Education FAQ

**So apparently this post is a repeat and I wasn't so slow to answer people's questions after all. Sorry for the lack of new information. I'll try to get another post up soon.**

Approximately ten billion years ago I promised to answer the questions about the Nepali educational system and my school that people sent to me. Then life happened. But I didn’t forget so here are some long awaited answers to a variety of queries.

 

What do the children do for lunch? Some go home, some buy something from a vendor nearby, some bring something small from home, some do not eat at school.

 

Do they have recess? No. There is a 10 minute break between 2-3 period and a half hour for lunch.

 

What about gym class? No. Arm raises during assembly, but that shouldn’t really count since most of them do more moving during class.

 

Do you have parent teacher conferences? Results day is when parents come to pick up report cards for the term. Perhaps some conversations go on during this time, but nothing as formal as a conference.

 

Do you see a difference in how they speak English with you as opposed to their regular Nepali teacher? I see a difference in my English sometimes since I have picked up some of their bad habits in order to be more understandable! (The s sound at the beginning of a word is difficult so you often hear an “i" sound before words like ischool, istudy, etc. and I definitely do this sometimes.) I try to correct the little mistakes that their regular teachers might have a hard time honing in on since English is also their second language; things like he vs. she, when to use good morning vs. good afternoon, sir vs. ma’m or miss, etc.

 

The biggest difference between me and the majority of my co-teachers is that I am willing to move more slowly through the content because I put a big emphasis on comprehension; when I am teaching by myself I move extra slow because I can’t translate tricky things into Nepali so I have to spend enough time doing actions in front of the class to get the message across. (Some tricky ones lately: haystack, millet, and horn – the instrument that none of the kids have ever seen as opposed to the thing sticking off of goats and buffaloes that they see every day.)

 

How large an area does the school serve? I walk about one kilometer to get to school. I know students who come at least twice as far as I do. I would guess that the longest walkers probably go for about an hour, but I’m not sure. There are also students whose families actually live outside the Kathmandu valley. The families have chosen to send one or more children into the valley to get a better education. These kids live at hostels nearby, but some of them went home before Dashain and won’t come back until after Tihar because the trip is long. One student told me his family lives in a village and to get home he spends one day in a micro and then two days walking!

 

How do the kids get to/from school? Only expensive private schools have buses. Most of my students walk. Some of them get dropped off by parents on a motorcycle, and when it rains I sometimes see a few getting out of a microvan which means they spent the 10 rupees to catch a ride that day.

 

Do the boys wear their ties during recess? Yes. Ties are required for both genders at all times. Some of the littlest ones have various clip-on systems since they don’t know how to tie them yet. (But I also saw a kindergarten girl helping some of the boys the other day and she was a pro!) I will occasionally use ties as collateral when I loan pencils to students who don’t have one.

 

My host brother, who goes to a private high school in Kathmandu, forgot his tie the other day, completely by accident. He rode the microbus for about 40 minutes to get to school and when they saw he didn’t have a tie, they sent him home. So at 7:15 he was done for the day. Sounds even easier than trying to convince your mom that you should stay home sick!

 

What games do the kids play? Beat each other up, steal each other’s pencils, try to hide from the American teacher under the desks or behind the pillars…oh, did you mean games outside of class?!? I see kids playing tag, ping-pong, and what I think is like hide-and-seek. I’m sure they have other games that I can’t pick out from the mob of running children. I taught my grade two students how to play Mrs. Fox What Time Is It and thought that maybe that would become a popular game. Unfortunately, there has been a lot of confusion about this – the kids don’t know when to say mr. or mrs. (gender-pronouns again), most of them can’t tell time, and they definitely haven’t thought through the strategy of taking smaller steps – I don’t really care because I’m just trying to get them to practice telling time, but sometimes I wonder why they think the game is fun.

 

When the kids graduate from this school, how many will go on for additional education? Some definitely will. Those who can afford it will go to a private school for “+2” which is like grades 11 and 12. Then there is bachelor’s and after that masters. Some will continue coming to Kitini where +2 classes are offered from 5:00am until 9:30am. I don’t have a good sense of how many, I know that education is respected but I also know that a degree doesn’t guarantee you a job and some students will go straight to work. There are already kids dropping out in grade two, so my guess is that most of the ones who stick around until grade ten will continue but that won’t be all the students I’m working with now.

