HeyMath! Consultant: Fay
I've been working for Heymath in Chennai for about 3 months now. It's been great fun. I really enjoy the job - I'm essentially creating the lesson content, this involves:
- Coming up with fun ways of teaching primary maths.
- Using flash to create colourful, animated and interactive lessons.
- Writing voice-scripts so that our lessons have the added dimension of an audio explanation to what is being explained visually.
- Adding my own voice to lessons.
- Assessing the quality of the lessons we produce. Everything is a team effort.
Outside of work, I do yoga and take lessons in Tamil. Tamil is fascinating, but the learning process has been very slow, mostly because I get such little opportunity to try and speak it. Lets just say everyone in Chennai speaks profoundly better English than I do Tamil.
So far, I haven't done much traveling. This is mainly because I'm a lazy git, but also because there are so many other more chilled out things I like to do at weekends, reading Indian current affairs magazines, writing letters to my far-away friends, catching up with the people I have met here in Chennai and trying to learn Tamil.
My favorite part of living in Chennai has been all the fascinating things I have learnt about this part of the world and also getting to know a whole range of people who live in this city. It has been a slow process; people are very friendly but not as chatty in general as in the UK. On the whole social-lives here are very family-orientated. I haven't got anywhere near the social-life I would have in the UK. If I wanted to, I could probably find some people with whom to visit Chennai's few pubbing and clubbing venues, but it's very much an expensive hobby, inaccessible to the majority of Chennai's residents, and so as such, appeals to me less.
Since it takes such a long time to get to know people, I would have found life here very difficult if I wasn't living with Ed, another Heymath employee from the UK, with whom I share a flat and spend a lot of time.
Almost everything here seems very cheap, particularly people's time. I still find it kind of odd that I pay the same amount for a block of luxury cheddar as for an hour's Tamil class.
Anyway, I totally recommend applying to join Heymath in Chennai. It's a great opportunity to do something different with your life for a year. Not only will you be experiencing life in another part of the world, but you will also be working for a pretty awesome company!
