Home Ec teacher brings trip experience back to school

Asking Nichole Thiel about her trip to India is like asking a guru about the meaning of life.

“People are like, ‘Tell me about India,’ and I go, ‘Where do I start?’ ” the Lake City High School home economics teacher said. “You have this huge experience and no one to share it with.”

Thiel was one of six public schoolteachers from around the country selected to travel to India for a month as part of a project with Colorado State University to develop course curriculum that includes a focus on India’s textiles industry. CSU professors applied for the fellowship and chose the other professors and teachers who participated.

Thiel flew to India on Christmas Day, joining 19 other educators who visited 21 cities in 30 days, observing all facets of fabric design and production in the country. They traveled on camels and elephants, visited mud huts and walked down manure-covered dirt roads.

Thiel was struck by many things: the working conditions, the time and care put into each item. She brought back a bundle of fabrics and a wooden hand stamp used to imprint designs on fabric.

“It’s just amazing how they take the most incredible fabrics and do the most primitive things to them,” she said.

The generosity of the Indian people also was amazing.

“We were just treated as such royalty,” Thiel said.

She purchased a necklace from a street vendor and was disappointed there were no earrings to match.

“They literally went downstairs and had them made,” she said. “It brought tears to my eyes.”

Nothing in India goes to waste, and everything is handmade.

“What we would cut off as threads and throw away, they save every penny of,” she said. “…You don’t go buy your tassels – they’re all cut and hand-twisted and tied.”

Part of the fellowship includes creating course curriculum, but Thiel said she has been incorporating what she learned on the trip into her course teachings ever since she returned.

As a home economics teacher, Thiel teaches apparel and design courses, teen living and lifestyle courses as well as cooking courses. Everything she saw in India relates to those subjects somehow, she said.

“India’s on a caste system.” Thiel said, meaning people are born into their professions according to what their relatives do. She already has talked about that in her teen living course.

A news release from the University of Idaho, which sent textiles professor Sandra Evenson on the trip, said both women know it will take a long time for them to realize all they got out of the trip. But the immediate benefits can stand on their own.

“Instead of saying a professor told me this while I was in college or I read it in a book, I can say, ‘When I was in an Indian village, this is what I saw,’ and show a textile that I purchased there,” Thiel said in the news release.

Invention Convention winners

Kootenai County students fared well at the state Invention Convention in Boise March 9 and 10.

Best of show for first through fourth grades was awarded to Tori Chavez, a fourth-grader at Ramsey Elementary School.

Hayden Meadows fifth-grader Carson May took best of show in the games category, Betty Kiefer fifth-grader Lynn Ransier took best of category in the nonworking category and Lakeland eighth-grader Kelly McKanna took best of category in the Jules Verne category.

Sydney Morrison, a first-grader at Hayden Meadows Elementary, took second place in the nonworking model category for first- and second-graders. Magen Daniels, a third-grader at Garwood Elementary, took first place in the same category for third- and fourth-graders.

In the adaptations category, Garwood first-grader Hannah Daniels and Atlas first-grader Kristel Chatterton took second and third place respectively. In the same category for third- and fourth-graders, Hayden Meadows fourth-grader Tristan Scoffield took second. For fifth- and sixth-graders, Garwood fifth-grader Trysta Kelley took first and John Brown Elementary fifth-grader Taylor Shuman took third.

In the games category, Atlas second-grader Levi Lemburg took first place in his age group. Fernan third-grader Maggie Seaver placed first in her age group, and Spirit Lake Elementary sixth-grader Stephanie Simon placed first in her age group, followed by Macy and Shelby Cass, fifth-graders at Garwood.

Garwood second-grader Emma Von Till took first in the Jules Verne category. Kaitlin Morgan, a second-grader at Ramsey Elementary, took first place in the working models category for her age group, followed by Lily and Mae Alexander, fourth-graders at Fernan Elementary.