 

***

 

Hopefully that answered some of your ponderings. If you have any other questions feel free to post them in response to this, and I’ll answer them…. probably sometime next year!

Coming Soon…

-          STARS: a review of my latest attempt at classroom management

-          Games: why 25% of the school days were not instructional the past two weeks

-          And other important reflections on my first two months of teaching

Fifth Period

Alternatively Titled: The Adventures of an American General Education Major, Fresh Out of College, Teaching Grade One Art in a Nepali Classroom

 

Me and the grade ones with our napkin flower collage projects.

I can’t remember if I have previously revealed that awhile ago my grade one co-teacher asked me not to teach English anymore. It’s not actually as bad as it sounds since grade one is supposedly English medium which means all subjects should be taught in English. Long story short, I now teach a subject where the government textbook is titled “My Social Studies and Creative Arts.”

 

In the past five or six weeks, we have completed the remaining chapters from the social studies section. So the rest of the book is for creative arts including topics like: collage, clay, and printmaking. In general, I find the idea of doing art with adorable children pretty appealing. We have already done some step-by-step drawings on the board and the kids are surprisingly attentive during this activity. But the more serious the crafts become the more materials and preparation are required.

 

I always try to be cognizant of the fact that my presence at Kitini is temporary. My goal is to use creative new teaching strategies that I think the teachers could use again without too much additional effort. If I bring in outside materials, I try to select items that can be found for little or no cost, or that I can purchase and leave behind. When I make games or flashcards, they are either durable enough to be reused or made out of scraps of blank paper I cut out of the margin of the notebook I use for planning. I want to give teachers as few reasons as possible to dismiss what I’m doing as something they could do, on their own, after I’m gone.

 

With this attitude in mind, I spent a pretty decent amount of time during the Dashain holiday pondering how to teach art with little to no conventional art materials. I already have several boxes of crayons that I use with the kids so simple drawing, coloring, and relief printing is easy. (For paper I usually just have the kids use their regular notebooks, but I’ll have to find a way to obtain something else when we start using wet materials like glue and paint.) For collage, there is always the option of using old newspapers. In brainstorming ways to get color I thought about having the kids use crayon on the newspaper before tearing it into pieces. Then I realized that yellow and pink napkins are also easy to find and cheap. Thus was born the napkin based flower collage activity which you will see below. I have one, half dried, black inkpad that we will probably use to do fingerprints or stamping at some point. And I have already made up some homemade play-dough with flour and water. I will need a larger batch to use it with a whole class, but I’m thinking about showing the teachers how to make it at a future workshop so letting them do the mixing will solve that problem. Mosaics can be made with practically anything; I even found a cute turtle craft using a paper plate and lentils. If anything, I KNOW that lentils are available here.

 

I did purchase some food coloring in the city, but that is beyond what I expect teachers to do. According to the internet there are also lots of ways to make your own natural paint dyes! I wish I was kidding. After reading up on flour based paints and vegetable colors, I concluded that taking a nature walk to gather plants and sticks/grass to use as brushes would be a super eco-friendly and fun activity. But there’s also a lot of ambitious things going on in my all-natural first grade art class imagination, so I decided that should wait until the end of the unit. I did find out that the grocery store sells old 6x6 egg crates for one rupee each so once we get to painting I have the perfect containers.

 

Fast forward to the end of Dashain and the start of school. I had planned a no-frills drawing activity for the grade ones with extra time to play “over-under” the exciting game of passing a ball around the circle alternating between giving it over your head or between your legs! Seriously though, it’s a huge hit. On special occasions I make up times and we race to do it even faster! Sometimes I worry that I get too much of a power trip by working with six year olds who will do practically anything.

 

Anyways, during said simple drawing activity I checked in with my co-teacher to make sure I wasn’t missing information about a magical supply closet somewhere full of art things.

 

Me: “Social studies siddhyo. Ahile art?” Social studies is finished. Now art?

Teacher: “Yes.”

Me: “Materials chha ki chaina?” Materials exist or no?

Teacher: blank stare

Me: “Paint chha ki chaina? Brushes? Glue?”

Teacher: “Paint no, small glue.”

Me: “No paints, no brushes, maybe a little bit of glue?”

Teacher: “Yes.”

 

This conversation confirmed my earlier suspicions that I shouldn’t count on having much to work with, and I gave myself an invisible gold star for accurately anticipating the situation.

