredibly brief safety briefing, we were sat in our boats, ambling down the river towards the first set of rapids. The scenery around us was so impressive- tall mountains that rose straight up from the river bank and were covered in forest and wispy clouds. The mobile phone companies had clearly taken inspiration from ‘HOLLYWOOD’ when they decided to plant a huge sign half way up one of these cliffs. Surely the most memorable moment had to be Dan popping out of the side of the boat on a particularly flat section but as soon as this happened, the sabotage started. The best tactic was to wait for someone to be admiring the scenery, catch them off-guard, lift up the legs and watch them tumble backwards into the water.




Our next stop was Chitwan National Park. Everyone you meet in Kathmandu asks you when you are going to take a visit there as if it is a right of passage. Shisir (CEO of Teach For Nepal) had organised a weekend of explorer luxury for us. We arrived to colonial feast- large, rural hotel with fans and air conditioning (it was about 5^oC hotter and a lot more humid in the park), a feast of local foods, a signed picture of Elton John on the wall and two REAL elephants in the elephant shed!

The early start the following day (0530!) was immediately compensated by a jungle trek that resulted in us being within 10m of a group of huge black rhinos. By the end of the walk, the group’s leech count was over 10. We couldn’t decide whether to take them off or let them drop off but experiencing 10 minutes with a leech stuck on my leg was enough time to make my mind up. Next stop were the elephant baths, casually. Letting an elephant squirt you with its trunk and throw you off its back is surprisingly good fun.

As you can imagine, we were all in such a happy mood by lunch time. Everyone was so relaxed and enjoying the experiences that a tropical jungle can inject into you. Even the mosquitoes couldn’t suck out our high spirits. We rounded off the trip with three crazy journeys. The first was a ride on the back of an elephant through the jungle whilst spotting rhinos, monkeys, deer and a chicken.

This was followed by a night-time tour of Chitwan on the back of a pick-up travelling at break-neck speeds. The final crazy journey was back to Kathmandu after making the most of Nepal’s distilled products the night before. Some people were suffering from severe “altitude sickness” on this journey.

Rajan- There's no pun worthy of this man

Last week we made a three day alteration to the regular LRTT course. We decided to be brave and really test out the impact that we have had on the 65 teachers that we trained on our course. This involved revisiting the teachers in their schools, observing their lessons, giving them feedback and planning with them.

 

Jack’s day was an incredible experience. It started with a two hour drive to outside Kathmandu then a 30 minute hike up to the top of a hill. Perched on top of this hill was a large school filled with excited students, not even fussed by the incredible view over the cliff at the end of their playground. Jack went there to meet Rajan, quite a reserved guy but with inspirational ideas. Jack observed Rajan teach an English lesson to 30 students using some ideas from the LRTT course about group work and peer learning. At the end of the lesson, Rajan asked for feddback from his students, “What did you think about my teaching today.” A very brave thing for a teacher to do, but their response gave Jack butterflies in his stomach. They replied, “You didn’t teach us Sir. We taught ourselves.” If this wasn’t enough, Jack found out that Rajan is running whole-school training sessions on his experience of the LRTT course and plans to observe and give feedback to each of them. What a hero:

 

These three days allowed us to observe and coach over half of the teachers from the LRTT course. These opportunities were the best experiences for us and the most powerful for improving teaching in each of the teachers. We all saw some great lessons and clear implementation of the strategies we had delivered during the course.

Dan and Kay had a brilliant experience when revisiting their school. They were asked after a leisurely lunch to spontaneously teach a class of 76 year 7s! To deal with this they used a Nepali teacher tactic of walking into the classroom and asking which page the students were on. They ended up delivering a lesson on Nepal’s monsoon season group work, peer assessment and creative writing- transferable skills, eat your heart out! They left the class with ALL 76 year 7 students asking them to mark their books.

 

 
 
 
 



After the observations, we headed back to Teach For Nepal House with high spirits. But we have to remember all our empathy we learnt at our schools in the UK. These teachers have such a challenging task ahead of them and we are all so admirable of their commitment and dedication in this context.


The charity we are partnered with, Volunteers Initiative Nepal invited back to their offices for a lovely closing ceremony, complete with Tikas, scarves and t-shirts. We took them out for dinner to a traditional Nepali restaurant. Traditional Nepali was an intriguing experience- tiny clay pots of rice wine, Nepali dancing and a peacock with a penchant for pecking people until they gave it money.

 

 

These teachers nEverest.

Today I was sat in a maths class taught by Sunil, an inspirational Teach For Nepal (TFN) Fellow.

We are running an LRTT course for the TFN fellows next week so before Sunil's lesson, I asked what the Fellows' biggest challenges are and what they would like to do in the training. He spoke about wanting to improve group work and classroom management. But, like I said, five minutes later we were blown away by his lesson with a year six group. Sunil was engaging, full of praise for the students and mixing up a range of teacher-talk, pair and individual work. He had a charming praise tactic of shaking students' hands and an alternative praise tactic of carrying students around on his shoulders!
 
