Day two of the workshop today – really day one – at the
Islamic Boarding School, Pesantran Adduqayya, outside of Sumenep in Guluk-Guluk
on Madura. Yesterday, our 7 AM ride arrived at 8:00 for the 20 minute drive
that took 35 minutes to get to the 8:00 ceremony that actually began at 9. My
friend Umi gets very frustrated when the schedule falls apart like this, which
is funny, because it seems so very Indonesian to me and so doesn’t bother me.
The boarding school is quite a ways out of Sumenep, through
a bunch of tobacco and corn farms, and it’s fairly large – about 5,000 students
from kindergarten through first grade. When we arrived yesterday morning, the
room was already full with students – boys in the front and girls in the back,
separated by about six feet of empty space. It’s just as likely that they were
happy to be there because it’s the only time that boys and girls at the school
are allowed in the same space as that I was there, but that’s alright.
They had a big banner hanging behind me with my name printed
on it just below a picture of the loudspeaker on a minaret of a mosque, and
another one hanging above the road into the school. There was a table at the
front of the room with about five chairs, only two of which were ever occupied,
and
1.
Opening
2.
Reciting of the Koran
3.
Some words
4.
Closing of the opening ceremony
Fortunately it turned out not be the whole Koran, and it
only took about 30 minutes, with a few speeches (my host again reiterated to
them that the placement of the predicate in Indonesian was different from
English, perhaps hoping I would get the hint and launch into a discourse about
the predicate), and then they handed it over to me.
Someone – I think perhaps Umi – had optimistically named the
two hour session (cut because of the late arrival to 90 minutes) with 100
students in it “How to be a Better Writer” – which seemed a tall order to me,
and I told them so. True to old form upon my arrival in Indonesia years ago, I
was a little nervous and speaking too quickly, but I slowed down. The room was
hot, seriously hot, like they had just cleared out the boarding school steam
bath because it was the only space large enough, and I am certain that I
alarmed the people at the school, because halfway through a bunch of students
came running in with fans and pointed them all at me and turned them on, which
was a huge relief, though by that time my shirt was sticking to my body. “I
thought you had spilled water on yourself,” one of the teachers told me to
today. How dignified. The fans did work, though, and I did not actually pass
out in front of them.
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I really hadn’t prepared much for this session, since Umi
told me it would be a question and answer session, but it wasn’t quite that,
and so I had them do a few writing exercises – something about the difficulties
of learning English and something about a scary experience (one of them, I
think, had a grandmother who was a witch, and someone else told about the ghost
that killed his neighbor) – which I used to emphasize that if they want to be
better writers than what they need to do was to write more. As always, the
giant concern is grammar and grammar and structure and grammar and vocabularies
(my old favorite Indonesian-English word). They read their writing with
microphones (one for the boys and one for the girls) and the noise of the blasts of air into the mike combined with the learning-English accents made it a sort of challenge for me to understand a lo of what they said. I can’t vouch that it was a vast success, but at the end I took about 20 pictures with different school English clubs (one club only had one student in it apparently).Most students I asked said they enjoyed it
(this is actually not true: what they said was “yes” when I asked them if they
enjoyed it), though one young woman whose notebook I had just signed (one of
several) replied “I didn’t understand it.” It’s a very humbling hobby, this,
though perhaps she was just distracted by my wet shirt.
Then we went to lunch – I had rindang, my favorite
Indonesian beef dish, for the second day in a row - and to the Kraton of
Sumenep. (A Kraton is like a regional palace from when there was a king of
Sumenep, which changed into a local colonial authority – a bupati – under the
Dutch.) It was the dustiest Kraton I have ever visited, but nice, anyway. There
was a pool there where you could drink water for good luck, different kinds of
luck depending on the staircase you went down, and some locals were there
sipping from the pool in hopes of virility or a better job. I told Umi that she
should drink it first, and I’d come back in two days if she was still alive.
The fish swimming around in it were giant. Our last stop was a beautiful beach
– Pantai Slopeng – where I went swimming and watched the fishing boats heading
out. It was completely deserted, though there was a lone fisherman in the water
down the beach, and a coconut vendor outside the gate, who hacked open our
coconuts for us neatly with a rusty machete.