 

 

 

* * *

 

The next day I came to class armed with colored napkins, some cheap glue bottles I found at the grocery store, and a sample flower collage. I displayed my sample to generate interest and then had the kids watch me make another one before sending them back to their seats and looking for the quietest students to get their materials first. 

As I am passing out napkins, my co-teacher scurries over to the always locked cabinet in the first grade classroom. I know she has the key and I have seen it opened before… it’s full of crumpled up old papers and some wooden boards made to stand up with paintings of different family members on them. No sign of crayons, markers, or other consumable items. A moment later she whips out a stack of vibrantly colored tissue paper! Where did that come from? I have yet to see tissue paper sold anywhere in this country so I certainly wasn’t expecting it to show up in my school.

 

So maybe there is more to that cabinet than I previously thought. While the kids are happily ripping their napkins and getting glue all over the tables I go over and ask if I may have the key to take a look for myself, just in case there are any other buried treasures. The teacher hands me the key and when I open the door and start rummaging underneath piles of trash she says, “Tell what you need and I get.” But I don’t even know what to ask for and I really just want to see for myself. So I ask her to give out more pink napkins and keep digging.

 

 

 IT’S ACTUALLY A SUPPLY CLOSET!

THERE ARE SUPPLIES IN IT!

 

I find all sorts of good stuff like full color printed, laminated, English flash cards! A class set of dice! Copies of old exams (which I have been asking to see for weeks now!) Blank chart paper in several colors! A pocket chart! An old clock – exactly what I’ve been wishing for in class two where we are learning to tell time and really struggling to understand that the hour hand doesn’t always exactly point to the number. Large print stories to go with each chapter for the social studies book provided by Rotary International! More wooden figures with people and animals!

 

PAINT!

 

I’m not even irritated that no one thought it would be a good idea to tell the volunteer English teacher, “hey so we have a whole cabinet full of laminated words, letters, and flashcards in English if you wanted to use them….”

 

Mostly I’m over the moon about the paint. (And let me tell you, this whole thing would have played out very differently if I had spent my Saturday boiling vegetables to make natural dyes and then come to class and watched my teacher pull paint out of the cabinet. My amusement would have been significantly less.)

 

My joy and delight led me to spend my lunch hour sorting and organizing the cabinet while I simply basked in the availability of so many things I had been pondering making myself. If there had been an earthquake, I would have died extraordinarily happy underneath that cabinet. 

 

 

Please note that the before picture was after I'd already been digging for 20 minutes :)

 

Reach the World

Towards the end of August, I received an invitation to participate as a travel correspondent for an organization called Reach the World. The full description of the program is below, but essentially Americans travelling in foreign countries volunteer to write two articles per week on topics like tradition, food, transportation, or the environment. These articles are published to the RTW website where students and teachers can access what quickly becomes an up-to-date travelogue from hundreds of locations across the globe. Each traveler is also matched with a single classroom and will correspond with that group of students more personally from messages to video-conferences.  

Reach the World (RTW) is a global education non-profit based in New York City. Since 1998, RTW has been cultivating relationships between young students and volunteer world travelers through an innovative program of online journalism and face-to-face interactsions. Over the past 15 years, RTW has directly served 16,000 students and 800 teachers in under-served communities.

Reach the World’s mission is to help elementary and secondary school students and teachers to develop the knowledge, attitudes, values, and thinking skills needed for responsible citizenship in a complex, culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. The program hopes to address two major problems faced by youth in under-served communities: the narrowing of the curriculum, forcing out subjects other than literacy and mathematics; and the unequal access to technology tools. Through a standards-based program of web-based journalism, videoconferencing and collaborative project-making, RTW students go on virtual journeys with global mentors and engage in hands-on learning within the classroom. Global competence surveys reveal that in the process, RTW students are expanding their worldviews and developing an understanding of global citizenship.

Um…non-profit encouraging global competence and appreciation for diversity. It took me all of three seconds to know that this was a program I definitely wanted to be involved in. As much as I hope that some of what I teach my Nepali students will have an impact, deep down I believe that where my greatest potential lies is in bringing back artifacts, anecdotes, and pictures that can make the world come alive for my future students in the United States. Anything I can do as a teacher to help kids realize that there is more to the world than just their town, city, state, country; and that all of the other people out there matter just as much as the ones here… that’s what I want to be doing.

