Dear dedicated reader,
I sat in the wooden chair that is present in each and every classroom behind the small wooden desk where I usually rest my teaching materials for the brief half hour that I have to make an impression on each class during a normal teaching day. Teaching while seated is acceptable here, but I just can’t do it: I always teach standing, moving frequently in between the benches if I can and trying to keep the students engaged by having to track me with their eyes.
However, today, from my new vantage point in this chair, I looked up into the eyes of 9th standard girl who was so nervous I could see the sweat beading on her forehead (though this could easily be attributable to the 80 degree average that Kadod seems to run regardless of the season). Pushing a piece of stray hair behind her ear and then quickly returning her hand to crossed arms tightly hugging the front of her body, her eyes nervously flitted to mine and then to the back of the classroom and then out the classroom door. She chewed on her lip, then stamped her foot, impatient with herself. Finally she shook her head. “No, miss,” she said, defeated.
I looked at her reassuringly. “It’s okay,” I said. “Can you recite an essay for me? On any topic?”
The girl launched in on an essay entitled “My Favorite Game”: “There are many types of games,” she began, “but they are mostly indoor games like playcards, karam, or chess. Outdoor games include football, volleyball and cricket. Cricket is a sport played with 11 players to a team, it –“
“That’s fine, thank you, you may sit,” I told her. What I had just heard was a regurgitated version of an essay I had taught (ie. been forced to write on the board while the students copied into their notebooks) several months back. Before that, I had asked this girl, roll number 39, to recite one of the poems from the book for me. Next to her roll number I noted a terse “poor” under the poem heading and “good” underneath the essay heading, just as Tabussum had showed me to do earlier.
“Roll number 40?” I called out, looking up across the classroom which was a buzzing sea of moving lips and hands in ears as each girl stared down intently at her textbook to try and do last minute practice before their fateful number was called.
My tendency towards melodrama is getting away from me. The results of this oral exam in actuality is not that ‘fateful’, thanks the seedy underbelly of the Kadod High School exam scheme. The way the system works is thus: The students take their second trimester exams, the teachers give them marks out of 40. After this, the students are required to take an “oral exam” to determine their competency in spoken English. What this really means is that they are required to recite a poem of their choice from the textbook and memorize an essay on a topic of their choice, also to be recited.
Wanting to actually play the part of a real teacher, I asked Tabussum to let me administer the oral exams in my classes and she obligingly taught me how to do it. She told me to take down their scores as “poor”, “average”, “good” or “very good” and informed that later she would ‘translate’ this into marks.
When I pushed her to let me just assign them marks, she blushed and explained what this ‘translation’ actually entailed. She would look at the rating that I gave the girls and assign a mark based out of ten to the rating I had given them, except in the case of the girls who had failed in the exam. In their case, she would simply give them the requisite number of marks to pass.
“You see,” she said, “They need seventeen marks to pass. So that girl who has taken ten marks, I will give her seven marks,” she said with an embarrassed smile.
On seeing my look of horror, she blushed even further. “I know it’s not right,” she said. “But if the girls fail, it’s a difficult for us, later.”
“What do you mean?” I asked her, still shocked.
“There is so much paperwork,” she explained, “if the students fail. It’s not good, I know, but teachers do like this.” She shrugged.
After a tense moment during which I could see her awaiting my reaction, I raised my eyebrows and gave her one of my what-will-be-will-be smiles. It was no use arguing: even if I think it’s wrong, what do I know about these things? The whole exam system is so beyond my comprehension that what use is it to fight even this one cog in the system? She and I had already disagreed when I’d tried to get her to agree to let me give them a real oral exam.
“Why don’t we just ask them questions? Like the kind they’d encounter in a real conversation or that I ask them in class?” She’d shaken her head and argued that Sejalben had already told them how we’d testing them on the exam: strict memorization and recitation only.
So, as I sat in my chair and looked up at roll number 40 (otherwise known as Priyanka) in her nicely pressed blue jumper, knitting her fingers together while she looked into the distance and recited “The Rain, The Beautiful Rain” I hoped that perhaps one day someone asked her a question to which she could reply:
“Thunder crashing / rain slashing / brings the rain, the welcome rain!”
Best,
Cat
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Friday, January 23, 2009
Narendra's Flower Girl
Dear dedicated reader,
A week ago, we were looking at the face of Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, on the kites that we were flying over the roofs of Kadod. Today, we were looking into his face directly while shaking his hand in front of 50,000 people.
How did this come to pass? Even I am still wondering, to use an Indian-English turn of phrase. From what Melissa and I can piece together retroactively, a strange chain of events seem to have set each other off and aligned perfectly to produce this moment.
The chain begins last week with Mayuri, the daughter of a friend of the principal’s who recently has married an NRI from the US and will be moving there in a matter of months. She wanted to practice her English and hang out, we needed to run errands and so we decided to combine the two into an afternoon in Bardoli that, because of Mayuri’s easy-going personality, was a huge success.
We were on our way back to the bus stop when Sureshbhai, the President of the school who previously took us on a tour of his farmhouse (a tour best remembered for the part where he demonstrated how to flush his western style toilet) saw us and offered to give us a ride home. Piling into his rather luxurious car, he insisted that he buy us some bananas before returning to Kadod. We protested: it really wasn’t necessary to get us bananas, but he strongly insisted and wore our protesting down. As he negotiated with the banana seller out of the car window, he caught sight of a poster just behind her head. He pointed at it.
“You see that?” he said to us in his shaky English. “That is Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat.”
