English Language: News from Kathmandu 4

Here we go, the comments are getting funnier!

Greetings!

I taught my second lesson this morning at Lalit Kalyan. This was a grade 4 class that we had observed doing a lesson with storytelling two days previous. I wanted to also do a lesson that involved storytelling and showing different methods of helping students to recall and retell a story. I did, however, underestimate the English level of the students! Perhaps because both lessons we delivered yesterday were so well received, we were left with the impression that we were underestimating the ability level of the students – so we planned this lesson to be a little bit more complex. Halfway through the lesson, I realized the students' ability was not high enough to comprehend the full content of the lesson we had planned.

The lesson progressed in stages, from me telling the story with pictures, to reviewing the story with the pictures on the wall, to the students putting the pictures in the correct order. We then moved to trying to sequence the bits of dialogue from the story in order as well. After some repetition of the instructions in Nepali from the teachers who were present, the students caught on fast enough and understood the dialogue. The next stage of retelling and recalling was where the lesson plan got too complex. It was clear to me as I was teaching, and if it had been my regular class, I would have known when I was pushing them, and when I was losing them. I think it was good, however, for the teachers to see the gradual sequence of activities, and how it might progress to more complex tasks – all of them, however, still based around a very simple story! In any case, not every lesson goes over perfectly, and as teachers, we are all too familiar with how seemingly random this can be. We might teach the exact same lesson to two different classes and get two completely different responses. In any case, the students did learn some new words, learned a new story, and were eager to learn more. I am constantly impressed by how attentive and adaptable the students here are.

In the afternoon, we visited a school we had not yet been to. As we were driving there, we crossed the river for the first time. A cow was grazing on garbage along the riverbank. Plastic bags, orange peels, rubble, dead birds, everything was everywhere. I started to think that the garbage truck we had seen around town simply came to the river and dumped everything there. There were definitely no tourists in this part of town. If you didn't know where the school was, you would walk right past it. Amidst a bunch of ramshackle houses (I'm guessing they were once temporarily houses), there is a very narrow three story concrete building that houses the school. I have never seen classrooms so small! Martine already mentioned the grade 1 class we observed, but we also went downstairs to observe a grade 5 class.

The grade 5 class took place in the narrowest classroom I have ever seen. There was an aisle down the left hand wall, barely wide enough for one body, and 5 rows of long benches and desks down the right side of the room. For purely logistical reasons, many of our teaching techniques and ideas would be simply impossible to do in a setting like this. The class was working from a textbook on a chapter called “Famous People”. The teacher read the text out loud in English, sentence by sentence, pausing after each sentence and explaining it in Nepali. The text was about Elizabeth I, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Raleigh. I turned around and looked at the tin roofs held down by old rubber tires. I couldn't help but think, who cares about Hamlet when there is nothing to eat? Is Queen Elizabeth really relevant when you are sleeping next to a pig pen inside your house?

I am certain that it is just as easy to teach the simple past tense with Nepali heroes and celebrities, as it is with 16^th century English monarchs. The students would gain so much more from their language learning if it applied to their daily lives and fuelled their imaginations about their own country and heritage. I truly felt like I had stepped back in time to colonial days – and yet Nepal has remained fiercely independent. This is visible everywhere, except in the educational resources – why?

We are looking forward to a productive day tomorrow, perfecting the workshop content for Sunday's presentation. I wish we had more opportunity to spend time in the schools; alas, exams are ongoing and then holidays begin.

Until Sunday!

Monika

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Namaste,

Today was quite a different day from the others as we went to visit Bal Kalyan school in the afternoon.

It is situated much further north about ½ hour's drive in the taxi. As the journey progressed, my mood changed. The area we drove through was very poor and all along the river rubbish was dumped in great big piles, animal carcasses amongst the rubble,...almost a typical Nepal scene, but several degrees higher.

We walked the last leg through a narrow street where children played in the dirt with their ever present smile.

The teachers were very welcoming and we observed a Grade 1 class: they were learning the vowels of the English alphabet. The teacher showed them the letters on bits of paper and the children pronounced them individually. She was very lovely with these deprived kids. The first teacher this week I noticed actually smiling at the children, encouraging their learning and praising them!!They all looked really happy to be there and to be learning.

However she kept up the same pattern for a bit too long I found. Reading a simple story to the children and letting them find vowels in a different context would have kept their attention a bit longer.

I taught them a short lesson, new words to do with sporting activities. I used a lot of actions to go with the pronunciation to help them remember the words later. They loved that and theyalmost got overexcited, but I managed to calm them down with another activity.

We did a couple of team games and that went down well! I was amazed at how quickly they picked up and adopted these activities. Their hands shot up to have a go and they didn't shy away from repeating the words individually.

Afterwards in the staffroom the feedback was limited due to the fact that the teachers don't speak much English. And why should they I wondered. Here they are doing a brilliant job teaching children who have less than nothing, who would play in the dirt if they didn't come to school, and they manage to give them some sort of education! The children come to school...what an achievement and hat off to those teachers. The rooms in which they have to deliver the lessons are very small...one can hardly move in them. I left with a feeling I can't quite describe...and also with the thought that we can't approach this school the same way we are approaching the others.

More tomorrow,

Martine