Holiday trip

We are off today to Lombok, Flores, and Komodo Island, gone until Jan. 11, in time for school. I will likely write to the blog fleetingly, and rarely check our email. My phone number is 628574306067 for those who might have reason to need to call us.

Ring Road

            There’s a new highway almost finished on the north end of Salatiga, a ring road that will enable the Semarang – Solo traffic to bypass Salatiga on a four lane highway. This should be a great thing for Salatiga traffic, because the road through town now is hilariously busy often with lines of buses and trucks at top speeds, something you notice when your main method of moving about is on foot, bicycle, or motorcycle. Those buses are big, and they’re all about the destination, not the journey.

            It passes fairly close to our house, and it’s been a great place to go for a bike ride. I went there with Graham on Sunday afternoon so he could so some extended skating on the new roller skates he got for his birthday, and I followed him around on my bicycle while he wore himself out.  The closer the road has gotten to completion, the more it has become a sort of city park, so that when you go there, you see all sorts of people, picnicking on the side of highway, young men lining up their motorcycles for spirited races on the straightaways, couples meandering along the fresh white stripes going down the road. All of this happens in spite of the busy road work going on, the buckets of burning tar, the men painting the curbs, the steamrollers and the back-hoes – you just go around them, whatever form of transport you use. It’s already smooth enough for local drivers to use it as a convenient bypass – it’s a city park with a lot of fast moving hazards transversing it, in other words.

By any standards, it’s a nice road, smooth, wide, free of obstacles and cross traffic, for the most part (though it will, I suspect, be a bear to cross when it opens), which means that by Javanese standards it’s something of a miracle. Travel in this country is amazing. We’re 37 kilometers from Semarang, but if you can get there in an hour you’re lucky. If you happen to travel there or back at any of the times when the shifts are out in the fabric factories (read: sweatshops) in Undangan, there’s not much to do but just watch as the young women crowd onto bus after bus, or stand waiting on the corner in large groups. Looking at the traffic from a bus, or as a new arrival, it’s easy to feel like there’s no logic to it, just a mass of undisciplined traffic, but now that I’ve spent some time on a motorcycle in this traffic (which still doesn’t count as fun, for the most part, except that it kind of is [unless I am riding with Laura on the back, who actively comments on the relentless hazards in utterances that usually take the form of various vowel sounds] – where was I? Oh…), now that I’ve spent some time on a motorcycle I get the logic of the roads, the horns typically a polite (sometimes very loud polite) signal that there is car or a motorcycle in a space you look like you might want to occupy but should not. There are motorcycles weaving everywhere, darting between buses and cars and trucks and other motorcycles. It’s mostly a two lane highway between here and Semarang, but with anywhere from 4-6 lanes of traffic.

So the ring road feels like something of a luxury, an extravagance, an enormously appealing place to go where you can move at top speed on whatever vehicle you are riding (lovely, for example, on the ride down a very long steep hill on a bicycle) because you never really move that fast in traffic here. It’s strange to bond with the community on the brand new ring road, but for the weeks that remain before it gets hit by actual traffic, it’s a gathering place, and an oddly pleasant way to spend an afternoon, with traffic that is all about the journey for the moment, back and forth, with no place to go.

Spelling reform

        In 1968, the Indonesian government spearheaded a reform of the spelling system, ostensibly to put it more in line with Malay. It made all sorts of orthographic sense - roemakoe (my house) became rumahku, the pronunciation remaining the same (roo - ma - koo); Djakarta became Jakarta. But, according to Benedict Anderson in his obituary of Suharto (Soeharto) in 2008, the spelling reform had a more sinister purpose: it meant that it would be immediately obvious to identify when something was written, and whether it was officially sanctioned or not. It was an aspect of the general policy of the Suharto government to control the interpretation and dissemination of historical knowledge, especially with the point of justifying his takeover from Sukarno in 1965, the central part of which involved the wholesale slaughter of anywhere from 1/2 million to 1 million people throughout Indonesia. Those people, supposedly, were connected to the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party, who were blamed for murdering six senior generals in attempted coup; to this day, the degree to which the Communist Party was involved in the murders remains unclear, though what is not unclear is that this was simply a pretext, and that the mass murder was the way in which Suharto created the conditions of fear and raw power that sustained his regime for 37 years until 1998.
         Every year, Suharto memorialized the dead generals with a giant ceremony at their giant statue and reminded everyone of the history, in which the bloodthirsty Communists, who the military under his command valiantly defeated but who were always ready to rise up again unless there was sustained vigilance, ended their threat to the sacred Indonesian nation. The Communists, until 1965 a major political power, were never a force again, but Suharto strictly controlled historical writing and did things like make school children watch a four hour movie every year on the anniversary of the killing of the generals, about the evils of the Communists (and their women, who supposedly castrated the dead bodies - that part apparently not in the movie - and then danced on the bodies - in the movie).
         The moral of the story: bad spellers are Communists, which I have allways suspicted inyway.

