Ibu Umi and the badang merah

Another transport day today, from Jember flying to Surabaya, and from Surabaya to Semarang – and then a taxi up the mountain to Salatiga, and back to Colin and Retno’s house. Which means I had to say goodbye this morning to Egypt and Meka, Umi’s two sons, and to Pak Alvian, Umi’s husband. I said goodbye to Umi too, though I will see her again in Salatiga next week. But I am sad and full of joy at the same time.

I met Umi the first time in March of 2011, when I was invited to attend the Asian English Language Teachers Creative Writing Conference. I’d heard about it the first time when one of the founders – and now one of my friends, an English professor from Malaysia – spoke about it at a conference in Salatiga.  He said that it was based on the idea that teachers of writing in English should be writers too, and that teachers are able to better create their own materials for their students than any textbook could create – especially the readings. The heart of the Conference is a three day workshop, which I did in Jember in 2011, in Birgunj, Nepal, in 2013, and now, next week, in Salatiga, where teachers come together, share and critique writing, and as a final product publish a book of the participants’ writing that they did in the workshop. Anyone who knows about my work with teachers in the Yellowstone Writing Project will understand why I was immediately struck by this, and why I quickly introduced myself to Jaya, the English professor from Malaysia – he invited me to the conference in Jember that year, which might have been the best thing that happened to me, professionally, during a very rich year for me professionally in Indonesia (and personally, even more so, of course).

Umi Safari was one of the participants in the workshop. We sat next to each other around the table on that first day, and as often happens when I open my mouth here, she was surprised and delighted when I spoke some version of Bahasa Indonesia. She is so friendly and warm, as some of the people who (might) read this blog already know from meeting her in Montana, that it is impossible not to like her immediately. She resonates a kind of joy in the world, and she embraces people full-heartedly. We spoke so much about teaching that week, during and especially outside of the workshop, over dinners, in the bus on the way to the beach (the same beach I spent an overnight at last week), between sessions. I saw her as a kindred spirit then too, especially regarding her attitude toward teaching. She understood the official government curriculum as a distraction from the real work she needed to do as a teacher, she spoke about her students with love and respect and she based her ideas about teaching in that love and respect as a starting point.

Especially, I learned so much from her. Teachers in Indonesia, at all levels and in almost all places I have been, work in even more challenging conditions than teachers I know in the United States. In particular, they just have more and bigger classes, and the government curriculum is measured by national tests that all students, across the 3,000 mile archipelago with over 700 local languages spoken on over 1,000 inhabited islands, take at the same time.  Teachers feel enormous pressure to teach to the test, and in fact the government curriculum is incredibly rigid. Our first conversations were about that: how does she teach creatively and effectively in that situation? How does she negotiate between the approaches she knows work with her students and the blanket and undiscriminating approach of the government curriculum? She was wonderful, and she was applying for a Fulbright, and she asked me if I would read her application and give her feedback.

I did read it, and I don’t remember what suggestions I offered back, though I think it had something to do with making it more personal, with being more specific about how she thought it would help her teach better when she returned to Indonesia. And she got the Fulbright, a six-month stay the following year at Kent State, and while she was there, she came and stayed with us in Bozeman. Eighteen months later, she was chosen as one of the two to return to America to teach new participants about their experiences, and she came back to the United States. My family loved her immediately, like I did. Seamus came with me when I picked her up the first time, and she rushed into the terminal and gave him a big hug and stood with her arm around him and said, “Look at me Kirk, can you believe I am in Bozeman? I am in your home!” beaming as she squeezed him tightly.

Her visits turned into a grant she submitted, that we wrote together beginning during her second visit. I knew I was going to try to come to Salatiga for this workshop, and I expected it to be during my sabbatical semester, so we decided to extend my trip and try to get funding to support a series of workshops in East Java and Jember. We got the grant (in spite of, I should note, an epic screw-up of mine that nearly derailed the whole process and which I will say no more about here), and here I am today, in the waiting room of the new Jember airport, done with this part of the work.

