adventures in bangalore

Well I’m back in the good ‘ol PNW and have been back for a full 10 days. I discussed in an earlier post my realization that I wouldn’t be gleaning some nice neat, bow-on-top kind of lesson or knowledge from the trip, but I did do a small bit of reflective writing for Indhu and Usha. They asked us to write about three memories from the month:

1. A striking new idea we had come across
2. An especially inspirational moment
3. A moment that was especially emotionally stirring

Here’s what I wrote (in about five minutes; don’t judge too hard):

1. Thinking about individual responsibility in reading poetry or seeing art. Miss Pratibha addressed our concerns about how difficult it is to teach poetry without, as Billy Collins aptly put it, “beating [the poem] with a hose to find out what it really means.” We also were wary about reading literature and poetry written in a drastically different context than that which we are familiar with; we didn’t want, for example, to read one novel about the Nigerian/Biafran war in the 1960s (Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) and think that we “get it” just from reading the book without really knowing a lot about the relevant context. Miss Pratibha said that art and literature should be seen as more of a gateway, an invitation for the student to explore more–find out more about the author’s life, the history of the genre, the specific events occurring around the time the poem or art piece was created–if she felt moved to do so. Some poems stir us, others don’t do much for us. Miss Pratibha encouraged us to approach art and poetry expecting to take on more responsibility than we do; responsibility to be the agents of our own learning and do investigating where we feel called to do so.
2. Miss Akkai’s whole presentation was so incredibly inspirational. I loved the whole thing. Hearing about the horrible things that have happened to her and the discrimination she faces as a trans woman while seeing what an action-oriented, joyful, compassionate person she is was my favorite moment of the trip. I know that no matter what awful things come up in my life, I can remember Miss Akkai’s joy and resillience and be inspired to respond as she so miraculously has.
3. Our discussion about the possibility of living a meaningful, justice-driven life without being an activist was a very important moment for me this month. This was a huge emotional relief to me after feeling so guilty and hopeless about the world, and thinking that the only way to really be a good person in it (as a person of privilege) was to be an activist, though I don’t that activism is the right fit for me. Hearing from people that I trust and respect that I can work for justice no matter what my career was a wonderfully relieving catharsis.

So these were some highlights of the month for me.

I believe the blog ends here, but the learning certainly doesn’t. I’m starting to think that it never will.

Whoops, I’m back from India and neglected to post this entry I was working on in the last few days of my trip. Here it is, for anybody who is still tuning in:

Last day of class!

This morning a sociology teacher from a local university, Mr. Lakshmi, came to talk to us about Dalit  poetry. Mr. Lakshmi tried to help us understand caste—an infinitely complex system of psychological and social power dynamics that he described as “India’s second constitution”—and about what it means to be a Dalit. Formerly referred to as “Untouchables,” Dalits are, in Mr. Lakshmi’s words, “poor, downtrodden, landless, bonded laborers” who are “socio-culturally not qualified to use any public property.” One of the ironic injustices he described to illustrate this was that Dalits always build Hindu temples, but are not allowed to enter them for worship.

One of the poems we read was by a Kannada poet called Siddalingaiah (don’t ask me how to pronounce that). It’s called “My People:”

MY PEOPLE

Who die of starvation, who are kicked till they faint,

Who cringe before others, reaching out to hands and feet

Who keep their hands folded, devotees of those above them,

These, these are my people.

Who plough, sow and harvest, sweating in the sun

Who take rest sighing heavily with fatigue

Who go about empty-handed, getting little to eat or wear,

These, these are my people.

Who carry dressed stone, raised roofs, build bungalows,

And get crushed for their pains under the debris

Who, fallen by the wayside, voiceless, weep within themselves,

These, these are my people.

Who, treated to fiery speeches, are scorched and burnt to ashes,

Who, for those who feast on sweets with God’s name on their lips,

Stitch sandals and shoes, these victims of usurers,

These, these are my people.

Who excavate gold but go without food,

Who weave fine fabrics, but go themselves bare,

Who do what they are told, who subsist on mere air,

These, these are my people.

 

Another of Siddalingaiah’s poems that I loved, which was translated from Kannada:

The Dalits are Coming

The Dalits are coming, step aside-

Hand over the rains, let them rule

 

Minds burning with countless dreams,

Slogans like thunder and lightning,

In the language of earthquakes,

Here comes the dalit procession,

Writing history with their feet.

 

Into the dump go gods and gurus,

Down the drain go the lawmakers.