My self evaluation, Semester one

Is was surprised this semester when my students didn’t fill out evaluations for my teaching, when there was no platform for them to say anything about the class. I asked them about this, and I collected my own, informal evaluations, but it still puzzles me. And then, after the semester was over, I got evaluation forms as an email attachment, forms I was supposed to fill out, evaluating my classes and my performance. I’m reproducing them verbatim, in the order I wrote them. I’m putting them here because I feel compelled to put in a blog entry, and I am tired (it’s been a long week) and because I think these evaluations offer a pretty good sense of my teaching this semester. And I will say, I like the idea of having to submit a written self-evaluation at the end of every semester, though I suspect it a reform that would die a quick and irritated death if I suggested it to my colleagues in the United States:

 For Public Speaking:

1.     What went well in your class?

In general, the best activities were the ones designed to get students to speak more fully in class. The thing that went the best was to see students developing a sense of confidence about speaking, and to see them developing a sense of how to be a better audience. I was also impressed that they began to think more fully about how to appeal to their classmates, rather than simply thinking of their teacher as their only audience. For me, that was perhaps the most important aspect.

2.     What did not go well in your class?

It felt very rushed to me, with many speeches crowded on top of each other. I had a difficult time keeping up with the material we were supposed to cover, and on the speech days, sixteen straight speeches seemed to me too many in a row. I also found it difficult to know quite how to assess the speeches, and I don’t think that I did that fairly.

3.     What are possible factors which influence the lack of success of your class?

I have never taught public speaking before, and it has been 20 years since I have taught a curriculum that I didn’t write myself. I didn’t do a very good job keeping on schedule. I also thought that perhaps the students didn’t need to be learning so many different kinds of speeches, For example, I still cannot see quite the difference between a persuasive speech and an argumentative speech, and sometimes I found the formulas for the speeches slightly distracting as well, difficult to follow and teach. Mostly, I attribute the lack of success in my class (because I don’t think I taught this class very well) to my lack of experience teaching public speaking as a course, and teaching a group of students whose first language was not English. I loved my students, however, and I was pleased to see them speak more by the end of the semester.

4.     What do you think the possible strategies to improve the teaching and learning process in the future?

If I taught this course again, I would focus less on the types of speeches and more simply on getting students to speak about something. The speeches seemed pulled from a rhetorical tradition – my rhetorical tradition, I should add – that students were not wholly familiar with. I really wish I knew more about varieties of Indonesian rhetoric. What are the occasions that demand speaking and rhetorical activity in Indonesia? On Java? What are the cultural expectations surrounding things like argument and self-presentation? I didn’t understand that, and I think I’d start by exploring some of those issues with students. I think I’d get them out more observing and analyzing speeches. In all my classes, I struggled with what I was supposed to be teaching – is it the English language, or the topic? I always leaned toward the topic, but some of my students seemed to expect more direct language teaching.

For Critical Reading:

1.     What went well in your class?

I don’t know, to be honest. I hope that I helped students recognize strategies for becoming more engaged and active readers. I spent a lot of time trying to get them to step back from the mania around correctness and to develop a higher comfort level with uncertainly and mistakes, both in language and in comprehension.  For the students who were engaged and interested, I think this was useful.

2.     What did not go well in your class? What are possible factors which influence the lack of success of your class? (I’ve combined 2 and 3 because I kept answering them both.)

First, I found it difficult to teach using the material we were given to use. It may because I have not taught critical reading to a group of students who speak English as another language; in that combination there were many aspects that I found difficult.  But I found many of the materials, and the way they were presented, to be distracting from the work of critical reading I wanted my students to do. The test at the midterm did not go well, and I think demonstrates the difficulty of administering a common test for several separate classes. All of us have slightly different approaches and styles, which should be encouraged, I think, and I wish I had been able to plan my own curriculum, because I found myself doing this anyway, and I think my students suffered because of it (not, I should add, because my curriculum wasn’t a good one, but because it did not follow the sanctioned curriculum). I also talk too fast, even though I tried not to, and I had a difficult time getting students to speak in class, no matter what I did. I did, however, get better at that as the semester went on.