Umi has been simply incredible. We have had such an extraordinarily good time together. We spent so much time laughing, and we made an especially strange couple, I know, as we walked around together in the time outside the workshop, especially in Sumenep on Madura, a place with very few bules (the closest translation for that is gringos) – I saw one other in over the four days we spent there. We would wander around the city at Umi’s very leisurely pace, her holding my arm or my hand, visiting and laughing, and I know people didn’t know what to make of us. Had Umi been younger, perhaps, people might have assumed that she was my “traveling companion,” which happens sometimes in Bali, but more rarely in Java, and I think never ever in Madura. Sumenep is a fairly devout Muslim city, though, and it was funny to see the reactions – more bemused and curious than anything else, I should emphasize – of people as we strolled around.

She was a fabulous collaborator in the workshops, too. Participants attended to what I am saying, it seems to me (if I remember of course to speak slowly and clearly), but I am an English professor from the United States, and know nothing about teaching in Indonesia. I know that a reaction to some of my ideas about teaching writing is a fully justified, “That’s nice, but he doesn’t know anything about what it’s like to teach here,” but Umi could always handle that, always entered the conversation to say, well, this is how I translate these ideas into my own classroom, this is how I think about them in the series of over-crowded rooms – over-crowded with students and curricular expectations. She made what we spoke about with teachers plausible, imaginable, in ways I would have had a harder time doing on my own. Of course in the process she taught me a lot.

In the ten days, we developed all sorts of inside jokes. We go hunting native speakers, I tell her I don’t want to pass away, she tells me I must have spilled water on my shirt. She is a woman who loves to laugh, and her open heart and generous wisdom sometimes is easy to pass off as something simple, but it isn’t. At her school, I think she scares the men who run the show there (I know this never happens in the United States, so some of the women reading this blog might be interested to learn of this unusual phenomenon). She is smart. She has had a Fulbright, and travelled to the United States twice on the dime of the U.S. government. Her students love love love her – the rooms and faces light up when she walks by – and she loves them. (At least about her, and I imagine her students, I don’t mean that euphemistically: she loves them.) She teaches with unorthodox methods, and mostly ignores the mandates of the government curriculum, and her students do well on the annual tests anyway, well enough that her principal doesn’t bother her about her teaching style anymore.

But after I had landed in Jakarta, her principal cancelled the workshop she’d spent three months planning, and that I’d travelled around the world to do. He narrowed in into a one day workshop with three different meetings. There was a three hour workshop with the English teachers from the school. “He’s the one who looks at porno in the office,” she told me about one of them later. “And he’s the other one.” One of the teachers said there are two kinds of students, the serious ones and the lazy, stupid ones. I told him I would never use those words to describe students because it would mean I couldn’t teach them anything. None of her colleagues showed up for the lunch she scheduled. She began crying in the teacher room, wondering why no one respected her. But it wasn’t true: she had scheduled a one hour meeting with the seniors from the school, a huge group who asked me questions about learning English, about motivation. I knew they had authoritarian teachers, in Banyuwangi I’d heard older teachers say about young women students – 21 or 22 -  that now was the time good Muslim girls needed to think about getting married and having children (to rolling eyes, I am happy to report). I told them when I closed that I hoped they remembered the simple but important truth that when real change in societies around the world occurred, it did so because young people stood up and said no. In Indonesia in 1998, young people stood up and said no more. In the United States too. In Hong Kong. And I made Umi translate for me. The students who asked the best questions, in the most interesting and complex English, were the girls from her class the previous year.

Her husband Alvian is an English teacher too, and an Imam at the mosque around the corner from their house. He and I talked at length about Islam, about fundamentalism. He has been preaching about Islam as a religion of tolerance and love, pushing against currents like ISIS, currents that exist in Indonesia too. Her children, especially the two I got to know, Meka and Egypt (he goes by Gipsy – the “g” in Indonesian is hard), are wonderful. Meka, ten, wouldn’t let me speak English, kept teaching me new Indonesian words and phrases. My four nights in their house in a Javanese neighborhood were one of the best Indonesian experiences I have had, and my capacity to speak Indonesian sky-rocketed. She has organized a school for students who drop out of high-school (where I spoke to students too) and an organization that does out-reach to young people to encourage them to read. “Not just book reading,” she explained in our radio interview yesterday. “We want them to learn to read situations, read the world around them.” She has never, by the way, read Paulo Freire. This is her, thinking about teaching, because she learned how do it by listening to her students, who she listens to because she loves them.