“Ah yes,” I said, “I’ve heard of him.” And had I heard of him. My friends from my time in college in Delhi had compared him to an Indian Hitler. Representing the BJP, or Hindu nationalist party of India, his name was widely linked with a series of religious riots that took place early in his term as Chief Minister. He’d been blamed for inciting a lot of the violence towards innocent Muslim families at this time which some called a genocide. While this is a rather extreme view, I had also heard Tabussum, our Muslim co-teacher, talk about how he “was not good for her community.” However, aside from Tabussum, on probing into the politics of families in the area, Hindu and Muslim alike, I found that they took a very positive view of the Chief Minister’s time in office.
“He is all about progress, you can say,” Sejalben, the principal’s daughter-in-law, told me when I asked her about it. “He has so much self-confidence.”
“He is never married,” Daybalben told me, “because he is married to his work. No wife, no kids, nothing to distract him from the government and also no one for his enemies.”
Needless to say, when Sureshbhai told us that he was coming for the celebration of the birthday of Subash Chandra Bose (an Indian freedom fighter) to Haripura, a very small village one kilometer away from Kadod, my interest was piqued. I wasn’t the only one. All anyone could talk about this week (besides the inauguration of Barack Obama) was the imminent arrival of the Chief Minister and the construction of a helipad in the open field next to the petrol station. It was being said that as many as 100,000 people would attend from all over Southern Gujarat.
Melissa’s and my loose plans to attend were contingent on the rumors of school closing early on that day being true. We’d heard this rumor floating around the school and it was confirmed later in the week by not the principal, but rather by Darshanbhai and his father who run the local phone booth and have no children in Kadod High School. Once again, I found myself puzzled by the circuitous route by which Melissa and I receive information.
The tailor, Kamleshbhai, whose shop is across the street from the phone booth, had come over to discuss the CM’s coming and invited us to go with him on his motorbike.
We probably would have too had the principal not called us onto his porch later in the week, smiling broadly at us as we took our seats in the weathered plastic chairs with which we’ve become so familiar during our time here.
“Sureshbhai has called to me,” he began as he rocked gently back and forth from his seat on the porch swing, “and you are to present a bouquet to our Chief Minister, Narendra Modi when he comes at Haripura tomorrow.” Anyone could see his eyes were brimming with excitement at being able to relay this news to us.
For our part, we were completely speechless. “Uh,” I began, trying to give my brain a chance to catch up, “this is such an honor, sir,” I began.
“You will go on the stage and shake his hands!” The principal cut in excitedly and I smiled widely to show that I shared his excitement, though inside my mind had already jumped towards thinking about the thousands of things that could go wrong. How would we hand him a bouquet? Would we have to sit on the stage? What if I dropped the bouquet?
“What should we wear?” was all I could get out.
“Anything you like,” the principal said airily. “You should wear American clothes!”
“Er,” I looked at him, thinking about my closet and the t-shirt and jeans folded there that represented all that was left of my “American” wardrobe, “we can just wear saris, I guess. I mean, we are teachers, after all.”
“As you wish,” the principal said with an amiable head bob. “And if he asks you anything, you say you are from Kadod High School, Kadod, because he will know we are a good school and ours is a good school despite being in a small village and we try very hard and he will want to know how you have come to teach there.”
And hopefully not deport us for violating our visas, I thought to myself. I had never seen the principal so excited; he was practically gushing, pushing his English to its outermost limit in his excitement. “We will definitely mention the high school, if he speaks to us,” I assured him.
“But, he probably will not have time,” the principal warned suddenly, as if coming back to earth. I nodded; knowing Indian ceremony, we would probably be two of fifteen people to present him with bouquets.
The principal told us to be ready at 7:30 am, so in the warming new daylight, we stood on our porch as Sureshbhai’s driver drove in through school gates to pick us up the next day. He hurried us into the car where we were taken to Sureshbhai’s house to be briefed on what we would need to do when presenting the bouquets which were then entrusted to us to be carried into the giant tent on arriving at the event. The bouquets were bulky and lotus shaped as a tribute to the BJP’s emblematic logo. After all the criticism that I had levied at the BJP in my papers in college, I couldn’t help but feel the irony that I would now present a major BJP powerhouse with the logo of his own controversial party.
The security wasn’t as intense as I had expected, though in India security does tend to leave something to be desired (I once traveled from Delhi to Mumbai with a knife in my bag that I had forgotten about and only remembered after disembarking). Three separate police officers ran a metal detecting wand over my bouquet and then with a shrug and the type of strange glance reserved for white people in saris, let us in. The tent itself was a massive affair and surprisingly, air-conditioned. Huge sections were set behind crowd control barriers for women and children to be seated on the ground; behind this, some chairs for men and then a large standing room only area for the overflow. On the sides were couches set up in rows for VIP seating. Carrying our giant bouquets of flowers and with passes pinned to our saris, we qualified (completely undeservedly) for this upgraded cushioning of our behinds. Large screens to simulcast the event had been set up in all sections and though we had a perfectly good view of the stage from our second row seats, a large wall sized screen ensured that we wouldn’t miss a moment of what was promising to be quite a to-do.
Suddenly, my attention was drawn to the simulcast screens as the CM’s helicopter was shown touching down on the newly constructed helipad and he was loaded into a fancily decorated bullock cart to travel to the tent in the same manner that Subash Chandra Bose himself had some sixty years before. It seemed that only a moment passed before he was entering the tent and everyone was standing and cheering. As he raised an arm to the crowd in a gesture that incited more cheers and screams, I felt a dryness in my throat and a familiar pounding resounding in my chest that I haven’t felt since first learning public speaking in high school. Was I nervous? To hand a bunch of flowers to politician? It had suddenly occurred to my subconscious just how much I had heard about the political endeavors of this man and all the scenarios of potential mishap that I’d played out in my head while talking to the principal came rushing back into my mind.
I forced myself to take a breath. He was just another person, I told myself, and besides which he wasn’t even my Chief Minister! Would I get this worked up about meeting Ed Rendell?