3.     What do you think the possible strategies to improve the teaching and learning process in the future?

I am a newcomer here, and I hesitate to sound like I am critical; I don’t know enough about how things work here to be comfortable offering suggestions for changes. I will say that as an experienced teacher with several years in basic literacy and teaching, I have a very different approach to teaching critical reading than the textbook uses. It could be that I am not experienced enough teaching this sort of group of students, and so less aware of what they need; to some degree this is certainly true. As a teacher, I wanted my students to read and engage, directly, with as many kinds of texts as I could find – I wanted them to raise questions, get confused, make guesses, struggle, find personal and emotional connections, and reflect upon all that. I have a very difficult time teaching reading as a set of separate activities – this week, drawing inferences; next week, drawing conclusions; and so forth. Instead, I want to get students engaged in the process of being active readers who are bringing their own ideas and backgrounds to bear on the reading of a text. I tried to do this, but it didn’t work very well, because I felt too much conflict with the other material, which I also didn’t teach very well. To be honest, I found this experience to be extremely interesting and provocative, for me, but I don’t think it was very helpful for most of the students, and I regret that a little. I really think that there should be other methods of evaluation besides a common test; I don’t see how that can be a productive way to assess more than 200 students at once.

For Academic writing:

1.     What went well in your class?

I think that several of my students surprised themselves with the process they experience and the writing that they did. I also think that several of my students actually enjoyed the process of discovery they went through when they wrote their papers. For me, what went the best was watching students draft and revise and rethink their paper. I enjoyed that a great deal, and I think my students learned, at least at times, that to be successful writers they had to begin with something that interested them first.

2.     What did not go well in your class? What are possible factors which influence the lack of success of your class?

I hate sounding like a broken record - this is the third evaluation I have written – but I just cannot teach with a curriculum someone else has prepared for me, especially in a topic that I have been teaching for 20 years, and that has been at the center of my pedagogical and scholarly work. I should not have followed the text, or the rhythm of the class as it was pre-ordained, at all, and if I had it over to do again I would not. More than anything else, my students needed an occasion to engage as writers, to discover a topic and a idea that excited them, and to use writing as a way of doing that. Some of them did this, but a good number of them came up with topics that were bland from the beginning, and that they were clearly not interested in at all. (I am still confused at how many students chose to write about methods of teaching English vocabulary – most of whom expressed no interest in becoming teachers.)  I also was surprised at the expectation students had that I would correct every error in their papers, which I did not. In some ways, more than any other class, I wish I had this one to teach over again, because I think that I could have had a lot more fun, and that my students would have gotten a lot more out of it.  There are a several ideas about teaching writing in the academic writing textbook that I simply disagree with – outlining, structuring the writing before you know enough about what you want to say, worrying too early about the structure of paragraphs and the right ways to organize. If students want to write well in English, they have to approach the task as writers, not as grammarians or template fillers. I think the over-focus on organization and correctness from the beginning of the course is a great detriment. Also, my students had absolutely no idea about how to use the databases available through Satya Wacana, and they are too late into their academic career to not know how to use those.

                  Also, I discovered on the first day that the classroom where I was supposed to teach, the bright sunny one with the modern computers, was occupied with another academic writing course, and I was moved to a dark and noisy classroom with classrooms that were impossibly slow and that made the computer classroom a nuisance instead of a benefit. I could not hear my students unless I turned off the air-conditioning, which made it unbearably hot. I could not teach in that classroom, so after about five weeks I had to request a new classroom, even though access to fast and reliable computers would have been very useful throughout the semester. 

3.     What do you think the possible strategies to improve the teaching and learning process in the future?

First, their needs to be some direct and open-ended instruction on using the databases for research. Students need time to play around and explore in them and to learn how to use them, and they need this early on in their life as students – I would recommend it in their very first year, in some structured and not too challenging way. Without such instruction, students will do what students all over the world (in my sudden global experience) do, which is “google it” for research. My students, in this course, treated Google as the fount of all knowledge, the tree of life, the peak of wisdom (I’ll stop mixing my metaphors). They couldn’t Google enough; and I was surprised to learn that there is no one at the library who will take the time to sit down with them and teach them how to do use the databases. I should have done what Ibu Heny did, and brought in the librarian she recommended. But this is an issue, I think, that should be addressed well in advance of their time in academic writing.