 

On a path they struck for themselves

March the dalits in procession,

Burning torches in their hands,

Sparks of revolution in their eyes

Exploding like balls of fire.

 

For the thorn bushes of caste and religion,

They were as thorns in the side.

 

They became the sky that looked down at

The seven seas that swallowed them.

 

Since Rama’s time and Krishna’s time

Unto the time of the Gandhis,

They had bowed low with folded hands.

Now they have risen in the struggle.

 

It grows, it breaks out of its shell

The endless dalit procession.

 

Bullet for bullet, blood for blood,

Shoulder to shoulder, lives bound together.

 

Under the flag of dalit India

Stood the farmers and workers.

 

Flowers bloom in every forest,

Thousands of birds take flight,

The eastern sky turned red,

Morning broke for the poor.

 

The dalits are coming, step aside!

The dalits have come, give it up!

It was a powerful ending to our trip.

The past few days have been uneventful–Sunday was a rest day during which I became sick, Monday I stayed home to recover, and today was another rest day–but this weekend was full of fun travels.

On Friday we all got up early to pile into a bus for a two-hour drive to a Jain temple in a town called Hassan. To get to the 900-year-old temple we climbed 600-something steps to the top of a little mountain/huge hill and got to see this amazing statue:

…It’s a huge monolith (note the teeny person in the corner). The feet are darker because milk, honey, curd (sort-of yogurt) and ghee (clarified butter) are routinely poured over them as an offering.

Here’s me and, from left to right, Meili, Ruby, Anna and Stefanie trying to be cute after our intense climb:

After visiting Hassan and eating a delicious lunch at a tiny restaurant staffed only by a mother, father, and their 9-year-old son, we drove a few more hours to Mysore and spent the night there.

Aah! I just realized that the wifi at my hostel is about to be turned off.

Here’s a picture from a beautiful palace we visited in Mysore, right before I got yelled at for taking pictures:

And here is a gorgeous Hindu temple we visited later that day (I didn’t do a very good job of keeping track of names).

Also here is an ad I found on my host family’s kitchen counter… for skin-lightening cream. Ugh. Had to toss this in the mix.

22/07/2015, 10:14pm

Things I will miss about Bangalore:

1. Buying food directly from the people who make or grow their products.
2. Going barefoot in temples. There’s something special about touching the cold marble directly while walking in these beautiful sacred spaces.
3. The belief that food cannot be over-spiced. I love the intense flavors here and have always been a proponent of the “let’s mix ALL of these spices together in large quantities” cooking style. They get me here.
4. Indian coffee. There’s something about the perfect ratio of coffee to milk to sugar that makes the tiny 5-oz cups here so satisfying. My go-to 12 oz coffee size seems grossly excessive here (though I’m sure I’ll have little trouble readjusting to it when I get back)… a Starbucks drip coffee also costs about 13x more even though it’s only twice the volume.
5. City cows. They’re all over the place—standing around in the middle of the road, munching grass in the medians of highways, ambling down a sidewalks. I love seeing them slowly crossing busy streets and knowing they’re safe because the drivers will avoid them at all costs.
6. Being able to find a hot, filling, delicious meal for less than a dollar.
7. Random encounters with monkeys in the larger city parks.
8. The way traffic works here. It’s a lot crazier, and involves far more honking, which is a little stressful. But drivers and pedestrians here are so much more aware than they are back home. If you tried to text and drive here, you’d rear-end or be rear-ended by somebody in seconds. Ironically, the free-for-all driving which prevails here leads to a heightened awareness of other drivers and pedestrians and doesn’t seem to be less safe than Seattle driving.
9. Vibrant sarees and fragrant jasmine flowers women wear in their hair.
10. Bucket baths (wherein one uses a bucket and a cup to bathe oneself). It saves so much water that I automatically feel a little better about myself whenever I do it. Of course I could continue bathing this way when I return home, but showers are too wonderful.
11. Ubiquitous fruit vendors. It seems like there’s a cart piled with neat pyramids of pomegranates, mangoes, jackfruit, custard apples and bananas on every street corner.