We’d been told to follow the lead of Sureshbhai’s son, an NRI from San Diego named Dharmesh who along with his wife who had been more than happy to show us her $15,000 diamond ring in the car while cracking her gum, was presenting a bouquet to the prime minister. After Narendra Modi took a seat, he moved forward toward the staging area and we followed nervously behind him. I almost tripped on my sari as I got up.
Before I knew it, we were climbing the stairs towards the long table on the stage while Modi was sitting with other dignitaries. The silence in the hall as the crowd watched us was overwhelming. As we reached the top of the stairs, I heard the announcer, a youngish women with a silky voice, say into the microphone, “A bouquet from Dharmeshbhai, his wife Debbie, and a bouquet from Spoken English Teachers Miss Melissa and Miss Catharine.”
At the sound of our names, the reign of silence was broken with a large number of voices loudly cheering and whooping from the very back of the hall. As I took my first step forward across the stage, I couldn’t look to see where it had come from, but my mind was suddenly transported back to my high school graduation, taking my first step forward to get my diploma while my family looked on and screamed their support. Actually looking into Narendra Modi’s eyes, shaking his hand, and saying ‘Thank you’ are all a blur to me compared to that cheer, one that didn’t go up for anyone else who came across that stage. It was like a validation; a message from Kadod saying “you’re a part of us now,” and really, that feeling couldn’t be topped.
Best,
Cat
A week ago, we were looking at the face of Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, on the kites that we were flying over the roofs of Kadod. Today, we were looking into his face directly while shaking his hand in front of 50,000 people.
How did this come to pass? Even I am still wondering, to use an Indian-English turn of phrase. From what Melissa and I can piece together retroactively, a strange chain of events seem to have set each other off and aligned perfectly to produce this moment.
The chain begins last week with Mayuri, the daughter of a friend of the principal’s who recently has married an NRI from the US and will be moving there in a matter of months. She wanted to practice her English and hang out, we needed to run errands and so we decided to combine the two into an afternoon in Bardoli that, because of Mayuri’s easy-going personality, was a huge success.
We were on our way back to the bus stop when Sureshbhai, the President of the school who previously took us on a tour of his farmhouse (a tour best remembered for the part where he demonstrated how to flush his western style toilet) saw us and offered to give us a ride home. Piling into his rather luxurious car, he insisted that he buy us some bananas before returning to Kadod. We protested: it really wasn’t necessary to get us bananas, but he strongly insisted and wore our protesting down. As he negotiated with the banana seller out of the car window, he caught sight of a poster just behind her head. He pointed at it.
“You see that?” he said to us in his shaky English. “That is Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat.”
“Ah yes,” I said, “I’ve heard of him.” And had I heard of him. My friends from my time in college in Delhi had compared him to an Indian Hitler. Representing the BJP, or Hindu nationalist party of India, his name was widely linked with a series of religious riots that took place early in his term as Chief Minister. He’d been blamed for inciting a lot of the violence towards innocent Muslim families at this time which some called a genocide. While this is a rather extreme view, I had also heard Tabussum, our Muslim co-teacher, talk about how he “was not good for her community.” However, aside from Tabussum, on probing into the politics of families in the area, Hindu and Muslim alike, I found that they took a very positive view of the Chief Minister’s time in office.
“He is all about progress, you can say,” Sejalben, the principal’s daughter-in-law, told me when I asked her about it. “He has so much self-confidence.”
“He is never married,” Daybalben told me, “because he is married to his work. No wife, no kids, nothing to distract him from the government and also no one for his enemies.”
Needless to say, when Sureshbhai told us that he was coming for the celebration of the birthday of Subash Chandra Bose (an Indian freedom fighter) to Haripura, a very small village one kilometer away from Kadod, my interest was piqued. I wasn’t the only one. All anyone could talk about this week (besides the inauguration of Barack Obama) was the imminent arrival of the Chief Minister and the construction of a helipad in the open field next to the petrol station. It was being said that as many as 100,000 people would attend from all over Southern Gujarat.
Melissa’s and my loose plans to attend were contingent on the rumors of school closing early on that day being true. We’d heard this rumor floating around the school and it was confirmed later in the week by not the principal, but rather by Darshanbhai and his father who run the local phone booth and have no children in Kadod High School. Once again, I found myself puzzled by the circuitous route by which Melissa and I receive information.
The tailor, Kamleshbhai, whose shop is across the street from the phone booth, had come over to discuss the CM’s coming and invited us to go with him on his motorbike.
We probably would have too had the principal not called us onto his porch later in the week, smiling broadly at us as we took our seats in the weathered plastic chairs with which we’ve become so familiar during our time here.
“Sureshbhai has called to me,” he began as he rocked gently back and forth from his seat on the porch swing, “and you are to present a bouquet to our Chief Minister, Narendra Modi when he comes at Haripura tomorrow.” Anyone could see his eyes were brimming with excitement at being able to relay this news to us.
For our part, we were completely speechless. “Uh,” I began, trying to give my brain a chance to catch up, “this is such an honor, sir,” I began.
“You will go on the stage and shake his hands!” The principal cut in excitedly and I smiled widely to show that I shared his excitement, though inside my mind had already jumped towards thinking about the thousands of things that could go wrong. How would we hand him a bouquet? Would we have to sit on the stage? What if I dropped the bouquet?
“What should we wear?” was all I could get out.
“Anything you like,” the principal said airily. “You should wear American clothes!”
“Er,” I looked at him, thinking about my closet and the t-shirt and jeans folded there that represented all that was left of my “American” wardrobe, “we can just wear saris, I guess. I mean, we are teachers, after all.”
“As you wish,” the principal said with an amiable head bob. “And if he asks you anything, you say you are from Kadod High School, Kadod, because he will know we are a good school and ours is a good school despite being in a small village and we try very hard and he will want to know how you have come to teach there.”