                  As before, I think the pre-ordained curriculum might be useful, and necessary, for a new teacher, but for teachers with experience and creativity, such curricula are a distraction.  If I had to do everything over again, I would have ignored it all together, right from the beginning, and structured the course according to the ways I have structured my writing courses for years. I am not saying that the curriculum used at UKSW is a poor one; it is simply not the way I teach writing. I will say that some of the ideas in the textbook, from the point of view of someone trained in writing pedagogy in the United States, seem considerably out of date and in some cases counter-productive to helping students learn how to write. But I understand that I am in different context here, and that there is more here that I don’t understand than I do.

                 

Today in the Jakarta Post

            On the first five pages of the English language daily Jakarta Post for Friday, December 10, there are 10 stories about corruption of one sort or another, not including the picture of protesters in front of the Headquarters of the Corruption Eradication Commission. (In the photograph, one protestor is wearing a wig mocking Gayus Tambunan, a tax official on trial for graft who was caught on camera, wearing the same wig, at a professional tennis tournament in Bali – he had been bribing the warden of the prison, and the guard, to get out of prison every weekend, bribing them with the remnants of the money he had skimmed off as a tax official. The judge who acquitted Gayus in his first trial, after Gayus bribed him with $40,000, is the subject of the story on page 2: Corrupt judge gets light 2-year sentence.) Everyone is on the take in this country, and every day in the Post is like this, story after story: Crowd demand mayor to resign (in Medan, said mayor having been named by the prosecutor in North Sumatra for embezzling $165,000); Court sentences for officials to a year for skimming money off the top of the family planning program in Central Sumatra); Anticorruption rally ends in chaos, where students in Makassar, in South Sulawesi, threw Molotov cocktails at the police as part of countrywide protests against corruption, and clashed in other parts of Indonesia. Corruption is endemic here, at any level, from the slight $5 bribe you add on to your driver’s license fee to avoid having to take the test, to the exorbitant, such as Gayus’s bribes using embezzled money. It’s how things are done in Indonesia, and it’s excruciating to see how damaging it is to a fledging democracy.

            There are two stories about Indonesia and the Nobel Peace Prize. It was, apparently, extremely important that the Indonesian Ambassador to Norway be recalled to Indonesia so that he could attend the Bali Democracy Forum meeting held at the same time as the ceremony in Oslo (an irony not lost on the attendees at the Bali Democracy Forum, who noted how odd it was for the Indonesian government to flee from a ceremony honoring a persecuted Chinese democratic activist to go to a forum on democracy). Indonesia joins a panoply of other countries apparently strong-armed by China into not attending. They are not strangers to this sort of thing, as one of the articles points out, having organized a boycott by Southeast Asian countries of the 1996 Nobel ceremony, honoring peace activists in Indonesia’s bloody conquest of East Timor (one of whom is now president of the now independent Timor Leste).

            There is a story about the brother of the Sultan of Yogyakarta, the cultural center of Java, who resigned from the democratic party. The Sultan of Yogyakarta is appointed to the governorship of the province, the only appointed governorship in Indonesia, as a reward for the Sultan having allied with revolutionary soldiers during the Indonesian Revolution (1945-1950). The President of Indonesia wants to revoke that status now, because it is undemocratic, to the great consternation of, it would seem, most of Yogyakarta, and of course to the Sultan’s brother. (The Sultan himself has suggested that he will bow to the will of the people.)

            In financial news, the price of rubber is at an all-time high and Islamic bonds are a good investment (I have no idea what this means, but you can buy “Sharia-compliant notes” – I hope somebody in Oklahoma is making sure to ban these investments).

            That’s today in the Jakarta Post. 

Update: Indonesia, bless their fledging democratic souls, decided to send an envoy to the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony. I suspect it was the embarrassment of my publicizing the slight to the 32 followers of our blog that tipped the balance. Pak Kirk, Global Democracy Crusader.

Reflections on the Ordinary

Now that the shock of living in Indonesia has subsided somewhat, the kids have gotten used to their school, and we refer to rumah besar (the big house) as home, life in Salatiga is not really all that different from life in the United States. We get the kids to school, make a second cup of coffee, throw in a load of laundry, run out of milk, catch up on correspondence, volunteer in the classroom, visit with friends, look for lost soccer gear, fight over homework, get dinner on the table, and maybe try to sneak in a run before the day's out. That said, life is, for all practical purposes, absolutely nothing like life in the Unite States.

