A student who helped usher us through the hullaballoo and confusion of arrival smiled politely at me, before the semester started, when I told her I was determined to have a discussion-based class, and told me I would have a difficult time doing it in Indonesia. “Students don’t want to talk in Indonesia. They are very reluctant to participate.” It is not as if my students are competing for the floor in my classes in the United States, so I didn’t let her prediction concern me too much. I told her it didn’t really matter, that I wasn’t really able to teach in another way, and that my students were out of luck if they hoped for me to just pop in and lecture. “I didn’t travel to Indonesia to hear myself talk,” which might not be true given that I have also started writing a blog.
So I was slightly prepared in my first week of classes when my students really didn’t want to speak at all. It made quite a bit of sense to me actually. I’m not a small person, and I am very white, and very American, and I speak loudly, and I learned later very quickly, and I was sweating profusely, the way someone who lives in Montana sweats when he moves to the tropics and then is a little amped up on coffee and nervous energy and has ridden his bicycle in busy traffic to a stuffy room on a sunny day. I think I might have looked somewhat alarming, and perhaps they thought I would pass out, and hurt one of them in the process. So their silence, in that first day in my critical reading class, was not terribly hard to understand.
After my first week, teaching my two other classes that were likewise perspiry and quiet, I of course asked my students what was going on. I intentionally had them do a very simple free-write in my critical reading course, something along the lines of “what was a word that you saw in the reading last week, and why did you see it?” My plan was then to ask for someone to tell me the one thing that they wrote down, in the knowledge that everyone in the room would have that one thing written down and they would certainly read it for me off their paper. When they did not, no matter how politely I phrased the question, I said, “Listen, you need to tell me why no one is speaking,” a question which, somewhat more predictably, got no response.
I am a patient person in the classroom, however, and determined, and I waited, until Severine nervously raised her hand and said, “you do speak a little fast, sir.” (There appears to be nothing I can do to not be addressed as ‘sir’ several times a day.) This was a breakthrough moment, because of course while it might occur to most thoughtful people to speak slowly to a group of non-native speakers in a classroom where learning to read in English is a central focus, I had not considered the possibility.
Now
I
speak
more
like
this.
(Really. I picture my words leaving my mouth in a sort of vertical descent, rather than horizontally, at least when I am concentrating on speaking slowly enough and with the right sort of not-patronizing-but-not-obfuscatory English language.)
After that, the students started speaking, no torrent, certainly, but a small spring of discourse that cheered me no end. I learned all sorts of interesting things that first week, when variations of this discussion occurred in all of my classes. I learned, for example, that Indonesian students are conditioned to extreme deference toward the teacher, and that this included a rather deep anxiety, magnified by my being an American teacher who couldn’t speak any Indonesian at that point, of making mistakes in English pronunciation and grammar. In my writing class, I learned that this regularly translates into a paper that is full of marks of grammatical errors, and that one of the points of many of their English classes appears to be learning that they are not native speakers of the language and thus make errors in pronunciation every time they speak and in grammar every time they write. (I comforted them by showing them some research done on multi-national speakers of other languages who communicate in English for business and other transactions, situations in which, quite literally, error does not exist, because no one is marking it, everyone is focused on making sense, and the goal is understanding one another. There’s a lot of miscommunication, and a lot of round-about face-saving discussion to help discover the actual gist of the conversation, but no error, because error only exists in language, I told them, when someone is looking for it. I’m not much of an error-seeker, but their other teachers are, and my lack of attention to error worries them a little.) Essentially, they learn quite a bit about how poorly they speak and write the English language, at least as they told about their classes. They have a sympathetic ear in me, to be sure, because the thing I know better than I have known anything else in my life, and the lesson that is reaffirmed to me anytime I am within earshot of Indonesian language, is that I speak and listen to Indonesian very poorly.
I was instructed by students in my public speaking class to do something that I have never liked to do as a teacher, which is to ask a question and then call randomly on students to answer it. I’ve always found this to be a failing strategy in my classrooms in the United States. It kind of irritates my students there, like I am somehow over-stepping my bounds. But in my classrooms here it actually relieves the mounting pressure. All teachers are familiar with the ways silence in the classroom creates tension, and one of the secrets, of course, of getting students to speak is to let them become more nervous by the silence than it makes you (a very hard thing to do, as any new teacher will tell you). But in Indonesia, it’s comically extended, and my students here are actually capable of out-waiting me, of not responding to the most basic questions so resolutely that I give up. (I now preface my solicitations from students with the phrase “I know I am not supposed to ask questions like this, but does anyone have any comment about….?”) Almost always, though, when I call on them randomly (“Agam, what do you think?”), my students have an answer ready, usually a pretty good one, and they seem perfectly happy to tell it, and even sort of glad sometimes when I asked.
I was doing this in my writing course during the second week of the semester, making my students read things they had written during their freewrite (another violation of my teaching code, but if I didn’t do this I tell you nothing would happen, and then I would have to listen to myself talk, which I am perhaps protesting too much about not enjoying). “Does this bother you, to just ask you like this?” I asked one of them, as I was going around. “Oh no,” she replied.
“We are used to it. In Indonesia, the teacher is the ruling class.”
“We are used to it. In Indonesia, the teacher is the ruling class.”
In a place like Indonesia, a carnival of post-colonialism, that comment continues to resonate with me. There are ruling classes everywhere, of course (tax cuts for the top 2% anyone?), but for most of Indonesia’s history, the entire point of everything that happened was (at least from the Dutch and then Japanese perspective) justifying and increasing the visibility of the ruling class. Two rather long-lived and slightly unhinged president/dictators powerfully and often quite brutally dominated their “independence” up until the end of the 20th century. Indonesia is no slouch at colonial power itself, having fought a long and failed war in East Timor and struggling still in places like Papua and northern Sumatra with pesky freedom fighters/unpatriotic insurgents. To mention, in such a delightfully offhand way, that “the teacher is the ruling class,” well, there is something almost resistant about its comfortable transparency. The teacher is not the ruling class here in the way that if you assign something, the students will go and do it – not even close, actually, sometimes to my great frustration. Here, the teacher is the ruling class in the sense that no one wants to tell the teacher that what he is saying doesn’t make sense, or that he might be talking too fast, or that they don’t like the assignment, or that they don’t know why you’re asking them to do this assignment in the first place, or that they didn’t think the test was fair. The teacher is the ruling class in the sense that the teacher’s presence engenders not cooperation, but complicity and silence. I’m still learning how to cope with this, and I am certainly going to write more about it, but I am finding it one of the most fascinating aspects of learning to teach in this new place.
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