 

This picture has nothing to do with RTW. It's just a photo that I like.
I took it in Nagarkot and the people silhouetted are the other ETAs I was with.

 

Anyway, I applied and was accepted. So now I teach English to grades 1-5 six days per week, run afterschool intervention groups for struggling students Sunday-Tuesday, lead a poetry club for 7-9^th graders on Thursdays, take Nepali lessons twice a week, do teaching workshops for the staff at my school on Fridays…and write two articles per week for Reach the World. Perhaps that explains why my blog posts have been a little bit sparse lately. Despite being busy, I love everything and I wouldn’t give any of it up (well except maybe class 3 after a really hard day!)

If you are interested in learning more about RTW you can visit their general website at reachtheworld.org. From there you can access three hundred journeys that are currently on-going from Nepal to Germany to South Africa and beyond. Below are some specific links to my articles.

 

Already Published…

·          Autobiography

·          Logbook #1: Godavari

·          Field Note: What is transportation like in Nepal?

·          Field Note: What do people eat in Nepal?

·          Field Note: How do people cook in Nepal?  

·          Journal: Festival Season

 

Coming Soon…

·          Logbook #2: Nagarkot

·          Field Note: What is daily life like in Nepal?

 

**If you are a teacher and you would like more information about using RTW in your classroom, or connecting with a traveler, check out the general information on the website and then use the links on the homepage to get in touch with a RTW staff person. Same goes for international travelers interested in sharing their journey with students in the U.S.**

I Lift My Eyes

School is closed for fifteen days for the Dashain holiday. So far my main response to this holiday, the biggest of the entire Nepali year, is one of confusion. There are so many rituals, sacrifices, and traditions that I just don't understand. I'm certainly enjoying the time of physical rest with my host family, but mentally and emotionally it is clear that I'm still living in a foreign country.

Fortunately, I was able to spend the first several days of the break taking some time just for myself. I travelled to the hilltop town of Nagarkot which is almost purely a tourist destination. Nagarkot is most famous for its spectacular views of the Himalayas. Unfortunately, monsoon season has extended itself much longer than usual this year so I spent a lot of time staring at far off white shapes wondering if I was seeing clouds or mountains. Despite the clouds, the landscape was magnificent and it was a nice time to relax.

As if that wasn't enough, five of the other ETA's made the six hour bus trip from Gorkha to come join me in Nagarkot. It was beyond wonderful to spend time with great friends, to laugh about the daily miscommunications of Nepal, and to reflect on our time so far.

At the end of the weekend I had filled my camera's memory card at least twice. Here's a brief sampling of what you can see even under less than ideal conditions in Nagarkot, Nepal.

Wondering where the spectacular Himalayan view could be?

Even without the mountains the sprawling landscape is still beautiful.

 



First sunrise attempt: fail, too cloudy

When I finally saw the mountains!

 

Once, Nope Twice in a Million

Is there a record in the Guinness book for most foreign countries within which a single traveler has been bitten in the back of the leg by a potentially rabid street dog?

That’s right folks. It happened again. You can’t make this stuff up.
*If you didn't know me during my semester in Cameroon, you can read about the first incident at this link: A Story to Tell*

Things that were the same: me, innocently walking along a well-traveled road, minding my own business, not approaching any animals and not transporting large quantities of raw meat or dog biscuits.

Things that were different: this time there were five dogs and the one that bit me was black not yellow. This time I put up a much better defense including rock throwing, yelling, kicking, defiant eye staring, and an attempt at telepathically informing the dogs that if they came any closer I would “rip off their limbs and beat them.” (The last strategy was shared with me by a concerned fellow Fulbrighter hoping to help get rid of the terrified smell that all dogs within a mile radius can apparently smell on me.) Apparently I would benefit from a self-defense class geared towards canine attackers.

Other notable facts surrounding the incident:

-          Hand sanitizer must be a fairly strong disinfectant because it stings like nobody’s business when you dump it into a fresh wound since it's the only available semi-medical supply.

-          The pharmacy in Nagarkot does not include the anti-rabies vaccine. Fortunately, I’ve already been down this road before and my shot series is recent enough that if I can’t get to a doctor for a day or two or five I probably won’t die. 

-          I will shamelessly be using the hole in my dress as an excuse to buy a brand new kurta.