And hopefully not deport us for violating our visas, I thought to myself. I had never seen the principal so excited; he was practically gushing, pushing his English to its outermost limit in his excitement. “We will definitely mention the high school, if he speaks to us,” I assured him.
“But, he probably will not have time,” the principal warned suddenly, as if coming back to earth. I nodded; knowing Indian ceremony, we would probably be two of fifteen people to present him with bouquets.
The principal told us to be ready at 7:30 am, so in the warming new daylight, we stood on our porch as Sureshbhai’s driver drove in through school gates to pick us up the next day. He hurried us into the car where we were taken to Sureshbhai’s house to be briefed on what we would need to do when presenting the bouquets which were then entrusted to us to be carried into the giant tent on arriving at the event. The bouquets were bulky and lotus shaped as a tribute to the BJP’s emblematic logo. After all the criticism that I had levied at the BJP in my papers in college, I couldn’t help but feel the irony that I would now present a major BJP powerhouse with the logo of his own controversial party.
The security wasn’t as intense as I had expected, though in India security does tend to leave something to be desired (I once traveled from Delhi to Mumbai with a knife in my bag that I had forgotten about and only remembered after disembarking). Three separate police officers ran a metal detecting wand over my bouquet and then with a shrug and the type of strange glance reserved for white people in saris, let us in. The tent itself was a massive affair and surprisingly, air-conditioned. Huge sections were set behind crowd control barriers for women and children to be seated on the ground; behind this, some chairs for men and then a large standing room only area for the overflow. On the sides were couches set up in rows for VIP seating. Carrying our giant bouquets of flowers and with passes pinned to our saris, we qualified (completely undeservedly) for this upgraded cushioning of our behinds. Large screens to simulcast the event had been set up in all sections and though we had a perfectly good view of the stage from our second row seats, a large wall sized screen ensured that we wouldn’t miss a moment of what was promising to be quite a to-do.
Suddenly, my attention was drawn to the simulcast screens as the CM’s helicopter was shown touching down on the newly constructed helipad and he was loaded into a fancily decorated bullock cart to travel to the tent in the same manner that Subash Chandra Bose himself had some sixty years before. It seemed that only a moment passed before he was entering the tent and everyone was standing and cheering. As he raised an arm to the crowd in a gesture that incited more cheers and screams, I felt a dryness in my throat and a familiar pounding resounding in my chest that I haven’t felt since first learning public speaking in high school. Was I nervous? To hand a bunch of flowers to politician? It had suddenly occurred to my subconscious just how much I had heard about the political endeavors of this man and all the scenarios of potential mishap that I’d played out in my head while talking to the principal came rushing back into my mind.
I forced myself to take a breath. He was just another person, I told myself, and besides which he wasn’t even my Chief Minister! Would I get this worked up about meeting Ed Rendell?
We’d been told to follow the lead of Sureshbhai’s son, an NRI from San Diego named Dharmesh who along with his wife who had been more than happy to show us her $15,000 diamond ring in the car while cracking her gum, was presenting a bouquet to the prime minister. After Narendra Modi took a seat, he moved forward toward the staging area and we followed nervously behind him. I almost tripped on my sari as I got up.
Before I knew it, we were climbing the stairs towards the long table on the stage while Modi was sitting with other dignitaries. The silence in the hall as the crowd watched us was overwhelming. As we reached the top of the stairs, I heard the announcer, a youngish women with a silky voice, say into the microphone, “A bouquet from Dharmeshbhai, his wife Debbie, and a bouquet from Spoken English Teachers Miss Melissa and Miss Catharine.”
At the sound of our names, the reign of silence was broken with a large number of voices loudly cheering and whooping from the very back of the hall. As I took my first step forward across the stage, I couldn’t look to see where it had come from, but my mind was suddenly transported back to my high school graduation, taking my first step forward to get my diploma while my family looked on and screamed their support. Actually looking into Narendra Modi’s eyes, shaking his hand, and saying ‘Thank you’ are all a blur to me compared to that cheer, one that didn’t go up for anyone else who came across that stage. It was like a validation; a message from Kadod saying “you’re a part of us now,” and really, that feeling couldn’t be topped.
Best,
Cat
Friday, January 16, 2009
Back in Action
Dear dedicated reader,
School has begun again and after not wearing a sari in so many days, it is surprisingly pleasant to be back in one again. I forget sometimes that it is still shocking for those outside of the school to see us wear them: for Melissa and I, the wrapping and wearing process has become as second nature as brushing our teeth. It occurred to me recently while I was riding my bike through town yesterday afternoon that we still aren’t the everyday fixtures in Kadod that we somehow hoped we’d become. For any family who lives farther from the school than a five minute walk, they rarely see us on any regular basis and our appearance is still, for them, fodder for comment and occasionally giggles and stares.
For the students and teachers, however, our presence has become simple and unremarkable fact. I had hoped that this meant for the English teachers that some of the initial intimidation factor had gone, but in this it turns out I would be wrong.
“Rashmikaben,” I found myself asking one of the 8th standard English teachers in the staff room yesterday, “I have a question about the 9th standard exam paper.”
The students second set of exams are school exams in the sense that they are made by teachers in the school as opposed to their annual exam which is made by the government education board and taken at the end of the year. On the surface, this sounds remarkably like a regular U.S. system of trimester based exams; however –
“Yes,” she said, looking unsettled and quickly ruffling around in her massive pile of papers to retrieve the exam in question which she had herself had written.
“Oh, that’s okay it’s not necessary- “ I tried to put her at ease and let her know it was really a simple -
“What is your question?” She continued, cutting me off anxiously after locating the paper.
“Well,” I began, feeling somewhat anxious now myself, “I reviewed the paper answers with 9B (one of the sections I take) yesterday and the girls had some questions about certain answers which seemed all right to me, given the question.”
