Simon's Birthday

We celebrated my birthday in Room 372 with an afternoon tea for our Fulbright friends.

Hanane (Morocco), Hasna and Haya (Palestine), Keitsemetsie (Botswana), Diana and Karina (Mexico)

Susanna and her daughter Lilly (Finland) and two kiwis

Khalid and Hanane (Morocco)

Ute Arrives

Ute arrived yesterday 21st November after a long trip for three weeks with us.

Arrival at Indianapolis Airport

Eiteljorg Museum of Native American Culture

This is a must see museum in Indianapolis. It focusses on maintaining the history and culture of the native American Indians. Unfortunately, their history during the founding of the USA between the 1600's to the 1900's makes sad reading. All despite their own willingness to try and accomodate the new settlers. A similar pattern with respect of indigenous people everywhere. It was 2 degrees, sunny and fine on the day.

ThanksGiving Dinner Sherwood Oaks Christian Church 20th November

We were invited to the Sherwood Oaks Christian Church as part of the International Community at IU. This was a lovely occasion with something like 300 people served a dinner of Turkey and vegetables by the church members. We were transported there and back and entertained with music and a mass Thanksgiving history role play (!) during our time. Thanks giving is a holiday officially observed on the 24th, but extends through the week. Americans visit family and give thanks for what they have. What a lovely event and our hosts went out of their way to make us welcome in their community. Thank you!

The Sherwood Oaks Hall

Karina (Mexico) and Ley Kheng and Gail (Singapore)

This is little Siran from India. Her family are not part of the Fulbright Group, but she is famous. Her family lives near us and here she is grooving to the music on the table after dinner.

The Week Past: Some air guitar and karoake with actions

Its been a busy week winding up our project reports, attending lectures and functions. Here are a few pictures of life with my colleagues. The Mad Housewife is a good brew from California. Some of the Fulbrighters are so young they don't know some of the classic music of the 60's and 70's!

We are now in the Thanksgiving Break that extends to November 27th - no IU University classes. The weather has just turned very cold and we are now at zero overnight with frosts. We are travelling to Alabama for a few days next week. Heads down and work time...

Group Karoake with Actions - another use for a walking stick

A Sign for Promoting American Culture

A real brand of very good wine from California

Sunset at Evermann

Moroccan Independence Day Celebrations. That's sweet peppermint tea on the table - a traditional drink

Pictures

Above and below pictures: a shruti box from India in Jessie and Joshua's home Philly, PA

The fireboys - a sculpture outside a local community services building: Lancaster, PA

This family needed a father - so I helped out. Lancaster, PA

Philadelphia PA

We travelled through Philadelphia en-route to Lancaster PA. Arriving in Philly on Sunday we stayed at Joshua and Jessie Block's in the city. We really enjoyed our time in this cosmopolitan city. Josh took us for a walk through his suburb of Kingsessing. Many older houses with porches - typically three stories and built c. 1800's. Most are either being done up, or needing done up. Lovely tree line spaces and a great community feel. We were treated to a musical performance in Josh's house as his wife Jessie was playing traditional jewish music with her band. The house was filled with lovely sounds as we talked. We look forward to seeing them in NZL in the early part of next year.

I visited Joshua's school on Monday 'The Science Leadership Academy' in downtown.The school has many more black students compared to Indiana. I enjoyed meeting all the students and they were very easy to talk too as Joshua introduced me. We left to travel by train to Lancaster; an hour or so away. Good choice. We really enjoyed the ride and recommend the SEPTA system. Rolling out of Philly the landscape grades out of concrete to fields and farm houses. The characteristic signature are farms with 2 to 3 silos for grains. The trees were all yellow and rust coloured with dashes of red. The landscape and train ride were similar to southern Germany - but swap the housing styles.

Lancaster was founded in 1720 and is a lovely PA town well worth a visit. It has an older style and ambiance associated with its artisan hub, and narrower streets and older stone buildings to match. On Tuesday I visited the Lancaster Country Day School, a private school from K to 12. I enjoyed a visit to a POGIL chemistry classroom and followed this with a professional discussion time with the teacher in charge. In the afternoon, I went to Franklin and Marshall College. This is a private college of about 2500 students who are all undergraduates. The fees are approx. $60000 USD per year. I was hosted by the Professor in charge of the POGIL programme in the USA. I also visited his POGIL class in Chemistry. It turned out that one of his students had cousins that lived in Dunedin. Now what are the chances of that!? Another meeting in the afternoon involved Higher Education at FMC and the links to the Fulbright Programme.