Also, if dogs were not a deal-breaker before they certainly are now. The line has been drawn. More than before, I am officially a cat person. While I hate punishing the whole group because of an individual’s behavior, the entire dog species has lost any points they may have been regaining since the first time I was bit back in 2011. Me and dogs…we are NOT friends.

*Update*
I got the first of two shots on Thursday -- the bite took place on Tuesday -- and the wound is healing quite nicely :)

Present Tense Nostalgia

(From Thursday October 3, 2013)

So today I was standing outside the grade nine, section A classroom at the end of the day. I was waiting for my afterschool poetry club students to filter in while most of the kids headed home. In the past week, I have noticed a dynamic change with a lot of my littlest students. They are definitely not nervous around me and wherever I go (in school or out on the street) I can hear little kids shouting “Good Morning Miss!” When I put my hands on my hips and say “morning?” at 3:00pm they don’t turn red anymore; they just smile and shout even louder “Good AFTEEEERNOOON Miss!” Today, I was standing on the second floor balcony, waiting for my own program to start, waiting to move on with my day, my plans, my life, and all the while my students were waving up at me as they ran out the gate.

And it hit me. I’m going to leave. One day, they will wave at me for the last time.

Obviously, I knew this coming in and I know that this happens to teachers every year: they get attached and then they have to say goodbye. But the realization that I too will become a blip on their radars and that I won’t always hear their footsteps running up behind me (but then suddenly slowing down as if that would convince me they’ve been walking down the hall the whole time!)…it drew up a little wave of sorrow. One might say I was “being nostalgic about now.”

I am so lucky. I am so lucky that after six weeks I have grown to love these kiddos. Even the ones who beat each other or pretend to cry to get out of class. Even the girl who I watched take her pencil, throw it out the window into the small field that backs up to the school, and then shrug her shoulders at me to say “sorry, I can’t do any work today. I don’t have a pencil.” I am so lucky that I get to stay her for another five months to savor all the yelling and laughing and bilingual confusion. I am so lucky that at the end of a week of failed behavior management systems and MIA co-teachers, the good still outweighs the frustrating-irritating-overwhelming-shocking-saddening-craziness so dramatically that today I stood watching them leave and was practically crushed by how much I will miss them.

Repost of one my favorite photos.

 

The Day Before the Day Before Vacation

Tomorrow is the last day before everyone has fifteen days off to celebrate Dashain. Naturally, my school will be having a special Dashain program rather than any classes all day. (By special program, I am anticipating approximately four hours of students dancing and singing. Not that I don’t enjoy these types of programs held for various occasions, but the more of them I attend the less the cultural novelty is able to outweigh the feeling of being trapped inside an elementary school talent show where there aren’t any cuts. I’ll let you know how this one turns out.)

Anyway, when I found out (on Monday) that instead of four remaining instructional days I only had three 40-minute class periods to provide closure to the units in each of my five classes… I still wanted to have a fun last day with my kids. I temporarily adopted some unfortunately typical Nepali teaching strategies (like going way too fast for most kids to keep up, and just writing the answers on the board so that everyone can at least copy the correct words into their books) and successfully closed the units in every single class! And it’s okay if they didn’t understand because once teachers finish the textbook, they just go back to page one and repeat the activities. Sigh. Only one enormous problem at a time.

After two harried days, today was a reward for everyone involved. I taught every single class a new game and it was great…if not always exactly as I had planned. (For any of my other ETA/teacher friends, I tried to include a decent description of each game in case you are looking for new ideas to try. Let me know if something doesn’t make sense.)

***

My grade two co-teacher was in school today, but when we got to class she sort of looked around and then said “ke garne?” which literally translates as “what to do?” Recognizing that a class with 27 children ranging in age from 7-14 will rapidly spiral out of control without some kind of activity, I taught them how to play fruit basket with the days of the week. Whenever I need a few moments to organize my plan for a class period I didn’t realize I would be in charge of (at least a few times a week), I stall by rearranging the seats. I make a big deal of thinking about which students to send to empty chairs and the exact placement of benches when I really just need a mostly circular shape. After a minute of furniture rearranging, I had successfully modified the game to fit this class.