I left my iPhone in the place where we stayed in Banyuwangi – and only realized it after the four hour drive back to Jember. One of the volunteers in her organization drove on his motorbike, on the same day, to retrieve it. I paid for his gas and food, but Umi warned me not to offer him extra money. “If you give him money for it,” she said, “he’ll think you believe he did it for the money. He will be offended.” So I gave him a bunch of gifts instead and bought him lunch. She said that in Indonesia they call it the badang merah, the red thread, which the whole point of is never to cut. If I give him money, I am cutting the red thread. If I don’t, it continues to unravel, connecting more and more people through acts of generosity and kindness. Umi has red threads coming out of her from every direction. She unspooling miles and miles of the stuff. I can’t express enough my admiration and love for her.

In which we go hunting for errors and native speakers

            My sample might be staggeringly small – it is the fourth largest country in the world, after all – but I feel sort of confident saying that at least many Indonesian students of English learn the language with a fair amount of fear. My sample includes the students I taught at Satya Wacana, the students I met at the boarding school in Madura, and students who I met yesterday (who were the majority of the participants in the workshop that was supposed to be for teachers), and it’s informed by the teachers I’ve spoken to and worked with across the time I’ve lived in Indonesia. Here’s how I learned it yesterday.

            Because the participants turned out to be mostly students preparing to teach English (the person who planned it didn’t follow Umi’s directions: it was not a mistake on her part, I feel compelled to note), I changed one of the questions I’ve used as a writing prompt near the beginning of the workshop – instead of asking about their successes and frustrations in their teaching of writing, I asked them about their experiences writing in English, what they enjoyed and what was challenging. When they read, there were some fairly consistent themes across the group: they don’t write very much, and they don’t like to write much.  They worry especially about their grammar, but it’s not really an abstract worry, of course – what they are worried about is having their teacher read what they wrote and simply point out every single mistake students make in their writing.

One student said she prefers speaking to writing, because when she speaks the teacher doesn’t correct every single word. They worry about the vocabulary too – they expressed the sort of contradictory but easily understandable sentiment that they liked writing because it helped them learn new words, and that they didn’t like writing because they often didn’t know the right words for things. But that’s wrapped around the teacher too, because the wrong word will be corrected. One young woman wrote about a promising assignment where all the students wrote blog entries and shared them among the class, who then, it turned out, responded in their comments by pointing out all the mistakes that they make, including the teacher’s now very public corrections.

Writing, in other words, often appeared to them as a kind of trap that they had no choice but to step into again and again: think Charlie Brown kicking the football, but without even his blind optimism to drive them. When they write, they already know, they will make mistakes, for many of them almost certainly several in every line, and their teacher will point out the mistakes, and the assessment of the writing will be based on the amount of mistakes they make. And so they spend hours crafting every sentence, writing it slowly, studying it carefully, making sure that everything is just as it should be before they move onto the next sentence. What they say is completely and totally unimportant, because their teacher won’t notice it.

I need to be careful to keep this from appearing as a slam on teachers. I don’t mean it that way. Teachers in Indonesia work, often, in classrooms with 40 students, and they might have as many as eight different classes in a given week. They have a government-mandated curriculum that includes direct instruction in various text types – expository, narrative, blah blah blah – and their students will be tested on their knowledge of those texts. (They know, of course, that their students’ performance on the national exams will assess the teachers as much as the students.) They learn and say things like “Analytical texts have very strict structures that students need to learn how to follow,” which is the way text-types – modes, we used to call them in my field of composition studies - always get explained, even when they claim not to be doing that (and it of course a version of silliness that has no reflection in actual non-school written discourse). And they are modeling a teaching strategy their own teachers almost certainly used before them, at least when it comes to the determined and vigilant correction of errors in writing. They know it’s not working, really, the teachers I’ve met, but they don’t know why, and they don’t have a framework, really, to think beyond what’s not working.