Things I will have a new appreciation for when I return:

1. Our beautiful sidewalks. Most of the sidewalks I have walked on here have gaping holes, large unstable segments which rock dangerously when stepped upon, tree roots cracking them, felled telephone wires splayed about, and/or large piles of cow poop. It would be quite unwise to walk anywhere here without looking at where you’re stepping the whole time. Here’s a picture of a typical segment of sidewalk here:

1. Talking to strangers (sorry mom). I don’t speak Hindi or Kannada so here I rely on whatever English people happen to have, which usually leads to confusion on both of our parts and makes me feel guilty for expecting people to speak my language in their country. It’s really nice to be able to have an effortless conversation full of nuance and idioms with pretty much anybody I encounter back home.
2. FRESH DARK GREEN/LEAFY VEGGIES. Enough said.
3. Blasting music. Staying in hostels is fun, and I so appreciate my homestay family welcoming us into their home. But I miss having loud dance parties with myself whenever I want.
4. The (relative) lack of mosquitoes. In Bellingham/Seattle, I usually get bitten if I’m out at night on a muggy summer day. Here, just this morning I got my first bite of the day before 10am. Mosquitoes are everywhere throughout the entire day…and may or may not carry malaria or dengue fever.
5. Blending into the crowd in public is, I have realized, a wonderful privilege that I have back home. It’s somehow so draining to be stared at all of the time and know that I stick out like a sore thumb in a sea of people who obviously belong. People don’t really glare or send dirty looks, but even their benign curiosity is a little tiresome. I can’t wait to not be an oddity.
6. Eating protein. Here, people mostly eat rice, potatoes, cooked vegetables, and lentils. South Indian food is delicious, but I am so very excited to go back to my diet full of meat and eggs.
7. Clean air.
8. Being able to stay out late. Here, staying out past 8 or 9 is very much frowned upon and not smart to do without a large group. It will be nice to be able to stay out later without risking shaming anybody when I go back home.

Today we performed the plays we wrote at “Speaking of Theater,” a theater festival hosted in a bookstore called Atta Galatta. When Dr. Radah told us that we were going to be filling the opening slot in the festival the general sentiment of the group was quite anxious. We had barely practiced the plays, most of us had never acted… and we were told we had to leave our homestays before 8am to get to the venue in time to open for the festival. Waking up early is hard. I was quite nervous that there wouldn’t even be an audience so early in the morning, that we would mess up our semi-improvized lines, or that people would be bored by our sub-par playwriting skills.

When we arrived this morning, mostly awake and still a little nervous, we saw that the venue was quite small, just a little bookstore with a slightly raised stage and seating for 50 or 60 people. This turned out to be perfect for our purposes, however; in typical Theatre of the Oppressed fashion, we involved the audience in our performances and they rose magnificently to the challenge, perhaps aided by the intimate and un-intimidating venue (and probably our un-intimidating acting skills). After each play Dr. Radah led a discussion about the relatability of the situation, desires of the characters and larger themes at play and by the discussion of the 3^rd and 4^th plays audience members were on the edge of their seats, waving their hands in the air to be called on and energetically offering their opinions on the issues that arose from our performances. I had been worried about the earliness of our performance, but as it turned out, the kind of people who show up to a theater festival at 9am on a Saturday are especially excited about being there and are consequently quite willing to participate. It was fantastic to be so well-received and to see the lively and thoughtful dialogue arising from the plays we had created.

Here are some of my classmates performing:

Oh, what a good day today was! My twelve group members and our two group leaders, Anu and Amy, reconvened for a group debrief for the first time in over a week. We started by checking in, and ended up continuing our conversation based off of our check-ins for the next two hours. Here’s some of the stuff that we talked about today.

For the past week or so, I have been increasingly anxious about pinning down what exactly I’m learning here. The question, “what have you learned on the trip so far?” came up yesterday when I was talking to a few classmates over lunch, and I drew a blank when it was my turn to answer. I said eventually that I had learned a lot about my privilege through widening my perspective—both privilege here in India and in my life back home—but was dissatisfied with this answer. Did I really come all the way over here to learn about my privilege? That didn’t seem to me to be adequate justification for paying thousands of dollars, committing a month of my summer and flying to the other side of the world for this trip. I thought that blogging would help me to see themes in my posts and form my experiences into distinct kernels of knowledge, but 17 days into the program it hasn’t done much of that. It has been so frustrating to come back home each evening exhausted from a day packed with walking from place to place in the bustling city, having great conversations with the amazing people we are meeting here as well as my amazing classmates, with simultaneous overwhelming feelings that I learned a lot that day but that I have no idea what it is that I learned. I have sat down with my laptop most nights and try to reflect on my experiences through writing, which usually works for me back home, but for some reason it wasn’t working here.