She narrowed her eyes slightly. “Is this about the ‘snacks’ question?”
The 9th standard exam consists of a number of different sections. First, there is reading comprehension in which the students are given a passage that they have read during the trimester about which they answer some simple open response or multiple choice questions. Here is an example from the most recent exam:
Q-1: ‘Experiment’ means:
a) test b) trial c) judgment
Needless to say, I was scratching my head as the girls asked me, “But ma’am, is it a or b?”
The second part of the exam is a postage stamp sized picture which has been made grainy by the photocopier. In it, one can vaguely discern that some children are outside of the school. Some of the children in the background play on a playground and some in the foreground are eating something out of a tin. A paragraph describing the picture is provided and the students must fill in the appropriate blanks. It was about this exercise (which is alluded to nowhere in the curriculum) that I had a question:
“Well, yes, it is actually about the snacks question,” I said carefully. “You see, I was wondering if you were taking multiple answers for that question.”
The question was the following sentence. “The children are eating ______.”
Rashmikaben looked at me blankly. “I don’t understand,” she said.
I tried again, using a simpler sentence structure. “Is only snacks correct?” I asked.
“The answer is snacks,” she told me in English. She looked at me to see if this had satisfied me but seeing my hesitation she became frustrated. “I can’t explain in English,” she told me honestly.
“It’s okay, feel free to speak in Hindi,” I said.
“You see,” she began, “in the question, they are looking for what type of food, yes? So the students cannot answer breakfast because that is what you eat in the morning, or lunch, because that is the food of the afternoon and dinner is the food of night. So the students are eating this during their school free time, so the answer must be ‘snacks’.”
“But,” I asked, “how do you know what time of day it is from this picture?” The students could have been eating this during the designated long break at the school which would make ‘lunch’ the associated word in their minds.
“You don’t,” she said, “that’s why it must be snacks.”
“I, uh, see,” I said, though I did not. I thought about all the times that I had been offered ‘breakfast’ in Kadod even at 5, 6, or 7 o’clock at night. The word was an accepted alternative for light snacks and the picture was so ambiguous that the only truly incorrect answer given the context would be dinner.
Rashmikaben looked satisfied with my acceptance of her explanation and went back to her paper grading. I, however, couldn’t help but sit in my plastic chair at our blocky wooden staff room table and continue to ruminate over our conversation. If this was the type of rigidity with which the exams were graded, how could I win? The goal of these so-called assessments does not seem to be to test the students comprehension of English or knowledge of vocabulary since even students who understand the subtleties of the words in question wouldn’t necessarily follow the same logic which I had just been presented with, a logic that at best was one woman’s subjective opinion. How are the students who study hard in this subject being rewarded? With confusing and misleading information based on a teacher’s own confused understanding. Don’t get me started on the fact that she couldn’t justify her own answer in English.
I could go on to detail some other problems that I found in the exam, which was riddled with typos, misleading directions and other such traps, but what would be the point? The real point is that the disconnection between what is taught and what is actually tested is so complete that I’m not sure that even if I were to teach to the test through the syllabus, which I devoted more time doing this semester, that it would have any appreciable difference in student marks. I taught the students the meaning of the word ‘experiment’, spending much more time this trimester focusing on vocabulary acquisition than in the previous trimester. However, never could I have prepared them for a question like the one they found on their exam, which ostensibly is how we are measuring the students’ success in our English-only classes.
Fine. To hell with the exam. I’m just going to keep teaching them English.
Best,
Cat
School has begun again and after not wearing a sari in so many days, it is surprisingly pleasant to be back in one again. I forget sometimes that it is still shocking for those outside of the school to see us wear them: for Melissa and I, the wrapping and wearing process has become as second nature as brushing our teeth. It occurred to me recently while I was riding my bike through town yesterday afternoon that we still aren’t the everyday fixtures in Kadod that we somehow hoped we’d become. For any family who lives farther from the school than a five minute walk, they rarely see us on any regular basis and our appearance is still, for them, fodder for comment and occasionally giggles and stares.
For the students and teachers, however, our presence has become simple and unremarkable fact. I had hoped that this meant for the English teachers that some of the initial intimidation factor had gone, but in this it turns out I would be wrong.
“Rashmikaben,” I found myself asking one of the 8th standard English teachers in the staff room yesterday, “I have a question about the 9th standard exam paper.”
The students second set of exams are school exams in the sense that they are made by teachers in the school as opposed to their annual exam which is made by the government education board and taken at the end of the year. On the surface, this sounds remarkably like a regular U.S. system of trimester based exams; however –
“Yes,” she said, looking unsettled and quickly ruffling around in her massive pile of papers to retrieve the exam in question which she had herself had written.
“Oh, that’s okay it’s not necessary- “ I tried to put her at ease and let her know it was really a simple -
“What is your question?” She continued, cutting me off anxiously after locating the paper.
“Well,” I began, feeling somewhat anxious now myself, “I reviewed the paper answers with 9B (one of the sections I take) yesterday and the girls had some questions about certain answers which seemed all right to me, given the question.”
She narrowed her eyes slightly. “Is this about the ‘snacks’ question?”
The 9th standard exam consists of a number of different sections. First, there is reading comprehension in which the students are given a passage that they have read during the trimester about which they answer some simple open response or multiple choice questions. Here is an example from the most recent exam:
Q-1: ‘Experiment’ means:
a) test b) trial c) judgment
Needless to say, I was scratching my head as the girls asked me, “But ma’am, is it a or b?”
The second part of the exam is a postage stamp sized picture which has been made grainy by the photocopier. In it, one can vaguely discern that some children are outside of the school. Some of the children in the background play on a playground and some in the foreground are eating something out of a tin. A paragraph describing the picture is provided and the students must fill in the appropriate blanks. It was about this exercise (which is alluded to nowhere in the curriculum) that I had a question:
“Well, yes, it is actually about the snacks question,” I said carefully. “You see, I was wondering if you were taking multiple answers for that question.”