All of this should sound familiar to American teachers too, especially those who have been teaching writing for a while. The reading of texts simply to discover what’s wrong with them, the focus on teaching certain kinds of structures and formal requirements, being stuck in a style of teaching that’s not working because trying to imagine another way is so difficult, especially given the demands of every day classrooms and the dearth of meaningful professional development: these are teachers’ problems in the United States, too, just as the fear of writing in English is not limited only to students who are learning to write English as a foreign language.

Today at Umi’s school I met with a large group of senior high-schoolers, and one of the questions I got was “In the United States do teachers put on a scary face when they go into the classroom like they do here in Indonesia?” I got a giant laugh from the group when I immediately put on a very angry face, but the question made me a little bit sad, too. (A chicken just strolled by, getting its exercise I imagine so it can remain super fit like most Indonesian chickens.) There is a way of being a teacher here that silences students in many occasions – it drives Umi crazy, and it also makes her life hard, because her students love her and she is a teacher who refuses to lead with error correction – in fact from my perspective she is a revolutionary teacher who is pushing boundaries in Indonesia, but as a result she seems to be deeply unpopular with her colleagues. She actually deserves her own blog entry soon, since she is so amazing.

I wish my academic discipline of composition studies, with all its renewed attention to what we are presently calling translingualism, could really embrace world of English writing instruction. We’ve thought so much about it in the first year college classroom and in some cases in other classrooms beyond the first year, but we’re missing out on the real drama of global English, regarding its teaching, the ways writing happens in those settings, and especially the way the mania for correctness is shaping deeply how students understand and learn English outside of American universities. Our students in our Universities are already in one of the most privileged educational settings in the world, and while of course we should be paying attention to them and working to implement current practices and theories as best as we can, there are countless millions more students across the globe who are caught in a chaotic imperial expansion of English, who are learning English for reasons that no one is clear about, except that everyone says that you must learn English.

Today, in another workshop, one of the examples of student error that a teacher gave was “Today my cat passed away, and my grandfather died.” It is an error, he said, because he should have written that his grandfather passed away and his cat died. I kind of understand what he is trying to say, but even then it is just silliness. It seemed as if he spent a fair amount of time trying to teach this distinction to his student, and he asked me what I thought about it. “Wow,” I said. “That kid had a really awful day.”

            I asked the teachers in the workshop today how we should respond to some of the ideas they generated in a first writing, that their students don’t like writing, that they are scared of making mistakes, that they freak out about not knowing the right vocabulary term. What should we do about this? I asked. Most agreed that we should tell our students not to worry about making mistakes in their writing, to just relax and write what comes to their mind. And what do you do with that writing when you get it? How would you respond to it? Most of them said that they would be nice about showing students how to correct the mistakes in their writing. Maybe they thought about the conversation we had after that – about how if we say mistakes don’t matter, and then all we do is fix their mistakes, our students are several steps ahead of us already. They know that we aren’t serious when we tell them not to worry about mistakes; they know that mistakes are what their teachers will see, whether students are worried about them or not when they write. They know that the only thing that matters about writing is getting the right word or the right grammar, that they aim for perfection, error-free writing, as the most important goal.

          I always open the workshops speaking Indonesian, though, on purpose. I do my very best to say what I want to say, and I work hard at it, but I know that I am continually making mistakes, using the wrong word, and on and on. I come back to that later when we're discussing errors, asking them, were you paying attention mostly to all the mistakes I made when I spoke Indonesian? They say of course not (though they would never admit it if they were, in Java, since that would be so rude) - and I think it's true. They listen to me, and they stretch to understand my clumsy Indonesian, with a generous ear. That's the ear I wish teachers everywhere could hear their students with.  

       I can’t pull this together in my own coherent stream just yet, except to say that students of English writing are scared, that they know how regularly they make mistakes in language because pointing that out seems to be one of the primary goals of language instruction. So I’ll just post this now, and let the ideas keep bouncing around. 