For starters, Ibu Kasum shows up every morning at 8:00 sharp. From then until about 2:00 pm, she cleans the house, hangs out the laundry, mops the floors, cooks and delivers the kids lunch to school, and makes dinner for the family. For this I pay her the grand sum of $50 per month. Oddly, this does not leave me with infinite time on my hands. Before we left, Brent, a returning Fulbright who had just spent a year in Bali advised, "Whatever it is you want to accomplish in a day, cut it in half." He wasn't far off.

Take the laundry for instance. The semi-automatic washer we purchased requires that you drain the clothes after washing them on one side, and put them into another tub for rinsing and spinning. Only that tub is about a quarter the size of the first, so you have to do it four times, although it still beats the alternative which is washing everything by hand. Then the laundry is put out on the line, either by myself or by Ibu Kasum, for as long as the rain hold out. When the rain starts, you go flying like mad to collect it all, hope that at least some of it is dry, and drape the rest over every available chair and railing in the house until the next day when you do it all over again.

Or shopping. Ibu Kasum does most of the shopping but I still need to pick up odds and ends that the kids go through quickly or that she doesn't come across. Indonesian food stores come in three varieties: the tiny warungs, the toko, and the American style supermarket. The latter can be found only in the big cities and while they boast bright lights, huge inventories, and roller-skating sales clerks, offer only more versions of the same heavily processed, sugar and msg laden prepared foods that the small and medium stores in Salatiga offer -- mostly processed milk products, dried noodles, and rows upon rows of cookies and sweets. The Javanese have a serious sweet tooth. Seamus is in heaven.

The only place to buy 'real' food is in the pasar, the traditional market of which there are two in Salatiga. I am still honing my shopping chops as very little English is spoken outside of the ex-pat and university communities. While it is fun to wander the stalls and admire the incredibly array of goods, it is super time consuming. One very funny, and still somewhat confusing aspect of the Indonesian markets is that all the same type of goods are sold in one area. There will be a full row of fresh flower ladies, then a row of fruit sellers, then a row of people selling dried fish. They all sell exactly the same merchandise, displayed in exactly the same manner. Then of course there are the banana sellers who are a block up, I still have not figured out why they aren't with the fruit ladies. The vegetables are found on the second floor, stairs are around the corner past the row of quail's egg ladies, and across from the tofu/tempe stands. Its all very charming but it means you can put some serious miles on before you have purchased what you need for a single meal. And then lug it home on the bus.

Many of the ex-pats who we have met have been here for long periods of time so they are more invested in re-creating western foods that we 'short-timers'. The upside of this is there is a good network of people who know where to buy bacon, cheese, hamburger buns, canned tomatoes, oatmeal, and other goods that make a homesick 10 year old feel a little less, well, homesick. But it does require more running around.

I do seem to be getting the hang of it though. The other day I got my hair cut, bought fruit, veges, and bread all in the same day. I no longer panic when the fruit lady shouts out a number at me. I don't always know what she is saying, and depending on my mood, will not always barter with her, but at least I don't panic. I find it a little unsettling to argue over whether a kilo of the lovely, sweet, fresh mangoes that would cost me $5 in the States should cost me 90 cents or 75. But I am generally able to pay without causing a scene and audible laughter no longer follows me wherever I go. It is odd the things you take for granted. I don't miss my American routines necessarily, and I am enjoying the experience of the other, but there will be a quiet joy in that first visit to my familiar grocery store, and maybe a tiny sigh of relief.

Substitute teachers

 The day we visited the Merapi area, we delivered supplies to two school that had pupils from refugee families, delivering the bags to the appropriate children. At the second school we visited, all the faculty came out, and they brought us tea (this is not remarkable – tea simply appears) and made us comfortable and brought the kids out in small groups. We gave them the packages one by one in a sort of awkward procession (for me) – they would shake our hands and thank us and take the supplies. “Terima Kasih” “Sama-sama” again and again. We sort of dispersed after a while, Laura inside talking to someone while the kids were who knows where and I was in the parking lot, squatting so I could look kids in the face, shaking hands, saying “sama-sama” again and again. Only after I it had been happening for a few minutes did I register the howls of laughter coming from a classroom just behind me.