On top of this, I’ve been fretting about what I’m going to do with everything I’m learning here after I get back. Surely speaking with all of these activists will inspire me to dedicate my life to bringing about social change for underserved populations or something equally noble. Right? Or is it enough to witness dedicated people doing inspiring things and simply be better informed and aware of some of the good work that is being done in Bangalore? Or maybe, I thought, I’ll leave enlightened and sure of my life’s purpose. Whatever my expectations were specifically, I applied to and embarked on this study abroad clinging to the conviction that the trip would be enormously life-changing. I didn’t know how I expected this to happen then and still don’t; this uncertainty has added substantially to my stress.

But today some of this stress was lifted through our group discussion as we started thinking critically about our concerns. Why is the inability to articulate what exactly I am learning so troubling? Is all meaningful learning the kind that can be concisely articulated and boiled down to neat little life lessons? If I return home after this trip able to give a full answer in a few thoughtfully crafted sentences to my friends and relatives asking, “so what did you learn?” has the trip been a success? Or will it have been more successful if I am simply left with more questions?

Part of the issue is that I’m trying to reflect on an experience while still in the middle of it. Time, I’m sure, will help to reveal the ways this trip will have worked within me and effected how I live my life. But perhaps more important is the realization I had today that the problem is not that I’m not learning anything; it’s that my definition of “learning” is too narrow. In what I’ve been (implicitly) taught, learning is tied too closely to education, and education is tied too closely to school. Because of this, for my whole life (minus the early glory years of un-schooling) I have been taught that learning…

• Takes place in classrooms inside of schools
• Is the acquisition of new information, oftentimes through memorizing facts
• Is the acquisition of new specific hard skills, such as taking a derivative or balancing a chemical equation
• Oftentimes involves doing worksheets or writing essays
• Falls under a nice, neat category, such as “geography” or “language arts” or “Spanish”
• If done properly, can be articulated when it’s “done!”

The problem is of course that we do not put a greater emphasis on learning through non-academic experiences; learning should not stop when you leave the classroom, or when you put down your textbook or finish your essay. But stop it often does on these occasions, so learning in many people’s minds (mine included) is confined to very specific geographical places and actions. Throughout my time in the public school system far too much emphasis has been put on this clear-cut, easy-to-grade/testable/quantifiable learning so that when other types of learning happen I might not recognize it. And here we have no classroom, no school, no worksheets, learn some facts but don’t really care about the little details, have no nice neat category, and definitely can’t break down the complexities of this trip into a five-paragraph essay. No wonder I was panicking.

Technically it’s a Comparative History of Ideas program, which is a category of sorts but certainly not something nice and neat like “Computer Science” or “Art History.” And the title of the program, “Social Justice and Artistic Expression,” is more recognizable but still pretty fuzzy around the edges as well. I don’t think this trip will help me to check off any boxes of skills acquired (except maybe mastering using water instead of toilet paper) or wisdom gained (unless knowing how much a kilogram of mangoes should cost counts). But after today I can finally definitively say that that’s okay.

At the beginning of our trip, Anu said,

“Our number one priority is your health and safety. It is also very important for us to be respectful of the people here and be sensitive to different social norms. But I am not concerned about your learning; that will happen no matter what.”

She repeated this today, and only today I finally understood what she meant. I don’t know what I’ll ultimately take away from this trip, or what form my knowledge/learning/wisdom/whatever will take, but I shan’t be worrying about it for now. This uncertainty is rather annoying, but I’m working on getting over that. For now I’m just going to focus my energy on soaking up the awesomeness of the people we’re meeting, engaging with my classmates, and being present.

I’m tired and feeling rather lazy, so I’m just going to post pictures from today. The whole group walked through Krishna Rajendra Market, the largest of many large markets here. ‘Twas a good time.

Here’s me and my friend Meili on the floor above a bunch of flower sellers:

Here’s a cow strolling casually through an outside portion of the market. There are LOTS of cows around the city, and unfortunately most of them eat whatever garbage they find laying around on the side of the road. But this cow is about to buy some produce so don’t worry about him.

 

Close-up of some flower sellers! It was lovely to walk through this section.

And of course we can’t forget our Abnormally-Light-Skinned Woman Picture of the Day! This one has the added twist that virtually nobody here dresses like this. Ninety-five percent of the women I have seen here wear very modest, loose-fitting, traditional clothing that covers much of their bodies. But it says “Bangalorean” right on there so it must be representative of the women here, right?

We had another full day today. The morning was full of games to get us warmed up, and in the afternoon we moved on to the serious stuff.