            On a side note, I heard a great phrase at the workshop in Banyuwangi on Sunday. A older teacher, who from the neck-up looked a bit like a wayang kulit – a Javanese shadow puppet – talked about taking his students from Banyuwangi on the ferry across to Bali, where they sought out tourists who they could interview for their English learning. He referred to it as “hunting native speakers,” which is a phrase that has become a private joke between Umi and me. My family and I have been hunted like that before, in Bali and in Yogyakarta, by hordes of students who interviewed us about our age and what we think about Indonesia. He also showed me pictures on his camera during the break, in which google-eyed Javanese high school boys interviewed a 20 something women in a tiny bikini. You won’t find any bikinis on any Javanese beaches, at least not the ones I have visited – I imagine the man behind the camera was a bit google-eyed too, and the students were probably thinking, this is a pretty cool assignment…

        Banner count: six now - these banners no doubt will be well-recycled into tablecloths for street-side warungs. The two from the workshop today had a picture of me standing in some Montana snow-scape. 

Workshop two

Today at a University in Banyuwangi, on the east coast of Java - the place where we once took a ferry to get to Bali - I met with a group of students and teachers for a one day workshop. (Supposed tone only teachers, but it ended up mostly students - more about that perhaps later). They had another big banner with my name on it - now the national count is three, and I think it will be four by the time I get home - actually five, because there were two for me in Madura, one stretched between two palm trees over the road that entered the boarding school.

So, this will be a race of a entry, I think, skittering over details somewhat quickly. I can't bother at the moment to do all the rigamarole of downloading and then uploading pictures, so it will be imageless. Perhaps I will post some later.

Drive from Madura to Surabaya Thursday - five hours. As we were leaving Sumenep I said "Oh shoot I forgot to by Madurese salt," which, because we are in Indonesia, let to pulling over on the side of the highway, walking into a salt farm, up to the two men working the place, talking to them about the process with the help of my two hosts, and picking up a giant crystal of salt from one of the dozens of piles of salt that sat glittering in the sun.

Wait in the train station in Surabaya - two hours. Nothing exciting, except Umi is wonderful to travel with, and we are constantly laughing together, so we had a good time anyway. The train to Jember was ekonomi - we traveled a few times by train when we lived here before, but always executif which I promise you does not exactly translate to "executive" but it is perfectly fine. Ekonomi is sort of funny - I was sitting with Umi in a seat for two that faced across from us a seat for three. "Across" is a word that seems to convey a sort of distance, but I mean 18 inches in this case - two woman and a rather tall man were in those seats, and then there were four on the other side and the train itself was fairly packed. I was briefly internally petulant, which I think crossed my face, because for the first time on the trip Umi clearly felt bad about it, so I pulled myself together and it actually ended up being kind of fun. It was air-conditioned, and even better, I wasn't sitting under the air-conditioner, which drip drip dripped on to the seat below it. It was four hours, though, so arrival in Jember was a relief.

Umi's husband and two of her sons - Mecca and Egypt (Jordan, her older son, joined us later) - met us at the train station and we drove to a restaurant where I ordered on Umi's recommendation bisstek lidah, which was delicious. After I finished it Umi said she was glad i liked it because her family liked tongue too and then I remembered what lidah meant. Then they dropped me off at a fancy hotel for one night - the rest of my time in Jember, beginning tomorrow, I'll stay at Umi's house, but she wanted me to stay one night in hotel comfort, and it was nice. I had a beer in the bar and listened to a jazz trio perform a very soulful rendition of "Summertime."

Friday Umi had a trip to the Indonesian National Coffee and Cocoa Research Center, which was on a beautiful plantation very close to Umi's house - it was super cool, with an overview of the entire process of roasting and preparing coffee, right up to the way to make it into instant coffee, and with the cocoa from the bean to the chocolate bar. They make all their own processing machines on site, and they bring people in from all over Indonesia to promote home industries - they also make small machines for those industries on site. It was really cool, and the coffee and chocolate were delicious. I have rekindled my appreciation for Indonesian coffee, which they make by grinding the beans very fine, putting them in a cup, pouring the water in, and letting the grounds sink to the bottom, which they do. It's a rich delicious coffee.

