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.