Oren’s First 100 Days of School

Or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death

[Editor’s note: Oren Karp is a recent graduate of Brown University and a Fulbright Scholar teaching English in Kathmandu, Nepal. He posts an account of his life in Nepal every few weeks.]

 

Okay, I’ll level with you: I have no idea how many days of school I’ve actually had so far. But it definitely feels like one hundred, in the good ways and the bad. I no longer have any sense of being new, in my school or my neighborhood: I feel like I have become a small part of the everyday machinations here, tugged along by my invisible puppet string at the same time every day to and from school, passing by the same neighbors on stoops, shopkeepers in bodegas, college students waiting for the bus on the corner, the barber who cut my hair a few months ago.

Last week was first-term exams for all grades at my school. Every day, students sat in mixed-grade classrooms and took exams starting at 11am, lasting anywhere from 1 hour for younger grades to 3 hours for older grades. (My school actually goes up to grade 10—grades 8-10 come in the morning, from 6am until 10 or 10:30, so I don’t teach them—but all grades from kindergarten to 10 came at the same time for exams.) There were different subjects every day, and the exams were written and standardized through the government, with all the same care and thought that they put into their textbooks. That is to say, they were terrible.

I’ll use the English exams as an example, because, even though most of the exams have questions printed in Nepali and English, I’m really only familiar with the English curriculum. For the younger grades, many of the questions were directly out of the textbook—and I mean directly out of the textbook. At worst, some tests included questions about a passage in the textbook which was not even reproduced on the test. The result was that, if you gave a native English speaker (such as, say, me) one of the tests, they wouldn’t be able to answer all the questions unless they’d read the textbook and remembered the passage which the question was referring to.

I suppose the idea is that if the students know English, they will be able to read the textbooks and remember what happened when the test comes around. But, believe it or not, that’s not what they do. Instead, students just memorize the questions and their answers, sometimes without understanding or even being able to read either of them, and then try to replicate things exactly on the test. This is the reason for the extreme emphasis on writing and spelling in class: when exam time comes, what matters most is that you can put the correct answer down, whether you even know what you’re writing or not. I have gone up to some students during class and asked them to read their answers to me, and too frequently find that they either don’t know what it means or can’t even read it aloud for me.

One of the biggest problems that I noticed for students on English exams actually lay in comprehending the questions themselves. That is, the directions are often too difficult for the students to understand, even if they just say, “Answer the following questions,” or “Add -ing to the following verbs to make the ‘-ing’ form.” Some students have to ask a teacher to read the directions for nearly every question on the exam, and then ask for clarification in Nepali. Many of the students who don’t ask just recognize the exercises from the textbook and know what they’re supposed to do. But it’s not uncommon to see a student get confused and write something like “invent → invention,” when they were supposed to write “invent → invented,” just because they couldn’t read the directions.

On top of this, there were some questions which were unintelligible even to me. The tests were rife with spelling, punctuation, and grammar mistakes, not to mention very unnatural and unusual phrasing. Could you answer this fill-in-the-blank question, which was on the grade 8 exam?

2. iii) Never cheat your parents, ……………… . (don’t they/do you/will you)

I know that I couldn’t. Not confidently, anyway. It’s not the first option, because it can’t be “they,” and I guess “will you” makes a bit more sense because it’s closer to an imperative, but none of them would actually be used by a native English speaker.

And the teachers don’t help—or, rather, they do. During exams, I was assigned a “floater” role, and walked between classes to relieve teachers or bring them extra supplies as needed. Most days I started off helping out with grade 1, since there were about twenty of them and only one teacher, and also their tests were the only ones I could reliably understand even in Nepali. When they finished, I would wander and check in with other teachers, or try to keep the kids who had finished from disturbing everyone still taking exams. I got to peek into a lot of different classrooms during all the different exams, and I noticed that teachers broadly took one of two different roles as proctors over the exams.

The first kind of teacher was very involved with the students while they took their exams. This teacher took proctoring as a hands-on assignment, walking around the classroom, reading kids’ exams as they were writing them, and of course, helping them to get the right answer. When someone finished their exam, this teacher took it, read it over, and then gave it back and told the student what they got wrong. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I saw teachers going up to students and telling them the answers to write in, even erasing incorrect answers off the test for them.

The second kind of teacher took more of what I like to call a “community approach” to proctoring. By that I mean that this teacher sat back, let the students talk to each other, and basically did nothing for the entire duration of the exam. When students had questions with this teacher as a proctor, they turned to other students to ask rather than turning to the teacher. And other students were more than happy to explain not only the question but their answer, as well. I walked by several rooms where students were loudly talking to each other (I didn’t catch it all, but I don’t think they were asking to borrow a pencil sharpener) and the proctor was sitting there, maybe even on their phone, or sometimes there was no proctor in the room at all.