“This afternoon we will be creating and performing plays,” Dr. Radah warned us before lunch to our surprise.

After lunch, Dr. Radah had us close our eyes and meditate on a moment of conflict in our past. The conflict could be grave or less serious, but had to be unresolved. She then asked us to focus on the emotion(s) we felt as a result of the conflict, and had us mold our bodies into an image that captured that/those emotion(s). Dr. Radah selected four “images” that were representative of common themes across the group, and everybody went and sat by the “image” with which they most strongly identified. In my smaller group (comprised of people who had selected the same image I did) we sat in a circle and each told the story of unresolved conflict that we had reflected on. We then had to choose a story to use for the backbone of our play, and write and rehearse it in 15 minutes. Dr. Radah is really into speed work.

My group chose a young woman’s story of trying to spend time with her very busy sister, but feeling devalued as the sister’s busy life—kids, husband, work—interrupted what she hoped to be quality time. We quickly assigned roles, grabbed some chairs to use as props, and haphazardly improvised while trying to stay true to the core story. We were the first to perform our work after our very short 15 minutes were up, and from my completely unbiased viewpoint I must say that ours was the best of the four plays.

The activity was a bit nerve-racking with the time crunch, and it was frustrating to throw together a play with no one director, but I really liked the idea of the process started. Dr. Radah said that we went through the memory/image/true story exercise because our play should be based on something that actually happened to and was meaningful to us, or it would seem contrived and not be engaging for the audience. And, as it turned out, we were able to throw together a halfway decent production in a very short time because that authentic, relatable backbone was already there and just needed to be fleshed out.

Here is another group performing for the rest of the group:

Here is me being really excited about eating delicious food off of a banana leaf at a restaurant today:

And because I’m liking random photos at this moment, can we just take a second to acknowledge how light-skinned the model in this ad is/how light they made her in photoshop? I have seen maybe one woman here with a skin tone close to this light. But THIS IS NOT WHAT PEOPLE HERE LOOK LIKE. This is incredibly frustrating even to me, a white girl; I can’t imagine the effect this has on women with darker skin.

Back home, I usually go to the gym five or so days per week. It’s an energizing, satisfying, essential part of my routine that I have been trying–to moderate success–to sustain during my time in Bangalore. Here, sometimes I go for runs with a couple of classmates; other days I get creative and make up various circuit workouts that I can do inside when it’s sweltering or raining outside. Back at the hostel where we stayed for the first ten days of our trip, me and a few other girls would get up at 6:30 or 7 and work out in a conference room before breakfast.

We were told to pack minimally for our retreat here at the Ecumenical Christian Center, so I didn’t pack my running shoes and thought I’d take a break from working out. Yesterday when my workout buddy Miranda went for a run, however, I got quite jealous and decided that I needed to work out this morning. My roommate, Anna, and I rolled out of bed at seven, I donned my trusty Birkenstocks, and then looked around the room to find the one hairtie I had brought to no avail. Pro tip: never bring only one hair tie anywhere. They practically lose themselves.

Oh, and in addition to the aforementioned massive centipedes, there are bugs of every kind thriving here in the lovely wooded campus of the ECC. At least five or six types of ants swarm over every surface outside, mosquitoes abound, lovely iridescent beetles hobble, and termites live in the door of at least two of my classmates’ doors.

So this morning as I did dips using benches outside our rooms, ants and aphids crawling around my wrists and mosquitoes aggressively asserting themselves from every angle, Birkenstocks rubbing against itchy bites on my feet, long un-tied hair sticking to my neck in the morning heat, I realized just how much I love and appreciate…

1. The small bugs in the good ‘ol PNW who generally mind their own business,
2. My three pairs of athletic shoes from which I can choose when I’m not traveling, and
3. My big, beautiful, clean, relatively-bug-free Intramural Activities Center gym at the UW

I will never, ever take you for granted again, dearest Intramural Activities Center. Or complain about going to you to work out. Ever.

After a long taxi drive out into what felt like the middle of nowhere, last night my homestay mates and I arrived at the Ecumenical Christian Center for our theater retreat. It’s a beautiful, sprawling campus filled with trees and flowers and, as we found out last night, nocturnal centipedes longer and thicker than my index finger. Once everybody had arrived, we met up and introduced ourselves to Dr. Radha Ramaswamy, founder of the Centre for Community Dialogue and Change in Bangalore. Her organization promotes Theatre of the Oppressed in India, which the nice pamphlet she gave us describes as “a set of theatre-based games and exercises that help promote dialogue within communities,” and which “breaks patterns of habitual behavior; starts a process of dialogue, reflection and action; and helps us rediscover our potential for creating change.” I really liked the sound of all this, but had no idea what to expect; I was quite excited to get started.