Basically each kid got a little slip of paper with one day of the week written on it. With some help from my co-teacher and excessive gesturing on my part, the kids learned that when their day was called they had to stand up and find a new seat. The kid who got stuck in the middle gave their paper to the previous middle person (that way the days got circulated around and the kids got practice reading/listening for more one than one word). Total number of violent crashes due to kids running to get a seat: two. Total number of bleeding wounds: zero. Rachel-1, universe-0.

In grade four, we played a game that tied together comprehension questions, running, and a secret coded message. It was classic. (Shout out to Christine Stone for inspiring this game!) Pairs of students received a sheet of paper with eight questions on it. The eight answers were on separate sheets of paper stuck with sticky putty (blue tack) around the school courtyard. While keeping their arms linked, pairs had to run around trying to match the answers to the questions. In the corner of each answer card was a “secret letter” that they wrote in the box next to each question; which means that at the end they had a letter for number 1, number 2, etc. Then they used the number-letter code to figure out that the message at the bottom said “Happy Dashain!”

This game went really well for several reasons. Most importantly, this particular co-teacher is fabulous. Her kids are never out of control and even when I am teaching she is actively involved. She plans, she makes materials, she is awesome. I love working with her and I’m willing to put in some extra work prepping for games like this because I know that she will take the ideas I share, adapt them to fit her teaching style, and use them again. Before I could even offer to show her how I set-up the game, she came to me to verify what she had already figured out and ask for an extra copy of the student worksheet that she could hold on to for future reference. I have an international co-teaching crush on this woman.

***

Grade five was… well grade five. This is the class that prompted a desperate facebook plea for classroom management ideas. This is the class where my “I’m-so-disappointed-in-you” eyes and “you-do-realize-I-saw-that-don’t-you?!?” scowly face might as well be tattooed on my face. There is something endearing about this class, but they also possess a significant migraine-generating power.

Anyway, I was really hoping that between myself and my co-teacher we could manage an exciting team game. Unfortunately, something came up so instead of two adults versus grade five it was one non-Nepali-speaking-ETA versus grade five. No time to be sad or irritated, the longer you let this group sit without direction the more painful it will be for everyone involved.

In this game I split the 30 kids into five teams. No, not five even teams of six, because they all refuse to work with anyone of the opposite gender so I had three girls teams (6, 6 and 4) and two boys teams (6 and 8). We moved to the one large, open room in the school (normally I use the courtyard for big exciting games but it was raining hard during this class). I spread out the groups and spent five agonizing minutes trying to explain the rules while also trying to maintain my pronounced conviction that I will no longer talk over students. Every time I am interrupted, I restart my sentence. Sometimes when I get to the fourth repetition I worry that I am actually losing more students with each pause because they’ve already heard what I’m saying, but I really do believe in consistency so I’m sticking with it.

Basically, each group could send one runner to pick up a question and return to their group. When the group had written the answer, the runner would return the paper to me. A correct answer would earn them their next question and one or two puzzle pieces. An incorrect answer would earn them a shrug and “nope, try again.” Once the group had correctly answered all eight questions, they would have all the pieces to complete the puzzle. I even spent the night before coloring, laminating, cutting, and numbering five identical puzzles in the name of fairness.

 

The first group to finish the puzzle won immunity (sorry got caught up in the fact that the game was inspired by a survivor challenge and that sometimes I wish I could send class five to a deserted island far away from me)….the winning team got their picture taken and the joy of victory! (I try not to take things personally, but this class does not encourage me to spend money on prizes for them – that and I’m trying hard to avoid starting an extrinsic reward addiction that could prevent me from ever effectively teaching them to be self-motivated, independent learners.)

Overall, it went pretty well. It would have been easier if my co-teacher had been there so that I could have let her pass back the tests while I set-up the chairs. It would have been more fun if the kids had been quieter so that the ratio of teacher talk time to student engagement would have been better. It would have been awesome if some of the teams had chosen to follow the rules rather than blatantly cheating. But when in doubt look to the most important criteria: number of fatalities = zero. Thus point for me.

1,389 words in and you’re still reading. Wow. You must be a parent, grandparent, really sweet friend, or someone who is intensely procrastinating. Whatever the case, don’t worry, the last two games won’t take as long to explain.

