31st January - 2nd February 2007

Wednesday 31st January

This morning I was at Ranapanediniya School. It was the last day for 5 of their teachers. There is a policy in Sri Lanka that after 8 years at a school, a teacher is transferred. It’s an interesting idea I think. Some like it, some don’t.

I took 4 classes, accompanied by K. Premasiri. With grades 3 and 7 I did The Fruit Song. Only with the latter did I attempt to get them singing it as a round, and I recorded them on minidisc. With grade 9 we continued the telephone dialogue from their exercise book we started looking at last week. With grade 11 we looked at a couple of new words in 3 tenses: the infinitive, the past and the past participle.

This afternoon I was at Nirasha and using the atlas gave them a few exercises based around countries, such as “Sri Lanka is near India”, and “Sri Lanka is not near England”. They don’t know where many countries are on the map, so even the basic geography lesson is useful for them.

Thursday 1st February

Today, being a full moon, was Poya Day, a national Buddhist holiday. So I visited a school of a different kind this morning – that populated by fish. I took my snorkel, and it was wonderful to swim freely among hundreds of beautiful fish.

After my swim I sat watching the crowds enjoying their Poya Day on the beach, and noticed that those playing cricket, and swimming were predominantly male. I asked Nalinda and Manju, and they confirmed my suspicion that even on a special day like today, most girls will stay at home. That reminds me, very few, if any, women smoke in Sri Lanka, and most, if not all, men do.

This afternoon I watched a subtitled Indian film starring Anil Kapur on TV with Mrs. Mendis. She was amazed that I didn’t know who he was. At breakfast time, I had seen, apparently on every channel, Buddhist monks reciting tales of the Buddha’s life in Sinhala, and chanting in Pali.

This evening at sunset Nalinda, Manju and I went to a temple about 12km out of Rathgama so I could get a good grasp of what happens on a Poya Day. White clothing was popular among the devotees, but not exclusively so. People were wandering around making offerings, by lighting sandalwood incense sticks, and coconut oil candles. They would also water the roots of the bo tree. This tree, as is the norm, was on a raised bed. So watering it involved pouring water into a funnel at shoulder height. Before the evening mass started we all stood in a huge circle around the temple, and offerings were passed round everyone before being taken into the temple. These offerings were mostly lotus flowers, candles and incense sticks.

Alas I’ve had no joy with Sri Lankan radio stations. I’ve done my best to contact them and arrange a visit, but it’s not going to happen now. Pity, that could have been really interesting. Maybe next time…

Friday 2nd February

I was at Siri Sumana School this morning. I did an exercise about Poya Day: “Yesterday was Poya Day. What did you do yesterday?” Although all five grade 4 classes are of mixed abilities there is a stark difference in the abilities of some of them. The first group were a bit unruly, and as I’ve previously said, this can make things very challenging, particularly when the resident English teacher is not there to help keep order. Despite their behaviour they soon grasped what the day’s lesson was about. The 2nd class however, just could not get it. I had blank faces for 15 minutes, and I felt rather inept at not being able to come up with a way to help them understand.

This afternoon at Nirasha School I did a colour word search, followed by The Rainbow Song, hopscotch and the Engines Engines rhyme book.

I’m having my own pronunciation problems now. It’s taken me a while to get the difference between“…tha” and “…ta”. “Pahatha” means “at five”, as in the time I usually meet Indiga in the evening, while “pahata” means “down”.