October 29 - November 4

October 29 – November 4

October 29 brought us to the end of the 5 day festival known as Tihar and I have to say it was too long. By its end, I was ready to get back to my classes and the students with whom I have been building a rapport.  Climbing in front of them on the morning of the 30^th we returned to our lessons of negative and positive statements and questions, contractions,  and the latest instructions on which pronouns to use for certain words and which words to use for sentences dealing with time.  During one of the classes I showed the kids a map of the Kathmandu valley, I had purchased earlier in this trip, and had them all get out of their desks, come to the front of the class and show me their village of Jitpurphede (pronounced JIT-PUR-FADEE).  There are many opportunities where I dovetail the lessons off of the English language and on to geography, math, social studies………nice change of pace.

These kids are really good and throw me challenges regularly forcing me to mentally, and creatively, dash and gash; discovering new tactics to keep them moving forward. One of the tricks I play with them, when I sense their focus bleeding out, is a count-clap game. I walk to the very middle of the room in between the two rows of desks and ask them "if they are ready?" and I have done this enough that they know what is about to happen.  Without saying a word I place the back of my hands, fisted, at the side of my face and flash numbers to them. Their job is to clap the number I have showing.  Sometimes I do just odd numbers, and then I will switch to even numbers and many times I will change it up again and mix odd and even.  Incrementally, I have been increasing how high the numbers are that end the sequence.  As soon as we end the count clap we jump right back into the lesson at hand with a new-found concentration and energy……….

To build my Nepali vocabulary I have been throwing a Nepal word into each class. The latest is the Nepali word for “to remember” samjannu (pronounced SOME-ZEN-NOO). (In Nepalese, if the letter “J” is inside the structure of a word it takes on a “z” sound.)  I have them chant this word in between the paragraphs of the reading exercises, which we do together and out loud. They need to remember the content of the stories we read as at the end of each one I ask them many questions about the story and they must answer me in past tense, present tense, using pronouns, and the correct verbs.

One of the nice surprises of this teaching assignment is the dialogue I have with the other teachers at my school.  There is an English Literature teacher for the 9^th and 10^th graders who is Nepalese, and the two of us find time for conversation about her upcoming lessons. She is from a large family of teachers (her brother, father, mother, and her husband) and inevitably before the day begins she will ask me questions concerning poems or short stories, which are part of her lesson plans, and we speak on interpretation of the pieces.  She asks great questions and has a high level of curiosity concerning word choice, and sentence structure, and also has an understanding of metaphor and specific phrases having larger meaning than what it is communicated in the literal sense.