To Teach and Learn

Tshering sat in his chair and struggled between his faith and his disillusion - an intense tug of war in his mind. His upbringing told him that he had to have complete faith. Even the stories he read as a boy said that if one has complete faith and blind devotion, then one can find the Buddha in the most unlikely things/places. But the modern educated man in him questioned the being before him. He recalled who some of his friends called the Rinpoche, "Rinpoche James Bond" and talks about womanizing and partying kept him occupied and very confused. He would have not been there in the hall had it not been for his best friend, Kinley. While Tshering was confused, Kinlay, on the other hand, was fully immersed in everything devotional. He sat next to Tshering, peacefully luxuriating in the warm radiance of the Rinpoche. The Rinpoche finished his oral transmission and the audience applauded. The Rinpoche smiled and said that the applaud was not necessary. He was not a show-man...

Stories have always been part of our lives. We grow up listening to bedtime stories, we watch movies and read books but writing a good one is so difficult. Story writing carries 30 points out of 100 in the English BHSEC (Year 12) exams. Another 30 points are for argumentative essay writing and the remaining cover the language and the grammar. A student has to manage writing all of the above within 3 hours. Say if we budget the time: 1 hour for essay, 1 hour for a story and the remaining 1 hour for the rest. So, finishing it can be very stressful. I have to teach my students to write a good story within one hour. I manage to teach but I am not confident if I can write a good one myself within 1 hour. So, in my class, we try to work out a few plots which we may be able to fit into any plot that is demanded by the question. Slight changes to the plot and we are writing the story asked by the question. Some of the things we can have ready for a story are setting, the main character,...

The story 'Test' written by Theodore Thomas is studied in class twelve. It is a futuristic story where people who want a driver's license are made to go through hypnosis. The State hypnotizes the applicants and they are made to experience a traumatic accident. The man who represents the State mentions that the primary objective of the test is to make drivers more careful. But what the State truly intends to achieve through the test is to make the people refuse their driving license. And those people who still want a license even after the traumatic experience are taken into custody. The theme of the story is very interesting and it presents a lot of room for critical thinking and interactive sessions in the classroom. We can have debates and panel discussions on the theme. The theme is "Ethics of the power of the state to control its citizens".  So, as expected, discussing the theme was very interesting. It was very interactive. We started with question...

The Media and IT Club in my school show English movies on Saturdays when there are no other programs. The Saturday movies are English movies and they are presented solely to help the students develop their English listening skills. Like one must read to write good English, one must first listen, to speak. This initiative was born last year when we had an American English teacher. Her name is Sarah Schmitt and together we decided those good Hollywood movies would do our students a lot of good when it comes to developing listening skills and picking up functional English usage in their everyday conversations. So far the media club has only been able to present two Hollywood movies; The School of Rock and Pitch Perfect. But these movies were received well. The students enjoyed them and hopefully, we will be able to let our students watch more good Hollywood movies in the future.  And I am pretty sure that we will be able to because the school administration is very supportive. ...

The Inter-House Speech Declamation Competition was the third literary program conducted in my school this year. We had some larger-than-life personalities and like every year we had Adolf Hitler. As far as I can remember we have always had students declaiming Hitler in speech declamation competitions. Even as a student I remember many Hitlers winning the competition. Hitler would commence and end his speech with thunderous applause from the audience. As a student, I didn't understand his speech but I liked seeing Hitler in these competitions because he was the loudest (most of the time) and the most amusingly dressed character with his most queer mustache. My teachers never told me more about what he did and why he is remembered. The class twelve boy who took up the role this year presented an impressive performance. He did well but he did not win. A part of me found the joy that Hitler didn't win the competition but another part of me felt sorry for the boy who lost. It was...

It is a beautiful day. The sun is shining. The birds are chirping. The sun’s ray flicker on the leaves as they rustle in the gentle breeze that gushes softly from the river below. Inside the class, the fans swing their hands slicing the air like warriors in a heated battle. The fans’ rotating sound is disturbing. Other than the soft flipping of the pages, falling pencils and pens and a little cough here and there, nothing is heard in the room. A pin dropping on the floor can be heard. Naïve but stern faces over papers are a spectacle to observe as each individual face has a story to tell.   First, there are the ‘no-nothing’ faces that are the easiest to spot in the group. It is amusing to watch them as they sweat and scratch their heads as if doing that will make the answers fall out of their jammed heads. Their eyes linger in mid-air thinking about what they should write just for the sake of not leaving the answer scripts blank. But at the same time, it is painful to watc...

