Big news guys! I am free of a cruel form of punishment known as Indus International School! Friday (the 25th) was my last day at Indus! I was withdrawn because of some weird complications with my school in America. So what happened was that when my mom went back to the mothership known as Mountain View, California, she called my counselor at Newport, which is my high school in America. She was originally calling just to see how the re-enrollment process goes, once we're ready to re-enroll me. But somehow that conversation turned into something different, and we found out that we should be focusing our attention on something much bigger than just when to enroll me again. My counselor told my mother-figure that if I finished the year at Indus, I wouldn't have enough credits to go into tenth grade with the rest of my peers. My mom did some thinking and found out that the credits could be made up here and there through summer school or extra classes, so that wasn't really a problem. But then we looked at Newport's syllabi for the classes that I was taking at Indus. That, my friends, was the major problem. I was already 4 months into the school year and I hadn't done most of the work that my peers (who were only 2 and a half months in) had done. So not only would I go back short of credits, I would go back short of knowledge as well. Since my current Plan A is to go into medicine, I need a lot of biology and chemistry to be prepared for med school and everything, but if I finished at Indus neither of my bio and chem credits would count. That being said, I'd have to take physics in 11th grade, instead of biology 2 like I was planning. PHYSICS. Yeah......no. I am most definitely not a physics person. Also, I'd be really screwed for math. I'm supposed to take geometry all year in 9th grade, but what do you know? Indus doesn't do that. They do this weird integrated math thing, which is super hard and kind of idiotic, so I would go back to Newport knowing no geometry whatsoever. Not a good thing.
Problems stacked up, and thus blossomed a big ugly garden of ugly problem flowers. This all happened around the middle of November. With all of these problems, I had a few options in short:
1) Finish the year at Indus. Risk being a 5th year senior and thus postponing my entire life by like 5 months or something. Also have to take math with the freshmen as a sophomore (socially and emotionally very bad)
2) Take the rest of the year off and hang out (sounds good so far, right? keep reading...), then go back into Newport as a freshman, postponing my entire life by a year. There's the catch, making this option also very very bad for obvious reasons.
3) Drop out of Indus (conveniently right before exams!) and do online school at this place called Keystone, therefore enabling me to do the two things I wanted to do while living here: volunteer and learn Hindi.
Which option do you think I picked? Let me give you a hint: given that I'm sitting here writing this at 2:17pm my time and planning to go volunteer at an orphanage on Thursday with my dad and his team of doctors, I can tell you for danggg sure I didn't pick to stay at Indus. I picked option 3, do online school. I started yesterday, which was Monday for me (I'm not sure what day/night it was for all y'all that are reading this outside of India). So far it's pretty chill. I can't do much right now though because I have yet to get my textbooks. My mom has some really awesome friends/coworkers who are carting them back to India from America for me (thanks a lot guys!) and they'll get here on Sunday.
My last day at Indus was pretty good. But get this--I took one of those idiotic formal uniform white shirts and let all my friends sign it. Seems pretty harmless, yeah? No. The head of middle school, who, I will be honest, is one of the meanest people I've ever met in my life, confiscated my shirt. You know why? Because I was defacing a school uniform. Okay, is it such a novel concept to have people sign an article of clothing that isn't even a school uniform after I leave school? Now it's just MY white shirt, what is she gonna do about it if I spray paint my skirt yellow after leaving the school? Whatever, that's Indus's people of authority for you. I'm not gonna miss Indus itself at all. The people that I met, on the other hand, I'll miss them a lot. Most of them anyways. I think it's super cool that now I know people from so many different countries of the world, and that's definitely something that I gained by going to Indus.
Ohhhh man, I just stopped and ate lunch then did some other random stuff, and I gotta say that Pau Bhaji is one of the most delicious delicacies ever. That stuff is so good. In Bangalore it has to come from a packet because there's no place to get good pau bhaji otherwise, but in Bombay it is so freaking delish.
OH! One more thing before I wind this up! Guess what! So before I went to Indus, I had these 5 tie-on bracelets that I never took off, 4 were from places that we traveled to and 1 was from a friend who made it for me just before I left. When I say that I never took them off, I'm being completely serious. Two of them had been on for almost 4 years, one for almost 3 years, and the other two for a few months. What do you think I'm gonna say next? You guessed it--Indus made me take them off. This had me very devastated, but since I left Indus I got to put them back on! Yay yay yay!
More later, thanks for reading! :)
Problems stacked up, and thus blossomed a big ugly garden of ugly problem flowers. This all happened around the middle of November. With all of these problems, I had a few options in short:
1) Finish the year at Indus. Risk being a 5th year senior and thus postponing my entire life by like 5 months or something. Also have to take math with the freshmen as a sophomore (socially and emotionally very bad)
2) Take the rest of the year off and hang out (sounds good so far, right? keep reading...), then go back into Newport as a freshman, postponing my entire life by a year. There's the catch, making this option also very very bad for obvious reasons.
3) Drop out of Indus (conveniently right before exams!) and do online school at this place called Keystone, therefore enabling me to do the two things I wanted to do while living here: volunteer and learn Hindi.
Which option do you think I picked? Let me give you a hint: given that I'm sitting here writing this at 2:17pm my time and planning to go volunteer at an orphanage on Thursday with my dad and his team of doctors, I can tell you for danggg sure I didn't pick to stay at Indus. I picked option 3, do online school. I started yesterday, which was Monday for me (I'm not sure what day/night it was for all y'all that are reading this outside of India). So far it's pretty chill. I can't do much right now though because I have yet to get my textbooks. My mom has some really awesome friends/coworkers who are carting them back to India from America for me (thanks a lot guys!) and they'll get here on Sunday.
My last day at Indus was pretty good. But get this--I took one of those idiotic formal uniform white shirts and let all my friends sign it. Seems pretty harmless, yeah? No. The head of middle school, who, I will be honest, is one of the meanest people I've ever met in my life, confiscated my shirt. You know why? Because I was defacing a school uniform. Okay, is it such a novel concept to have people sign an article of clothing that isn't even a school uniform after I leave school? Now it's just MY white shirt, what is she gonna do about it if I spray paint my skirt yellow after leaving the school? Whatever, that's Indus's people of authority for you. I'm not gonna miss Indus itself at all. The people that I met, on the other hand, I'll miss them a lot. Most of them anyways. I think it's super cool that now I know people from so many different countries of the world, and that's definitely something that I gained by going to Indus.
Ohhhh man, I just stopped and ate lunch then did some other random stuff, and I gotta say that Pau Bhaji is one of the most delicious delicacies ever. That stuff is so good. In Bangalore it has to come from a packet because there's no place to get good pau bhaji otherwise, but in Bombay it is so freaking delish.
OH! One more thing before I wind this up! Guess what! So before I went to Indus, I had these 5 tie-on bracelets that I never took off, 4 were from places that we traveled to and 1 was from a friend who made it for me just before I left. When I say that I never took them off, I'm being completely serious. Two of them had been on for almost 4 years, one for almost 3 years, and the other two for a few months. What do you think I'm gonna say next? You guessed it--Indus made me take them off. This had me very devastated, but since I left Indus I got to put them back on! Yay yay yay!
More later, thanks for reading! :)
Wow! What a glorious experience your school sounds like...or should I say your OLD school! I'm super thrilled for you that you've found another more pleasant way to get through 9th grade. And it's great to hear your plans for learning hindi and volunteering. Yay!
ReplyDeleteYes indeed! Thanks for the comment--I'm glad I found a better way as well! I'm already working on the volunteering and Hindi, which you will see n a post that will be up soon! :)
ReplyDelete