The question was the following sentence. “The children are eating ______.”
Rashmikaben looked at me blankly. “I don’t understand,” she said.
I tried again, using a simpler sentence structure. “Is only snacks correct?” I asked.
“The answer is snacks,” she told me in English. She looked at me to see if this had satisfied me but seeing my hesitation she became frustrated. “I can’t explain in English,” she told me honestly.
“It’s okay, feel free to speak in Hindi,” I said.
“You see,” she began, “in the question, they are looking for what type of food, yes? So the students cannot answer breakfast because that is what you eat in the morning, or lunch, because that is the food of the afternoon and dinner is the food of night. So the students are eating this during their school free time, so the answer must be ‘snacks’.”
“But,” I asked, “how do you know what time of day it is from this picture?” The students could have been eating this during the designated long break at the school which would make ‘lunch’ the associated word in their minds.
“You don’t,” she said, “that’s why it must be snacks.”
“I, uh, see,” I said, though I did not. I thought about all the times that I had been offered ‘breakfast’ in Kadod even at 5, 6, or 7 o’clock at night. The word was an accepted alternative for light snacks and the picture was so ambiguous that the only truly incorrect answer given the context would be dinner.
Rashmikaben looked satisfied with my acceptance of her explanation and went back to her paper grading. I, however, couldn’t help but sit in my plastic chair at our blocky wooden staff room table and continue to ruminate over our conversation. If this was the type of rigidity with which the exams were graded, how could I win? The goal of these so-called assessments does not seem to be to test the students comprehension of English or knowledge of vocabulary since even students who understand the subtleties of the words in question wouldn’t necessarily follow the same logic which I had just been presented with, a logic that at best was one woman’s subjective opinion. How are the students who study hard in this subject being rewarded? With confusing and misleading information based on a teacher’s own confused understanding. Don’t get me started on the fact that she couldn’t justify her own answer in English.
I could go on to detail some other problems that I found in the exam, which was riddled with typos, misleading directions and other such traps, but what would be the point? The real point is that the disconnection between what is taught and what is actually tested is so complete that I’m not sure that even if I were to teach to the test through the syllabus, which I devoted more time doing this semester, that it would have any appreciable difference in student marks. I taught the students the meaning of the word ‘experiment’, spending much more time this trimester focusing on vocabulary acquisition than in the previous trimester. However, never could I have prepared them for a question like the one they found on their exam, which ostensibly is how we are measuring the students’ success in our English-only classes.
Fine. To hell with the exam. I’m just going to keep teaching them English.
Best,
Cat
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Merry Christmas from Kadod
Dear dedicated reader,
I don't usually put store by the adage that a photo is worth a thousand words, but after trying to describe the Christmas celebrations of the English Medium School here in Kadod to which I was invited yesterday, I find that words really cannot communicate the atmosphere as well as the following:
Surrounded by pint size Santa-clad garden gnomes was honestly almost, but not quite, as good as being at home. I am missing all of you dedicated readers very much.
Merry Christmas!
Best,
Cat
I don't usually put store by the adage that a photo is worth a thousand words, but after trying to describe the Christmas celebrations of the English Medium School here in Kadod to which I was invited yesterday, I find that words really cannot communicate the atmosphere as well as the following:
Surrounded by pint size Santa-clad garden gnomes was honestly almost, but not quite, as good as being at home. I am missing all of you dedicated readers very much.
Merry Christmas!
Best,
Cat
Thursday, December 4, 2008
SCOPE of the Problem
Dear dedicated reader,
The entrenched hold which cheating has on this country’s educational system is much deeper than I ever would have suspected. Needless to say, this most recent item completely shocked me:
Some background first: The Government of Gujarat has undertaken to sponsor a specific English curriculum which they hope will enhance the English skills of the students and teachers who study with it. It is called SCOPE for short, though at the moment I cannot for the life of me remember what it stands for. It’s originally a Cambridge based curriculum and it shows in all the cultural relevancy that its materials have for students in rural India. The English teachers at Kadod High School take turns teaching it in the mornings at the same time as my Integrated English-Technology class and more than once have they shyly knocked on the computer lab door in need of some help with an exercise that is beyond their cultural comprehension.
For example: Match the following people with their dates of death: a) Charlie Chaplin b) Queen Elizabeth c) Pablo Picasso d) Beowulf. The respective dates of death follow.
I know my students immediately see the relevancy of this exercise to learning English in their own lives.
Irregardless, the principal was very anxious to start the program at Kadod High School and our Foundation is helping to sponsor part of the students’ tuition in taking the program. Many students who could afford to pay the other half of the tuition were anxious to do so and many teachers were taking studying for the exam very seriously. Why, do you ask?
The benefit of participating in the government scheme as opposed to private English classes is that, of course, it helps future prospects. If I understand the system correctly, teachers in government schools are not hired on the merit of their teaching, their interview responses, or any other standard measure which we use in the US. Rather, because government school teaching positions are government jobs, they are governed by the same crazy system that governs the hiring of any other government employee. Therefore, schools look at your marks from your B.A. and B.Ed, your masters if applicable, and all of these are translated into certain numbers of points. These points determine if you are first, second, third etc for your pick of teaching jobs at different schools.
Now, extra points can be earned in a number of seemingly random ways: 1) participation in the National Cadet Corps (a band of students akin to the Boy Scouts who march in procession for Independence Day, Diwali and a number of other functions throughout the year) during your high school years. 2) Taking a government sponsored exam, such as that given in the SCOPE curriculum to prove your proficiency in English.
