Cultural Transition

Dear dedicated reader,

As many of you know, I am no longer residing full-time in India and have largely abandoned this blog. I'm afraid that due to the nature of my new position, it is difficult to a) keep up with it and b) to tell the stories of events from my everyday life with the same voice that I used to employ. I think, in many ways, I have changed over the past year and in some ways the behaviors that used to baffle me no longer cause so much confusion.

I am now residing in Brooklyn, however, and I have to say that I may have to redirect my critical lens to some of the bizarre cultural patterns that I am now being subjected to as a returned ex-pat.

Regardless, this post is to alert you to an article that I had published in Education Times, a sub-section of the Times of India, about my experience as a teacher. The article can be found here:

http://education.indiatimes.com/educationTimes/getArticleDetail.do?sectionid=79&articleid=200911252009112515283162d464467a

Though below is the text, reprinted for you all.

Best,
Cat


Students' Speak: Lost in Translation

On my first day as an English teacher at Kadod High School (in Gujarat), I found myself at the front of a dim classroom in front of over 60 pairs of confused, unblinking eyes. It was June, the fans had slowed to a halt with another electricity cut and I was vainly searching for a piece of chalk and a duster. In America, these staples of the teaching profession are kept in the classroom; I hadnt thought to bring them with me. I was there as a teacher through the Nanubhai Education Foundation, an NGO which works to bridge the gap between rural and urban Indian schools by sending American trained teachers to teach in rural vernacular-medium government schools to improve students English and technology skills.


Lack of amenities


Upon asking, I found that the school had no photocopier and only sponsored photocopies for its teachers with special permission from the principal. The school textbooks were beyond the means of many of my students. In the US, the school I taught at in the poor part of Boston had been deemed under-resourced. Looking around at my current classroom, at the cracked blackboard, the cramped benches and the crumbling walls, I wondered if we in the US could ever understand what under-resourced truly means.


About the students


Despite this, I found that after some shyness my students were practically jumping out of their seats to answer my simple questions that first day. Their eagerness belied their excitement to learn. They hungered for knowledge in a way that I had never seen in my students in America. Furthermore, their respect for their teachers, their respect of the knowledge that their teachers offered them, was unlike anything I had ever seen while teaching in Boston or even in my own days as a student.


However, I was soon to learn the constraints within which this eagerness is regularly channeled. “Teacher, should we copy our essay in a blue pen or a black pen,” asked one diligent student, as I worked at writing away on the blackboard. I cringed inwardly and instructed the student, as I myself had been instructed by the other teachers, to copy the essay in a blue pen. Turning back to the board, I continued to copy an essay on the dull topic ‘Computers and the Future’ from a cheaply printed exam guide.


Copying, I had been told by other teachers, is a necessary evil. The annual exam is graded harshly and mistakes are not tolerated in student’s essays. The level of English expected from class IX students does not match their current ability level, after years of learning English from government teachers, who barely speak the language themselves. Many of the students I taught could barely read English, couldn’t speak at all and yet, somehow still managed to pass the annual exam because of teaching practices such as these. Is this a triumph of ingenuity of the schools to make up for what they lack or a symptom of a much bigger disservice to its students by the Indian government or is it both?


Comparing classrooms


As for myself, I could only capitulate to the system. The methods that I learned as a teacher, in the US, for engaging the students in an interactive environment, were meant for classes of 30 in classroom spaces that allowed for some freedom of movement. These methods did not translate to my classes of 60 with barely enough room for me to pass between benches to check my students work. Furthermore, the school administration did not appreciate my attempts at classroom interactivity. I was often told to control my classroom better and that Indian students learned better sitting at desks and copying things off the board than by playing games.
For me, this begged the question - did the students learn better or memorise better? Does memorisation denote true understanding?


As an American, I can sing the words to popular Hindi songs without understanding them. Can English be learned as merely another subject like math or science where one memorises the relevant facts and regurgitates them for the annual exam or does the language require a certain special treatment that the government syllabus has yet to accord it?


Concluding questions


On a policy level, I hear that things are changing. At a conference I attended last week, run by the English Language Teachers Association of India, a Gujarati policymaker informed the participants that reforms in the way English is taught are being pushed forward. For example, Gujarat now requires an oral test of the class VIII and IX students. These fabled reforms have indeed filtered down to the practice level. However, I’ve watched these oral exams actually administered. The teacher asks the student to recite a poem or an essay that they have memorised and then grades them on how well they remember it. Is this what policymakers had in mind?


In the end, I think the question is - what does learning look like? As an American educator working in the Indian context, it is a question that I found myself asking every day. I find that I do not have an answer, instead I have one last question - will these methods prepare these motivated students for life outside the school?


(The writer is the Executive Director of Nanubhai Education Foundation and a former full-time teacher at Kadod High School. Her interest in Indian development began at Brown University, where she double majored in South Asian Studies and History and spent her junior year studying at St Stephen’s College in Delhi while interning for the NGO TARSHI)