The Nature of Language was not studied in the old English curriculum. It came with the new and it came with a wide possibility of answers that can come from anywhere, as long as it concerned language albeit the syllabus, which I doubt I can call one. The teachers were given three pages of notes on theories of language acquisition, levels of analysis and other basic terms in linguistics. I received the notes from a colleague of mine who attended a workshop on teaching Nature of Language. The same thing was to be taught from class nine till twelve (as far as we have been informed). Students have to write answers to 10 points under this section in the exam. Since the questions (set by the teachers who are put together by BIG SEA) don't follow the specified notes, most students lose marks in this section. Few questions always surprise/confuse us. Students may lose only one or two points but they lose and sometimes they don't qualify for a RGoB scholarship because their English m...

I remember my language teacher and Shakespeare. He would try to impersonate a victorian theatrical scene with the Shakespearean English that he so stylishly uttered to our bewilderment. Most of us then were amazed by the strange poetic language heard for the first time and few were, of course, dumbstruck because the English was different and difficult. But the excitement only lasted for the first few periods. After that, it was only listening to the teacher, period after period. Even the most promising student slowly drifted away into daydreams. Thinking about it right now, a role play would have made the whole awesomeness more exciting or simply put, more durable and understandable. Today students don't have to study Shakespeare. Instead, they have one-act plays, 'Once Upon a Greek Stage' in class eleven and 'Episode in the Life of an Author' in twelve. Going by the teacher's guide, most teachers I know start with a role play. And how they, the students, e...

Today, one of my students asked me why did poets write poems in languages that were difficult for the students to understand. He said, "Why didn't the poet use simple/straight forward language?" It was a straight forward question and I tried my best to satisfy him with an answer. I told him to compare two sentences:   "I miss you"    "I miss you like the dry earth misses the fresh showers of spring. " I asked him which one did he like. He said that he liked the second sentence. I asked why and he said the second sentence was more beautiful and I asked him why again and he said because the second sentence was talking about spring.  Then I told him to close his eyes and listen to the second sentence when I read it. I asked him what pictures did he imagine when he heard the words. He told me that he saw the rain in the spring. I asked him what else did he see and he said, "flowers". I told him to imagine the rain on his face ...

I have always loved poetry. My all-time favorite is Ulysses by Tennyson. At the moment I am teaching 'We are Seven' by William Wordsworth and it is a joy to read it aloud with my students. Every word conjures pictures so vivid that I can't help but live the moments and sing the song. Before reading the poem, my students wrote their own poem on the title 'We are seven' and that was an overwhelming experience to draw the pictures with their words. Pictures of seven stars that wrote, pictures of seven friends they spoke, and pictures of the seven beautiful colors of the rainbow arched over snow-capped mountains and the wide-open sky did they draw. It is a beautify poem, 'We are Seven', the simplicity with which Wordsworth touches on the subtle pleasure of being innocent and living in ignorance of death and the bliss that follows. We Are Seven BY  WILLIAM WORDSWORTH ———A simple Child, That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every l...

In one of my classes, we were discussing commitment and bonding in the story, Bluffing, by the Canadian writer Gail Helgason. In the story, the two main characters come across a grizzly bear. They face it together but one runs aways and we were later discussing which character was more committed to their relationship. With this, there was brainstorming and sharing of understandings of bonding and commitment. One of my students wanted to share a story he heard. He didn't go into the details but said that a father and a son can kill a bear but not two friends. He said since there was a stronger bond and commitment between the father and the son, they would not abandon each other but the friends may only think about themselves and render themselves vulnerable to an attack. So, a father and son can kill a bear but not two friends. I never heard the story/saying before but I felt its message was very augmenting to the values that enrich our lives. I am very happy that I have stud...

Winter vacations are good times. They give me moments where my time is not controlled by the bell. A time to be with my family, a time to set aside time and forget it doing things I love doing. But in the middle of forgetting the time I can’t forget that I don't get to do the one thing that I love doing: being back in school, teaching. So, here are some good reasons why I want to be back in school. Reasons: 1. For the Attention I can never ignore the tremendous attention I get from my students when I am in the classroom. I never lose my audience. It is one of the best reasons why I want to go back. 2. For Feeling Useful When I am in the classroom I feel useful. I feel useful to my young friends and myself. Almost every day I go home with a feel of “time well spent”, every day I teach and I learn. 3. For More Laughter I also realized after much contemplation that I get to laugh more when I am with my students. They have never failed to appreciate m...