I’ve noticed that favoritism seems to be very prevalent in the way students are graded. Those teachers who gave help during exams weirdly didn’t seem willing to help all students: I’m not sure if it was because of caste or something else—the only pattern I noticed was that students who had been absent more often were less likely to get help from the teachers, even when the students who had been present didn’t know the answers either. And besides the exams themselves, teachers submitted numbers for all their students across various broad categories, such as “student’s learning achievement” or just “performance.” When I looked at some of the numbers my co-teachers were submitting, I didn’t agree with all of them, but I wasn’t surprised to see that the students who my co-teachers clearly favor in class—the students who are seen as “studious” and “well-behaved”—received the highest of these apparently subjective grades.

And so exams proceeded, and despite or (possibly because of) the way it all happened, it’s hard for me to believe that the results meant anything at all. What does it really mean if one school has a higher percentage of students passing than another school? All I know is that the results at my school were not good, and English was particularly grim. One student out of eighteen in grade 6 passed the English exam, and the passing grade was 24/40—60%. The vast majority of students got under 20/40, and a few were in the single digits. Unfortunately, that class was not an outlier. I left mostly just feeling bad for everyone involved, the teachers who will be held responsible for bad scores, and the students whose progress will be judged and whose future actually depends on these terrible, terrible exams.

As for me, the very least I can say about school is that it’s definitely not boring. Teachers, students, and a very slowly crumbling language barrier keep things interesting on a daily basis. It seems like most of the other teachers at my school think that I understand a much higher percentage of what they say than I actually do, a perception that I have indulged with a lot of nodding and smiling. And the bonds I’m building with my students are what I treasure most. Though they don’t mention it, I can tell that they notice a difference in the way that I treat them compared to other teachers: I never yell at them, I never hit them, I know all their names. I love getting to school and greeting them while they run around in the yard, seeing their smiles at the small miracle that I have somehow returned to school again to teach them.

A lot of my newfound enjoyment of school may also owed to the fact that I have more free time outside of school, between officially securing a two-day weekend for myself and this time of year naturally having more holidays on the calendar. But I have found that more free time is not always a good thing when you don’t have any activities to fill it with. During exams, I was home most days two hours earlier than usual, but I didn’t know what to do with that time. My ping-pong friend got dengue (which is spreading alarmingly in Kathmandu right now), though he’s luckily doing better now, and the music group wasn’t there when I walked by the community center after my language classes. Suddenly, just like that, I was alone again.

So I turned to the things that I understand, and made the best of the situation in the ways that I know how. I wrote emails to friends and family, I made a point of getting out of the house and getting some exercise every day, and I leaned on my American friends here in Kathmandu for support. During the Teej holiday, two weeks ago, we went together to Nagarkot for a few nights, a town up on a hill just on the edge of the valley. We relaxed and hiked, free of the city bustle, and through the fog and clouds I got brief glimpses of mountains, even laying eyes on the Everest range for the first time. And back at home, on many of the nights when I didn’t know what to do, I picked up my book and walked to Uma Maheswor, the temple at the top of Kirtipur, where I sat on the steps and read in the fading light, looking out over the twinkling stars down in the city.

Such are the ups and downs of living abroad. One week, it seems like everything is going just the way I want it, and I can even dare to believe that I’m finding my way. And then, just as quickly, the rug is pulled out from under me, and I’m brought back to my earliest days of isolation and loneliness here. It’s strange to feel like I don’t have stability, consistency, when my weeks all follow the same schedule. I go to school, I come home, I have Nepali class some evenings, I even eat the same meal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, most days. Yet so often that is how I feel: untethered, alone, unsure of what’s coming next.

At the same time, I’m learning that my experience might not be so defined by my identity as a foreigner. Kathmandu is growing astoundingly fast, and many of the people moving here are young people around my age, leaving their families and sometimes even their country in a massive break from traditional culture. Even though I am not Nepali, parts of my experience are shared by so many Nepalis—I have met people who have been in the city for even less time than I have, who are also experiencing a sort of culture shock, who are also without community. Some of these people have become my friends, and all of them have given me a sense of solace. Although I may be alone, I am not the only one: there is peace, and there is hope, in knowing that other people are out there, looking for connection, just like me.

This essay was original published by Oren Karp on his Nepali Dispatch blog and is posted here with permission from Oren Karp.

The picture of Kirtipur on a Saturday night was provided by Oren Karp.