Umi insisted i drive while we were in Jember, and it was really fun to navigate the Javanese road chaos again. She declared it a success, saying, in reference to the only alleged fatality attached to my previous Javanese driving experience, "Not yet killed chicken."

Then we visited a school where Umi volunteers (she is a work-horse and I have no idea how she does everything she does). It's for students who dropped out of other schools, and I met with students and teachers there for a short visit and conversation. It was that moment when - like some sort of flame of the holy spirit - I felt my Indonesian descend upon me again. I still can only say things that make my conversation sound like the pretend conversations in a language books, but I said them with fluidity and I was relaxed. It was a short visit, and after it the director brought me to his house with a big spread of food where I ate lunch with the teachers and then Umi spirited me away to the beach where I talked with students about writing and got interviewed by a reporter from Radio Indonesia. (I am going to be interviewed on national radio on Wednesday, and it is live-streamed, so if you're in the US and up between 1 and 3 AM Wednesady morning make sure to tune in.)

I already mentioned the wonder of meeting the fishermen on the beach as they left and as they returned - I didn't mention the charge of the angry monkey who bared his teeth and who I thought was going to give me a giant rabies laden Indonesian trip ending monkey bite. He was only about two feet away when he stopped, and damn that monyet had some teeth.

Okay - I have reached the limits of this entry. I will write tomorrow about my workshop today, perhaps. Tomorrow I will hike up a mountain with Umi where they mine sulphur. It really is a head-spinning trip this time around. I have squeezed past that obligatory moment where the thrill of arrival suddenly gets overwhelmed by exhaust fumes and rotting garbage. I am here again, and not complaining like a put-upon colonizer. I will sleep well tonight - the man pressing the doorbell appears to have given up - and tomorrow more transport - the 4 hour drive back to Jember. I am not driving that route, thankfully, because it's a narrow mountain highway with the usual lack of restraint and excess craziness and every kind of vehicle - it's really something. How everyone doesn't die everyday in a country wide head-on collision really is astounding. 

Just this:

I am having my 10 days in my god how can I go on with this moment. It will pass. I am staying tonight in the strangest little run-down retreat center on the far edge of Banyuwangi, which has many rooms but seems totally unprepared for the sorts of things guests in a place like this might appreciate, like for example clean towels and soap. We had a long drive again today - which is more or less any day that you get into a car in Indonesia, and driving is like going on the scariest roller-coaster in the world only with no safety regulations and the guy running the controls is texting. And for Christ sake there is this ridiculous little ringing buzzer that goes off every two minutes for no clear reason, like someone is standing at some unseen doorbell just pressing it for 2 quick seconds and waiting.

But last night I stayed in a little hotel on a South Javanese beach that was, after dark, completely deserted, and I went to the beach and watched the stars and listened to the surf and then suddenly about 100 fishermen showed up in the dark to head out and I had a great conversation with one of them who sat smoking and eating and taught me the word for fisherman - nalayan - and I got up early enough this morning to see the boats come back in, and talked to him again, and there were baskets of krill and other fish, and it was really just amazing.  Funny how you remember the person who taught you a particular word: the Chinese doctor who did acupuncture on my numb foot four years ago taught me the word for "blood-curdling' - mengerikan - when we had a discussion about the massacres in Java and Bali in 1965.

So I am just having a tired day, after a lot of action, and before another workshop begins tomorrow. I will recover. And I should sleep well, in spite of that goddamn buzzer. Since I left Madura just two days ago, I've about a week's worth of things happen. Not sure I'll have time to catch up here before I have another week happen tomorrow...

Leaving Madura

We're off this morning - 4-5 hours to Surabaya and then another 4 1/2 hour train ride to Jember - it's one of those Indonesian travel days that you get used to if you move around much here. Lots of transport.