In grade one, we made trail mix. Or some strange Nepali version of trail mix based on a hodge-podge of ingredients that I found at the grocery store earlier this week. The lessons in grade one social studies (did I mention that I teach social studies in English, rather than just English, in this class?), this week have been about making homemade food and weaving things. On Monday, we made a whole class woven poster and today’s trail mix activity was the closest I could come to any kind of food prep in a classroom where “share the crayons” is a daily battle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It doesn’t really matter what we do, these kids are cute. When I take out my camera they will get quiet and sit nicely so that I will take their picture so it’s a win-win for me: adorable photos of tiny Nepali children doing “Cheers!” with plastic cups of snack food and a mostly under control classroom.

 

Grade three has similar behavior challenges to grade five, but with this group I can clearly see why it is so difficult to get them all engaged: half of them can read and half have no idea what’s going on. Since the teachers have never studied, or witnessed, effective differentiated instruction (changing that reality is my biggest goal this year) basically every activity in grade three leaves half the students totally disconnected and thus out-of-control.

I taught grade three for the past two weeks, so this week was supposed to be my co-teacher’s turn to do a unit. Somehow I still found myself solo in the classroom twice. Today, the teacher assigned homework for the kids to do over Dashain and then literally said to me “it’s the day before vacation, I can’t teach.” Hmmm. Okay, I’ll play bingo with the kids using vocabulary from the story we’ve been reading! Fail. They just all chose not to participate. Rachel-0, Class Three-1.

My next brilliant idea was to teach them red light, green light. I figured two simple words, two simple directions, easy. After a few times of sending every single kid back to the starting line for not stopping on “red light,” they started to understand. As the front runners got close I braced myself for the next green light run that would surely send at least five students clamoring to slap my hand first. I’m not sure why, but no one stopped to hit my outstretched hand and instead they just kept running right on by. The rest of the kids followed. So for the next 5-7 minutes I stood in the middle of the courtyard yelling Red light! Green light! while a rowdy class of third graders essentially did laps back and forth. Do they know how to play the game…not really. But did I manage to occupy the rest of the class period, and did I pick up a potential new strategy for using up some of this group’s energy…yes, yes I did.

 

 ***

  
It was a long, but enjoyable day before the day before vacation. If nothing else, I will not feel the slightest bit guilty taking two weeks off from this madness.

FAQ: On Education and Other Ponderings

Things have gotten busy. I’m teaching consistently, or as consistently as the school calendar will allow, and in several classes teachers have turned over lesson planning to me. I also accepted a position as a travel correspondent for a non-profit in the U.S. that partners international travelers with public school classrooms mostly in NYC. (More about that later.) And I’ve been… living, which another Fulbrighter from Hope recently used to explain her own lack of blogs and it’s an accurately beautiful reason so I’m shamelessly stealing sharing it.

I did promise to answer some questions about the educational system in Nepal, and I also have a growing file of beyond adorable school photos to share. Sit back and relax as you read, but do keep in mind that there is relaxation involved for the teachers (myself included) who are living this experience. 

**If you are short on time and/or not related to me, you probably just want to skip to the bottom for the pictures.**
 

What do the children do for lunch? Some go home, some buy something from a vendor nearby, some bring something small from home, some do not eat at school.

Do they have recess? No. There is a 10 minute break between 2-3 period and a half hour for lunch.

What about gym class? No. Arm raises during assembly, but that shouldn’t really count since most of them do more moving during class.

 

Do you have parent teacher conferences? Results day is when parents come to pick up report cards for the term. Perhaps some conversations go on during this time, but nothing as formal as a conference.

Do you see a difference in how they speak English with you as opposed to their regular Nepali teacher? I see a difference in my English sometimes since I have picked up some of their bad habits in order to be more understandable! (The s sound at the beginning of a word is difficult so you often hear an “i" sound before words like ischool, istudy, etc. and I definitely do this sometimes.) I try to correct the little mistakes that their regular teachers might have a hard time honing in on since English is also their second language; things like he vs. she, when to use good morning vs. good afternoon, sir vs. ma’m or miss, etc.

The biggest difference between me and the majority of my co-teachers is that I am willing to move more slowly through the content because I put a big emphasis on comprehension; when I am teaching by myself I move extra slow because I can’t translate tricky things into Nepali so I have to spend enough time doing actions in front of the class to get the message across. (Some tricky ones lately: haystack, millet, and horn – the instrument that none of the kids have ever seen as opposed to the thing sticking off of animals that they see every day.)