With this in mind, many of the temporary teachers (teachers hired to fill vacant permanent positions on a yearly basis) were anxious to take the school sponsored opportunity to take the exam and the principal called on us to tutor these teachers in preparation. Melissa and I sat in the staff room and tried to encourage these teachers to speak English as much as possible in the hopes that it would allow them to pass the exam, which took place last Sunday.
On coming into the staff room this morning, I was interested to hear how the exam had gone from one teacher we had worked with very often.
“How was the test?” I asked, innocently enough.
“Oh, it was fine,” was the reply. “We all ended up copying off of Sejalben’s paper.”
“Come again?”
If this is the attitude of the teachers, how can we expect any more of the students?
Best,
Cat
The entrenched hold which cheating has on this country’s educational system is much deeper than I ever would have suspected. Needless to say, this most recent item completely shocked me:
Some background first: The Government of Gujarat has undertaken to sponsor a specific English curriculum which they hope will enhance the English skills of the students and teachers who study with it. It is called SCOPE for short, though at the moment I cannot for the life of me remember what it stands for. It’s originally a Cambridge based curriculum and it shows in all the cultural relevancy that its materials have for students in rural India. The English teachers at Kadod High School take turns teaching it in the mornings at the same time as my Integrated English-Technology class and more than once have they shyly knocked on the computer lab door in need of some help with an exercise that is beyond their cultural comprehension.
For example: Match the following people with their dates of death: a) Charlie Chaplin b) Queen Elizabeth c) Pablo Picasso d) Beowulf. The respective dates of death follow.
I know my students immediately see the relevancy of this exercise to learning English in their own lives.
Irregardless, the principal was very anxious to start the program at Kadod High School and our Foundation is helping to sponsor part of the students’ tuition in taking the program. Many students who could afford to pay the other half of the tuition were anxious to do so and many teachers were taking studying for the exam very seriously. Why, do you ask?
The benefit of participating in the government scheme as opposed to private English classes is that, of course, it helps future prospects. If I understand the system correctly, teachers in government schools are not hired on the merit of their teaching, their interview responses, or any other standard measure which we use in the US. Rather, because government school teaching positions are government jobs, they are governed by the same crazy system that governs the hiring of any other government employee. Therefore, schools look at your marks from your B.A. and B.Ed, your masters if applicable, and all of these are translated into certain numbers of points. These points determine if you are first, second, third etc for your pick of teaching jobs at different schools.
Now, extra points can be earned in a number of seemingly random ways: 1) participation in the National Cadet Corps (a band of students akin to the Boy Scouts who march in procession for Independence Day, Diwali and a number of other functions throughout the year) during your high school years. 2) Taking a government sponsored exam, such as that given in the SCOPE curriculum to prove your proficiency in English.
With this in mind, many of the temporary teachers (teachers hired to fill vacant permanent positions on a yearly basis) were anxious to take the school sponsored opportunity to take the exam and the principal called on us to tutor these teachers in preparation. Melissa and I sat in the staff room and tried to encourage these teachers to speak English as much as possible in the hopes that it would allow them to pass the exam, which took place last Sunday.
On coming into the staff room this morning, I was interested to hear how the exam had gone from one teacher we had worked with very often.
“How was the test?” I asked, innocently enough.
“Oh, it was fine,” was the reply. “We all ended up copying off of Sejalben’s paper.”
“Come again?”
If this is the attitude of the teachers, how can we expect any more of the students?
Best,
Cat
Monday, October 13, 2008
A "Properly" Indian Classroom
Dear dedicated reader,
As it is the middle of October, I find my mind turning to my compatriots in the US, most of whom are still working on the first sixty days of the school year, the part where you use your exceptional teaching ability to establish the order and expectations and tone of your classroom that will last you the year through and are the foundation for your ability to get things done.
To my own frustration, my development in that department has been a bit delayed, having been thrown in haphazardly with no preparation as to what to expect from the school or students and no orientation about what to teach, not to mention schedule and class changes that went well into our first month here. As a result, it was difficult in those early months to set the appropriate, productive, unchaotic tone. While my novelty got me through the first few weeks, the students, intelligent as they are, have realized my deficiencies (crippling inability to speak the Gujarati, inconvenient aversion to corporal punishment) and are exploiting these mercilessly to thwart my attempts to teach them a language that some of them don’t care to learn.
In theory, my co-teacher Tabussum and I agree that hitting students is wrong (not to mention illegal, although here you wouldn’t know it), and thus I recently proposed a workable class system so we could be a more united, organized front. One of my more proud accomplishments in the past few months, aside from now being able to wrap a sari in under ten minutes, is learning the names of almost all of my 240 students. If anyone of them is misbehaving, their name goes on the board. If they are caught again, they receive a check and must come and stand at the front of the classroom. If they are foolish enough to be fooling around WHILE standing at the front of the room, it’s straight out of the classroom and to the principal’s office. Tabussum agreed to give this system a try.
As is so often the case, the gap between theory and practice remains wide. The first day of our attempt to institute the system, Tabussum arrived at the door of my class bearing a standard 12 in/30 centimeter metal ruler. As she offered no explanation for its presence, I, unaware of its purpose, began to teach my lesson and the predictable amount of side conversations began as well. I turned sharply around and raised my eyebrows into my meanest, sternest teacher face at the offending student.
After a second warning, I was about to put the name of the boy on the board when I heard a distinctive “THWACK” and turned in time to see Tabussum pulling away the metal ruler from the back of the now pained 9th standard boy. I paused for a moment, unsure if I should continue as she went on to yell at him in Gujarati for misbehaving or stop and watch in the same fascinated manner as the rest of the class. Merely watching made me feel party to this particular method of behavior management, so I uneasily tried to continue as she, hawk-eyed, made the rounds of the benches, raising the ruler in a threatening manner anytime a student dared to even think about talking.