It filled me with slight apprehension but our LRTT team are a fantastic group of teachers and it will be a great experience for us to get to know the TFN Fellows, impart our experiences and see what they think.

 

 

The weekend began with a Friday afternoon visit to an 800 year old Buddhist temple in Patan. The calm sense of zen was maintained at a nearby rooftop bar and augmented with some acappella karaoke. Nirvana was reached on the floor of Thamel's techno club. Clare R was reincarnated as a hamster, Tom, Dan and Jack as elephants. It would be an insult to the animal world to assign the remaining flailing of limbs.

The next day half of us went to the medieval city of Bhaktapur, sat in the shade of a temple adorned with lewd carvings and drank coffee. After extensive temple-wandering we were shown around a paper making factory of questionable authenticity with an incredible rooftop view. Genuine or make believe we exited through the gift shop to devastating effect. The others climbed to a hilltop nunnery in the Shivapuri national park with stunning views over Kathmandu. We found them recovering in a restaurant and compared stories beneath the UV-lit clouds.

On Sunday, Tom and I climbed a 2700m peak. The views from the summit were underwhelming but we washed away the slight disappointment and copious sweat in a raging mountain stream. Turns out a waterfall massage can be just as pleasant as having a woman walk up and down your back. The rest of the gang chilled in a coffee shop, learned to cook Mo-Mo, went shopping for saris and took up residence at Namaste Bar, in the company of beer, cricket and cheese balls. Oh, and Kay got a tattoo.

A Nepalesingly Great LRTT Course!

The first ever cohort of 65 teachers made it through the LRTT training course on Friday! On Thursday evening, we were all buzzing with enthusiasm for the following day- a session on planning, a session on building non-academic skills, micro-teaching and the closing ceremony.

 

 

 

Clare R. and Kay had the ingenious idea of linking a lesson plan to building a house whilst Jack made the group mould “confidence” using Play Dough. The micro-teaching illuminated what the teachers took in from each of our sessions and filled us with a sense of optimism about what the teachers would be able to take back into their classrooms.

 

 

 

By the time of the closing ceremony, there was an electric atmosphere. This was quickly stubbed out by a torrential rainstorm and numerous long-winded speeches that all started with, “I’ll keep this short.” But they added to the prestige of the event and made me realise another similarity between Uganda and Nepal: everyone loves a grand, drawn-out event!

We were lucky enough to get the minister for secondary education and the vice principal of our facilitating college to attend, along with superb speeches from Jack, Clare R., Parveen and three of the teachers we were training. The only thing missing from a (classically Teach First) closing ceremony was a chant of “Together we are stronger!” So I got everyone to stand, link arms and chant “Ekata nai bal ho!”

 

After the event, everyone was immersed with swapping emails with their teachers and I had to drag them away amid making promises to visit them all in the coming week to watch their teaching.

 

 

 

 

The monsoon is Nepalling

Day One of our LRTT training course was a brilliant experience. All of us had spent the previous night planning each of our sessions. This ended up taking a good few hours but was a great experience for each to think about how we could best deliver engaging sessions on engagement and differentiated sessions on differentiation.

I was so nervous about the start of the course this morning. One reason was that I had planned to deliver an ‘inspirational’ speech that included a chant in Sanskrit Nepalese to 65 Nepalese teachers. The main reason for being nervous was the very real worry that the 65 Nepalese teachers wouldn’t turn up to this training course that I have spent the last 7 months organising!

Thankfully with five minutes to go before the opening ceremony, we had reached full capacity. This meant that we would be delivering our LRTT course to over 65 teachers. Bhupi started off with a speech about VIN (our partner charity). I followed, and thankfully collaborated with a Nepalese teacher for the Sanskrit chant.

We split the teachers into groups with two facilitators each, and made our way to the training rooms.  At first we found the language barrier difficult but we resorted to our bank of strategies for dealing with this in our students and the puzzled stares were soon replaced with enthusiastic smiles. Clare R. and Kay faced the additional barrier of a brilliantly positioned window that pinged water into the centre of their classroom creating a lake that reminded us it really is monsoon season in Nepal.

By lunch time (1445 due to a logistical error- TIAsia), we were all buzzing with enthusiasm. It was reassuring and inspiring to hear from the teachers that they were really grateful for our training and full of praise for their facilitators.

An exhausting day spent delivering and planning LRTT sessions has reduced Clare M. and Kay to hysterical laughter about pictures of funny cats. Rich and Jack have invented a game of catch that persuades Gemma that she is involved but really isn’t. Parveen has lost her voice trying to out-moo the group without laughing and some, but not all of us, can see the moon in the spoon.