We went out of town on Wednesday in search of some solice after the election day result. Fittingly the day was wet and grey. In German there is an expression 'Und the Himmel Weint' - the heavens cried. It was hard to avoid the poignancy of that saying, the fitting weather, and our mood in comparison to what we thought America stood for.

The picture says it all

So it was a delight to meet the Amish people. Firstly, we took a wild taxi ride some 20 km east of Lancaster to Intercourse - a place. Unfolding from the vehicle, we booked a buggy ride and were joined by 5 other people. An Amish older gentleman took us around some of the farms and explained how they did things. No electricity, but they had gas. They farmed cows, fruit (apples, pears and peaches), wheat, corn, soy, potatoes. The horses clipped and clopped through it all. Stopping at a farm, all of a sudden we were confronted by two younger Amish men selling cookies and root beer. It turns out that they school their own children to 8th grade only and that's it. Older young people can leave the community to explore the outside world if they wish. For example, this man's son was a truck driver.

We had a traditional meal at an Amish restaurant and took the bus into town. I thought I was on a charter bus?! Already seated were 10 Amish and Mennonites. The bus ride took some time, so we said Hi and talked together. One man wanted to know about NZL and farming there. It seems that farming and environmental issues are prominent in the USA too. The ladies smiled, but didn't say anything.  The election came up and we all expressed the need to treat each other with more respect than had been shown throughout the campaign. We wanted to know about how they got the grain into the grain silos - they blow it in. Some of the oldest silos were made out of stone and must have taken ages to build on make-shift scaffolding. These silos are the signatures of the landscape - pronounced silhouettes at dusk...

Housing in Kingsessing Philadelphia

A lady on the street

Philadelphia downtown - Railway station to the left

Inside Philadelphia 30th Street Station

Statue - In honour of the men and women who built the PA rail system: An angel uplifting a worker

Lancaster Franklin and Marshall College

Deciding who bats and who fields in baseball: Lancaster, PA

A tower in Lancaster

An Amish Farm house

Indianapolis Visit

On Thursday Sylvia and I travelled to Indianapolis for the day. I was seeking out some prosthetic services I couldn't access here in Bloomington. Anyway we also had a great day in Indy and saw a few of these sites.

Signature Charter IB School Evansville Indiana

On Wednesday we travelled 2 hours by bus to Evansville. The low rolling hills around Bloomington give way to flat landscape that is dryer, warmer and the trees are only just turning orange/red. The town sits right near the border to Kentucky and we saw the Ohio River. The school we visited was a charter school running an IB platform. It was ranked no. 10 school in the USA and number 1 in the Midwest by the Washington Post. It has many other awards. The students were superb and highly motivated. We sat through a TOK (Theory of Knowledge) class (TOK classes are a specific requirement of the international IB programme). Three boys delivered a superb analysis on 'The System is Broken' - an outline of preferential treatment of the rich and or famous when it comes to being judged by all of us, the media and the law. It was all done to rap tune and they didn't miss a beat! All of the students were clearly well informed and discussed education and societal issues of all sorts. They and the staff were a delight to be with.

Charter Schools are as contentious in the USA as in NZL. Examine some of the debate here fromt he New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/opinion/sunday/schools-that-work.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0

The Evansville School is a special charter of the school is all about motivation. They have about 340 students and accept anyone who wants to come to them. If they have an excess of students they run a random lottery system - so any type of student theoretically can be enroll. Its likely, however, that students and families will be pre-selecting themselves in reality to a large degree. The students work incredibly hard, as do the staff, and are extended much more on a continual basis than you might expect in other public schools. However, this comes in a background of less overall breadth of opportunities. For example, sports and ESL and disabilities services would be catered for if students got to enroll, but are not 'givens' or extensive as part of school life. The school students accumulate a lot of community service hours as part of the school's focus and note that this is too a requirement of the IB programme. Funding is a continual issue for the school and they are not as well funded, in fact one of the poorest, as others in the public funding system. I liked the tennis ball idea on the scrapping chairs!