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.