As soon as I finished passing out bags I darted into the school, because I have learned that most of the time the loud peals coming when I am around have something to do with my kids. Sure enough, in front of the noisy classroom were Seamus and Graham giving an impromptu English class to a group of 7^th graders while their teachers were at first distracted and then delighted. Graham would write things on the board like “Saya suka ayam goreng” and then when a girl (all girls in this class) would say “I like fried chicken” he marched to the back of the class and gave her the whiteboard marker and insisted that they come forward to write their sentence on the board. This occasioned great squeals and much embarrassment, and it was truly hilarious.

I’ve included a full text of Seamus’s English lesson below. 

(Bule is the Indonesian gringo.)
Saya suka bule ini.
I like this bule.
Bule ini keron sekali.
This bule is really cool.
(Kesukaan) saya bule adalah Seamus.
My favorite bule is Seamus.

 

Learning New Vocabularies

December 3, 2010

Several of my students use a phrasing in their papers that I marked, at least in my own head, as an error when I read it. When they write about methods of teaching vocabulary, which for some reason that I cannot yet explain is a very popular topic for my students to write about in the academic writing course, they often write “learning new vocabularies” by which they mean “learning new vocabulary words.” I explained this to one of my students one day in a conference, helpfully pointing out the distinction. Not a major issue, to be sure, but something worth mentioning in the pedagogical small talk of a teacher-student conversation.

So I was a little surprised last week, when I attended an English language conference at my university, to see the word “vocabularies” used in a presentation abstract, to mean “vocabulary words.” I suddenly wondered if there could be a way that “vocabularies” was actually proper, in Indonesian English, the way not having an article in front of “hospital” is proper in British English, and whether there could be something called Indonesian English which has its own rules (the linguist in me says of course there can).

This is a simple observation, but it raises profound questions about the ownership of a language, about the meaning of “error,” and about who gets to claim the right to enforce correctness in a language. It suggests that the process of linguistic colonization underway with English is, like the process of colonization itself, not wholly under the control of the colonizers.  It challenges English language instructors to focus on languages as on-going acts of human creation rather than languages as artifacts to be preserved by people like me, Pak Kirk, Global English Archivist. At some point, and I think that point might already be here, I don’t get to tell the students learning “my” language that, to borrow a phrasing from another student paper, the way they speaking it wrong.

Teaching the English Language is a Useless Activity

December 1, 2010

            Our Saturday trip to the refugee camps began with a visit to a middle school near Merapi, where several children from refugee camps were attending classes. Ibu Maria had arranged two workshops with teachers from the area, one for math teachers and one for English teachers. I’d gladly agreed to do it – though I think I had been confirmed before I found out about it – because I have been wanting to meet and talk about teaching in Indonesia with some practicing teachers, and Ibu Maria wanted to know if I had handouts or a Power Point presentation for my teachers (I am convinced that Power Point has colonized global ways of knowledge, but that’s for a different posting). I told her I wasn’t going to prepare anything, because I didn’t know anything about teaching in Indonesia and I had to meet the teachers first before I knew what I would say to them. I’m never sure if this is actually just laziness on my part, or some sort of wise behavior, but I do know that if I had prepared some sort of activity – Language Games! – I would have blown my learning opportunity.

            We met first in a large room, where there was a small ceremony. “ It’s culture,” Ibu Maria said. (Ibu Maria says “it’s culture” about everything, usually involving some nice thing that she or her husband are doing for our family and which we are unable to stop them from doing even with our extensive protestations.) “It’s culture” to have a little ritual before we start the workshop, and all the dignitaries in the room had to say a little something. I didn’t understand everything, but Ibu Maria warned me (though only just as the ceremony was beginning) that I would have to speak too, and that she would translate for me.  I said a few things, including what I reported on in the last entry, and about how excited I was to meet teachers, etc. etc. I must have been a little flustered, though, because when I was finished one of the people asked me what my name was.

            After the ceremony, I went with the five middle school English teachers, joined later by a sixth, to a classroom in the middle school. We arranged the desks in a small circle, and I told them candidly that I had nothing prepared, that I didn’t know enough about them to know what to say, and that I hoped they didn’t mind if we just had a conversation. They didn’t say that they did, but I suspect a little that they did mind, in fact, because I think they were expecting some kind of wisdom about teaching from me.

            They introduced themselves one by one.