This morning, we met at 9:30—after a delicious breakfast of dosas and eggs and chai—in a large gym. This was good because we were to utilize the all of the open space. Dr. Radah talked more about learning through physicality and how it is shoved out of the picture in the education system in favor of acquiring knowledge through intellectual and analytical frameworks. Some goals of Theatre of the Oppressed other than sparking dialogue about social issues, she said, were discovering aspects of yourself through play, and learning how to fully partake in the exercises and games without anxiety around getting the “right” answer.

We all went around the room and introduced ourselves again, then launched into some warm-up activities. Dr. Radah told us first to move around the room freely, then express how we were feeling in our walk, then to hold hands with somebody and silently have fun/move in whatever way we felt drawn to. We twirled each other and skipped and made bridges for other pairs to duck under; a few minutes in, a steady stream of giggles were breaking out all over the group. We were playing in a way that many of us hadn’t done since our childhood, and the mutually shared awkwardness and joy in interacting in unconventional ways were refreshing and fun. We played a few more games to get us warmed up and comfortable interacting with each other, then moved on to an activity called Columbian Hypnosis. We were told to pair up, and assign one person to be the hypnotizer, and the other, the hypnotized. The hypnotizer held her hand about a foot in front of the other’s face, and was free to move her hand however she wanted. The hypnotized had the job of following the hypnotizer’s hand and keeping her face a foot away no matter how it moved. We played around with this activity for awhile, making our partner jump and roll on the floor and bob their head up and down, inviting even more giggles.

Then things got serious. We all sat in the circle, and Dr. Radah got two volunteers to be “the oppressor” and “the oppressed” in a dramatized version of the hypnosis game. She pulled the volunteers aside to discuss their jobs, then let them perform their scene for us. The oppressor aggressively used her control (exploiting the power of the hand) over the oppressed to subdue and “conquer” him. He fought back for awhile but eventually gave up and was forced into laying down on the floor in surrender. It was a very dramatic and moving scene; though it was silent, and we knew what was going to happen, it was deeply saddening to see it physically acted out before our eyes. It was all too easy to apply this scene of dominating/dominated power dynamics to situations in real life. We all agreed that we were unsettled by how the scene ended. Then Dr. Radah gave the spectators power.

“You can at any time,” she said, “raise your hand and shout ‘STOP.’ If you do so you freeze the actors, take the place of the oppressed, and can try different tactics to try and make the scene end differently.”

My classmates tried all sorts of things—I was too intimidated to jump in—but my favorite was when Amy (my awesome assistant trip leader) grabbed me and another classmate from the circle and linked arms with us, forming a solid unit. It was an effective move; the oppressor was at a loss for what to do with multiple people. In our debrief after the mini scene, we discussed real-life examples also illustrating the importance of reaching out for help when you need it and finding strength and support in numbers.

After lunch we did something called image work. First, we brainstormed big issues that we feel passionate about; destruction of the environment, malnutrition, racism and educational inequality were a few of the big ones. These were to be revisited in a later activity. We then got into groups of four, and Dr. Radha called out words for us to illustrate in our group. We could only use our bodies, we had to work to make a cohesive picture including every group member, and we had to do it in under ten seconds. Oh, and we couldn’t talk at all. Unsurprisingly this task proved quite difficult. It was a good practice in being creative, thinking very quickly, and being flexible and aware of what our other group members were doing so we could work together in our image.

We then did an activity called “gallery,” in which we explored the term “standardization” (this was an offshoot of the concern somebody voiced about educational inequality and the unfairness of standardized tests). Each group member could, if they had an idea, “mold” her classmates into positions and facial expressions—also silently—to express this word. The sculptor then had to title the piece. One classmate lined several of us up, facing the audience straight on, put each of our right hands over our hearts and smiles on our faces, and called it “I pledge allegiance….” I added onto this by tweaking the already existing image slightly; with their right hands still on their hearts I had them stick out their left hand in a “thumbs up,” “thumbs partway up,” “so-so thumb” and so on in order down the line all the way until a decisive “thumbs down.” I called it “spectrum.”

Here are some pictures I took of my classmates creating galleries.