While I normally find our co-teaching arrangement very satisfactory, I must say that at moments like these its deficiencies become apparent. Luckily, Tabussum speaks excellent English – the first co-teacher we had, as nice and welcoming as she was, barely spoke any English at all which made coordination of teaching philosophy (or anything at all) virtually impossible. When Tabussum arrived to replace her, I was happy to learn that we both shared our idealism about what an English class could and should look like and she was pleased to inform me that Melissa’s and my teaching methods matched much more closely what she had been taught in her B.Ed program than any of the teaching that she had observed so far at government schools and she was looking forward to learning a lot more.
Under increasing pressure from the principal, however, to maintain classes that look and sound like properly Indian ones, I fear she is beginning to crack and the ruler may merely be the first indication. She recently disclosed to me that the principal approached her about the noise level coming from our ninth standard all boys class and asked her to control the classroom “properly”. I asked her why the principal did not just approach me himself: the general consensus, it seems, is that since Melissa and I are not from here, we don’t know what is to be expected and therefore can’t really help in bringing it about.
In light of these dismal expectations for my abilities, I wonder to myself how much role I *can* have in solving behavioral issues. After so much experience sorting out these things in the US, I find that my traditional leverage points (my relationship with a student, my knowledge of his/her individual goals, dreams, not to mention my relationship with his/her family and my ability to talk these things through fluently with both parties) are mooted in the face of volume and cultural appropriateness and linguistic ability. The only one remaining is my ability to create engaging, relevant (oh, educational buzzwords!) lessons that create a motivation in the student to want to pay attention.
And so, for now, I guess that’s the route I’ll continue to take.
Best,
Cat
Friday, October 10, 2008
Supposedly Unflappable
Dear dedicated reader,
Whenever I embark on accomplishing something here, I have come to regard unexpected, unanticipated or just plain unwelcome obstacles as merely a matter of course. The seemingly simple matter of photocopying a few pages requires the principal’s signature and the (uncharacteristic) functioning of the photocopier; finding a classroom for before school Spoken English means apparently working around the early morning cleaning schedule of the school peons; getting our modem fixed means waiting days or even (at this point) weeks.
To all of this I am accustomed and my helplessness in the face of these things does wonders for relaxing my attitude about them. I have shelved my American sense of absolute efficiency in favor of an attitude which believes that everything will happen the way it will happen in its own time and I, buffeted in the waves, will merely paddle with the current. In fact, in this respect I believed myself to be unflappable.
Perhaps by karma itself, I find that my hubris has been called out: I must admit that the circumstances I am about to relate have genuinely surprised even me.
Some context: Upcoming is the Diwali vacation, a three week holiday that happens in the middle of the second trimester. It provides a nice ellipsis after the constant pressure of exams and the almost holiday-less teaching schedule of June, July and August. It is akin to the Winter Break of American schools, only it is longer, lasting three weeks instead of one and a half.
Melissa and I, anticipating that this break would be one of our few opportunities to really travel and see the country (as well as fulfill our visa-created obligation to exit the country after 180 days and re-enter again), began planning our break back in the beginning of September. Train schedules were pored over, American friends were coordinated with, hotels were contacted, tickets were bought and the details were finalized. With only ten days to go until our break, our excitement has been building as the final itinerary pieces have fallen into place.
All of this came to a halt the other day when we were summarily informed that the Diwali holiday, scheduled to begin on October 18th, has been moved to “the 25th or the 27th…”
“Which is it?” We asked. The bearer of the news was unsure.
Melissa and I pondered this quietly for a moment. I, usually hesitant to swear, couldn’t help but feel that the phrase, “WTF?” was appropriate and used it quite freely on this occasion talking in the fast, overly exaggerated American accent that I use when I want to make sure that no one around us will understand what I am saying.
“But, how did this happen?” We asked Tabussum, our co-teacher.
“They wanted to make the schedule for the schools the same,” she replied hesitantly, sensing that we were feeling slightly distressed. “So the university schedule and the schools would have the same holiday and then all the students are being on holiday at the same time…”
“Who’s brilliant idea was this?” I asked with a resigned, only semi-sarcastic smile.
“The government of
Ah yes, I thought and for a moment I had a brief image in my head of the crowded, paper filled desk of the Gujarat Education Minister – stamps and paper weights to keep documents from flying away under the powerful Indian variety fans (quite unlike our wimpy American window fans). Buried under all of this, hidden away perhaps under the shelved bill to allow students to bring their textbooks into their exams, is the resolution to change the vacations. Cleaning out some papers, he finds it and, after a pause, realizes he should probably take action soon as the holiday is set to begin in a few days. He hands his decision to a peon who is sent to disperse it to all the government school principals.
Perhaps that’s how it really happened; perhaps I’ll never know.
“But, what should we do?” I hear Melissa asking, rousing me from my day-time reverie. She had already arranged her tickets back to the
Sejalben, also in the immediate vicinity in the staffroom, turned in her chair. “You will need to ask the principal,” she told us.
“And I can take your classes,” Tabussum offered helpfully. “He will probably say yes.”
Luckily for us, further obstacle was prevented due to the principal’s subsequent agreement that yes, we could leave a week early. In light of some of the class behavior I’ve been experiencing since classes resumed, I can’t help but feel a little relieved by this. Perhaps a month away from the school will give me some time to think up creative ways to control a room of 65 boys that don’t actually involve the very refined Government school method of beating them into submission…literally.
But, on a final note, seriously: who changes a vacation for an entire state a week beforehand? The whole situation is just so (and I never use this expression frivolously)… Indian.
Best,
Cat
P.S. Here is my itinerary for the (now) month long vacation.
October 18-21:
October 22 – 23:
October 24 – 25: Train ride from
October 26 – Nov 1:
Nov 2 – Nov 14:
Nov 15: Back to Kadod
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