            C, the first teacher, had been teaching for five years, and one of the first things he said was: “I think sometimes that teaching the English language is a useless activity.” His problem, it turned out, was not that teaching was a waste of time, but that the government of Indonesia required all teachers, in all schools, to teach the same material at the same level as a way of preparing students to take the same test at the end of the year. If they failed that test, they had a second chance, and if they failed that second test, they had to repeat the class. It was, I quickly learned, a multiple choice test. (Note my earlier complaint in an earlier entry that I had to teach a common examination with five other classes in my department, and that I found – find – it stifling to my ability to teach the students in my class.) Failure on that test by the students is, of course, failure by the teachers. This is a global narrative for teachers, told in a particularly stark way here.

            Bear in mind that Indonesia has 17,000 islands, though only 922 of them are permanently occupied. There are more than 700 languages actually spoken on the archipelago, Indonesian being the official language of the country but the second language of almost all Indonesians. There is a staggering and very visible class divide here, the gap between wealthy and poor something difficult to describe, even from an American perspective. The 2000 census of Indonesia lists 206 million people. And every single Indonesian eighth-grader on all of these islands speaking all of these languages from all of these backgrounds learns the same curriculum in preparation for the same test. It makes the deep concerns I have about official standards for teachers in the United States appear paltry, by comparison.

            The second teacher, his partner, has been teaching for six months. I asked her what surprised her the most about her job since she started teaching. “It’s really hard,” she said. “I didn’t realize how hard it was to work with so many students.” Another teacher, an older man who had been teaching for 24 years, said that he though he had to teach things that students weren’t learning from.  A young man who had been teaching for three years fretted about the motivation of his students. “I thought they would like to play games,” he said, “but they do not.” And all of them expressed clear frustrations with the government curriculum.

            I have not yet seen the curriculum, though I have one on its way from Ibu Maria. It includes, as it was described to me by these teachers, narrative, descriptive, and procedural texts. It emphasizes reading, writing, listening, and speaking (but the test that measures all this is multiple choice and scored anonymously). The teachers described similar problems as they went around the room: students don’t care about the readings, students aren’t excited by the language, teachers have to teach materials they don’t think help students actually learn the language, they have to teach so that students will pass a multiple test even though the curriculum states other priorities. And they all had 40-47 students per class.

            I wanted to know, as we spoke, how they handled this, focusing on things they did, that worked, even though they weren’t in the curriculum, and then goals that were in the curriculum which they could agree with. About the first, the most common response was finding new texts. “My students don’t want to read Javanese legends,” one person told me. “They’re bored by them.” So he finds fairy tales, which they like better, unfamiliar stories. They go outside; they have a dance with songs in English; and so forth.

            About the goals in the curriculum that they could agree with, I got an immediate and angry response from C. “You shouldn’t ask us to agree with anything the government wants us to do.  They have done nothing for the people in Merapi. They are doing nothing. We will not find anything they ask us to do worth doing.”

            It was an amazing 90 minutes with those teachers. I have no idea if I offered them anything, though I can say that they taught me a great deal, and I am hoping they will follow through on the invitations they promised me to visit their classes; I want to speak to them again. We talked about what they did as teachers to subvert the curriculum, and how to think about teaching with that in mind. I told them that I had a version of this conversation with teachers I worked with in the United States, who face similar pressures from official standard setters who seem to target most of all the professional knowledge that teachers bring to the classroom.  After that we took pictures for several minutes, part of the after-ceremony, I think, in situations like this.

            Because of my academic field, I have been aware for some time of the research and scholarship that deal with English as global language, but my interest has been, I must say, rather secondary – I have kept vaguely up with the writing out of a kind of professional responsibility. But now I am a teacher of English to groups of Indonesians and living in a country and part of the world where English instruction is omnipresent; signs hang outside houses all over Salatiga, offering English classes.  I am part of the project of global English, in a direct way, and to be in that position is to force countless questions about the politics of the project, ones I know I will write more about because they are becoming one of the primary issues I am thinking about. Talking to these teachers put the issue squarely inside the rural classrooms of Central Java, where the global force of English as a world language is felt by resistant and already multilingual students and their frustrated teachers.  Who drives this learning? Who decides to what ends it is used? Who decides what are the “best” methods (the phrase I hate the most to describe teaching: “best practices”)? And what place do teachers have in any of this?  It’s mind-spinning and in the vortex of national aspirations and global economics and the ambitions of people everywhere to speak so they will be heard, in some way.  Pak Kirk: Global English Teacher. A life of adventure and antonyms.