How large an area does the school serve? I walk about one kilometer to get to school. I know students who come at least twice as far as I do. There are other schools closer to their houses, but they come to Kitini for various reasons: it is bigger, it goes all the way to grade 10 while other stop at grade 7, it has a decent reputation among government schools, etc. I would guess that the longest walkers probably go for an hour, but I’m not sure.

How do the kids get to/from school? Only expensive private schools have buses. Most of my students walk. Some of them get dropped off by parents on a motorcycle, and when it rains I sometimes see a few getting out of a microvan which means they spent the 10 rupees to catch a ride that day.

Do the boys wear their ties during recess? Yes. Ties are required for both genders at all times. Some of the littlest ones have various clip-on systems since they don’t know how to tie them yet. (But I also saw a kindergarten girl helping some of the boys the other day and she was a pro!) I will occasionally use ties as collateral when I loan pencils to students who don’t have one.

My host brother, who goes to a private high school in Kathmandu, forgot his tie the other day, completely by accident. He rode the microbus for about 40 minutes to get to school and when they saw he didn’t have a tie, they sent him home. So at 7:15 and he was done for the day. Sounds even easier than trying to convince your mom that you should stay home sick!

What games do the kids play? Beat each other up, steal each other’s pencils, try to hide from the American teacher under the desks or behind the pillars…oh, did you mean games outside of class?!? I see kids playing tag, ping-pong, and what I think is like hide-and-seek. I’m sure they have other games that I can’t pick out from the mob of running children. I taught my grade two students how to play Mrs. Fox What Time Is It yesterday so maybe that will become a popular game eventually…except that the kids don’t know when to say mr. or mrs. (gender-pronouns again) and most of them can’t tell time.

When the kids graduate from this school, how many will go on for additional education? Some definitely will. Those who can afford it will go to a private school for “+2” which is like grades 11 and 12. Then there is bachelor’s and after that masters. Some will continue coming to Kitini where +2 classes are offered from 5:00am until 9:30am. I don’t have a good sense of how many, I know that education is respected but I also know that a degree doesn’t guarantee you a job and some students will go straight to work. There are already kids dropping out in grade two, so my guess is that most of the ones who stick around until grade ten will continue but that won’t be all the kids.




After reading a poem about a queen, everyone in grade 2 got to make a crown. This group is really struggling
 with gender-based pronouns (he, she, his, her) so working on Kings and Queens was educational, not just fun.

Besides making crowns, what else have you been doing?

• Grade Two: learning about introducing people and describing them.
• Grade Four: reading stories that tend to be kind of random and have abrupt endings. One was about a very bad landlord, and another was about an ogre (the moral of this one was not to go with strangers because some of them are mean ogres who like to eat children...)
• Grade Five: trying to read and understand a passage about dinosaurs. It's been rough.
• Grade One: trying to do anything educational with kids who don't know enough English to be engaged anytime I speak more than three sentences. Some days are really really good and some days I walk out of that classroom hoping that there will be an unexpected vacation the next day.
• Grade Three: practicing how to not scream at me, learning to use the "quiet coyote" hand signal (rather than all shouting at each other to be quiet), and trying my best to teach a unit on poetry (from an English book full of mistakes) to a class where half of the students can read and half of them cannot. Oh how I wish differentiated instruction was more than just a word in this context.
• Afterschool: three days a week I keep the weakest students from grades 1, 2, and 3 (one day per grade) for 40 minutes of extra instruction. I try to do fun things with them since I'm making them stay late. I tried out some homemade play dough, which was great until I handed it to the kids. Their wet hands (from the tap where they drink water and splash each other) combined with a hot day turned it into a sticky, gooey, non-workable mess. The pictures below include a lot of teacher assistance.

Homemade playdough that I thought would be the perfect way to help my afterschool, extra English kiddos work on forming letters without copying page after page. This picture makes it look like the whole event was successful... deceiving.

Another deceptively lovely photo of the playdough fiasco. Please note that many of
the students are still wearing the crowns they had made the day before!

• Poetry Club: on Thursday I offer a poetry club for students in grades 7-9. I have between 25 and 40 students who attend. The change in dynamic when I leave my last class where half the students can't read, and then go to poetry club where I can ask questions like "what do you fear?" and get responses like death, illness, loneliness... it's a breath of fresh air.



The board filled with brainstorming ideas for writing bio poems.