HeyMath! Consultant: Ben
Despite having this trip planned for over a year I still had little idea what life was going to be like when I got to Chennai. I wasn't even sure that Chennai was the standard name. To get myself acclimatized before I came I took some Tamil lessons with the Tamil society at Cambridge. Although some of this was good to know I think I knew more Tamil before I left than I do now after 4 months. If someone doesn't know English there will always be someone close by who can help but be careful if you want two of something, you might get three.
The main advice I got from my Tamil teacher before coming here was eat lots and shop lots. I took the first part to heart. It is quite possible to dine out for lunch and dinner everyday and for the first couple of weeks I did. This, augmented with visits to the snack cupboard at work, meant I was very well fed. One thing that you won't find at home is the South Indian Thali, a variety of pots of sauce with rice and bread.
Unfortunately beer generally means Kingfisher, with added glycerin for the heat. It seems that IPA is a bit of a myth, though I have been informed that it occasionally raises its head. That said, it is definitely worth buying a few if only for the experience of buying beer through a metal grill.
Money all comes with Gandhi's face printed on it. The small bills come in handy, especially the 10's when paying for autos. At the moment it costs 30 rupees (about 40 pence) to get an auto to work; for use when you are feeling lazy or want to save that extra ten minutes. The pay works out well but as you might expect the most lavish meals, trips away, and nights out tend to come at the beginning of the month.
At work you are treated as one of the team right from the start. My first work was quality checking the lessons and making small changes using Adobe Flash. Most of my time now goes into designing and producing these lessons for Westport, a group of schools in the U.S.A. It is particularly satisfying when one of your projects is created and uploaded to the site. Other projects of mine included arranging and taking part in a talk to 800 pupils at a Chennai school and doing some juggling for a maths trail event. I am about to start on the making of a StoryMath! about pirates and fractals.
I have just finished a term of teaching juggling at Kids Central, a local preschool. This has been a fun challenge. The main goal was to get them to throw and catch which some of them achieved better than others. This was set up by Nimmi, one of the directors. Next term football and origami are going to be taught by other interns.
Having two other interns, Daniel and Conaill, start at the same time has been great. One reason being that we have managed some epic long weekends. My favourite was lazing on a boat in the backwaters of Kerala. A last thing to bear in mind is that it is not always easy to know where the fun is but, if you let it, it'll come to you.