The workshop ended yesterday, and it seemed to go well. We got behind - for one thing the men kept showing up late for every session, which as I have mentioned I don't get really annoyed about because it is Indonesia after all. And then there were several moments where we got pulled in other directions because of questions that came up that demanded discussion. We'd been talking a lot about helping students generate a lot of writing, and about the need to curtail the teacherly impulse to point out every mistake. I always tell them that this isn't an issue solely for people teaching English to speakers of other languages; teachers in the United States, too, seem unable to resist pointing out where the student screwed up in the writing. There is something funny about this, usually. Certainly, in Indonesia, one thing most Indonesian students I have worked with are well aware that they struggle with grammar, so on one level, if I correct all their mistakes, they just learn what they already know: they are far far from competence.

At one point yesterday, a participant insisted that we stop to discuss a question he had. Indonesian students, he said, have a tendency to write English using in their heads Indonesian grammatical structures. He went to the board and wrote an example of this: "Ibu Ummi angry I. She beat my. Because me steal bagblack." How can we focus on students doing a lot of writing when they make such a level of mistakes? Shouldn't we get them to stop making those mistakes first?

So I asked the participants, what would you do with a passage like this? How would you respond to it. They had several answers, usually including the words subject and object and pronoun and how they would explain this and how they would introduce the lesson and the difficulties of teaching these sorts of things. I let them discuss this for a while and then one of them asked me how I would respond to the passage. "I would say, 'why did you steal the black bag?" I told them."Or maybe, how did you feel when Ibu Ummi beat you?" (I also told Umi that she needed to stop beating her students, even if they do steal.) We talked about the process of assigning writing primarily to point out what the students are not capable of. "What happens if we read with different glasses, without always looking for mistakes?" If someone came up to me on the street in the United States, I said, and told me that, my fist impulse would not be to offer a quick lesson about object pronouns in English. I'd want to know if the person was injured.

It's a fairly old idea, of course, in my field, but it never stops being relevant for teachers: if we read to find mistakes, we will find mistakes. And if we don't read to find mistakes, we have to read for something else When I first wrapped my head around this idea, it was like someone had just lifted a weight off my shoulders, because reading student writing with the agenda of pointing out what lousy writers students are is a drag, and it leads to endless and tedious carping by teachers about how terribly their students write and look at this stupid thing one of my students wrote and on and on. It's a kind of mean-spirited teaching.

It's always hard to know what effect a workshop like this has for teachers, but they seemed genuinely enthusiastic and excited to try out something new, to invite their students to write and then to celebrate and listen to what they wrote instead of remind them, yet again, how long they have to go before they can speak English.

Wrapped around in some of this is the way that "native speakers" are fetishized sometimes in English language teaching contexts, as if a person who grew up speaking English somehow has magic teaching English powers that others cannot have. It comes back to a belief that a speaker who doesn't learn a language from birth can never call that language his own language. One student, talking to me between sessions, asked me what I thought about his accent. "I don't sound like you when I talk," he said. "Of course you don't sound like me," I said. "You won't ever sound like me. People in Ireland don't sound like me either. But I understand what you are saying" - which is actually more than I could say about some of the people I spoke English to in Ireland last summer. "You don't have to sound like me to be a speaker of the language." No one gets to own a language - that's the beauty of language - and no one has ever been able to build a tall enough wall to hold onto their ownership of English. In fact that wall is a relic, like the Berlin Wall, with pieces protected here and there that we should treat like an artifact of well-left past.

Then they took me to a batik store, where I found a few fine shirts (I am XXL in Indonesia, which makes things a little difficult sometimes). After we bought our shirts we waited outside, in the dark, near the beach, listening to a child reciting something from the loudspeakers of a nearby mosque. We were waiting for our driver who was also buying things at the batik store. "He waits for us to leave because he will get a discount," Umi told me, "for bringing us here." I can't quibble with this logic, of course.

So goodbye to Madura today. It is a beautiful place, and I am so lucky to have the chance to come out to the farthest part of this island in a place where tourists simply do not visit. I landed in Jakarta at one AM last Thursday morning, and I have only been in the country for one week. I can hardly believe it. Time moves slowly here, in the best of ways.

In which I sweat profusely

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

an opening ceremony that had four parts, according to the young man who was the master of ceremonies:

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.

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.

crophones (one for the boys and one for the girls) and the noise of the blasts of air into the mike combined withe learning-English accents made it a sort of challenge for me to understand anything 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).

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…