Today, really, the workshop we’d gotten the grant for began,
and it went well. We opened with a session where I asked them to interview a
partner and then introduce their partner to the group. I got Pak Hazmi, who has
been teaching English at the school for 3-4 years and before that was a local
member of parliament and before that studied Islamic law in Yogyakarta. He
loves Metallica, which he uses in his English lessons.
In the second session, I asked them to start by writing in
response to the question “How do you use writing in your classes?” which threw
them off a little bit, understandably. “What do you mean, use?” one teacher
asked. “Just write about how you teach writing,” I said, but the more I thought
about it, the more interesting the difference between “use” and “teach” became
for me, and the distinction sort of became a miniature theme of the day. When
they talked about writing in their classes, the conversations were all about
teaching a variety of specificities with writing: one used writing primarily to
teach tenses, another used writing to teach the various forms (which it turns
out are different from and yet exactly the same as various forms of writing
everywhere, and like everywhere, there are only four of them), and so forth.
Teaching writing always came weighed down with all sorts of other jobs attached
to it, and most of them were the especially boring jobs that no one wanted to
do anyway. “Let me ask you a question,” I said after that conversation. “Do
your students like writing?” They did not, the teachers told me, not
surprisingly, because when they wrote they learned about all the mistakes they
were making in the past tense or about how they didn’t know how to structure an
opinion piece or about how they had a limited vocabulary.
I lost about 4 men after that session (one of whom told me
that he didn’t waste time in class having students speak in English because
they would never have to use English in speaking anyway), but the rest of them,
and all the women, hung in there. And we
had a good day, and I got them to think about the work that writing could do
for them as a teacher, the way it could help them learn about their students,
engage them with each other directly, focus the learning away from the teacher,
and teach them how to be more careful and focused readers and listeners. All
that, and without ever having to tell their students that it is happening, they
will become better writers anyway. What if, I asked them, you thought about
writing not in terms of how it could make your students better writers, but how
it could make you a more effective teachers, and then your students became
better writers anyway?
We did a lot of other stuff today, but that was the most
interesting and the most fun. At lunch one of the teachers insisted that Umi
and I come to her house, which we got to by meandering through the grounds of
the pesantran, which is really just a sort of village filled with children
instead of families. She made us sit for ten minutes in her sitting room and
brought in about 15 different kinds of snacks in round plastic containers and
some delicious fresh melon juice with chunks of melon in it, and then we
followed her back a new way, through the girls part of the school. When the
girls saw us coming, they stood with their back to the wall and looked down at
their feet, which the teacher told us they did out of respect. Umi had never
seen students do this before, so it’s not an Indonesian habit, which would have
surprised me anyway. I made a point of saying “Selamat siang” (good afternoon,
more or less) to every group of head down girls we walked by.
It’s such a devout place here. The girls are kept strictly
separate from the boys, and wearing full hijab from a very young age. The women
are not allowed to teach the boys, and the men can teach the girls only after
the men have married. “Do you think that makes a difference, Kirk?” Umi asked
me, and I said that yes, married teachers in the United States and especially
married men teachers never ever ever became romantically involved with their
students, because they were married. Umi, whose husband is an Imam in East
Java, thinks it’s all a bit over the top. “It’s not fair to the women,” Umi
told the teacher who is escorting us during this visit. “It is only part of the
religion and the culture,” he said. “We do not believe in treating women and
girls differently, and we give them all equal opportunities.”
On the other hand, the women in the workshop, all of them of
course in full hijab too, were the most active, energetic, funny, and engaged –
not one was late after the breaks (almost all the men were, every time). They
were open-minded and creative. Almost everyone there is from Madura, and most
even from that same village, and it made me think it must take a particular
kind of drive and personality to push yourself into a career as a teacher, or
probably in any job in Madura, as a woman, and to succeed at it. They are an
impressive group, I must say.
Driving back, through air thick with the smell of burning everything,
past crowded warungs and blasting mosques and motorcycles with families of four
on them and trucks stacked three times higher than the top of the truck with
dried tobacco, on one lane roads that somehow accommodated two cars and a
motorcycle, and sometimes a truck too, I was glad to be back. I can’t figure
out why I like it here so much, but I do. Tomorrow, day two of the workshop…
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