On making myself write again

I have hit something of a lull in my writing about Indonesia and our time here, at the halfway point of our year. Part of it came from the trip we took, the lengthy transport heavy crisscross of the country and the oceans that took me far from any internet and the desire to track it down in the small internet warungs ( called “warnets”) that appear all over the place here, in the smallest towns, where for about 30-60 cents an hour you can use a computer. Part of it, perhaps, is the normalcy of things now.

            We went to Semarang today, an hour bus ride from Salatiga, just for a trip. We had a delicious fish lunch in the Old City, where the Dutch influence resides in majestic and crumbling buildings and the ubiquitous canals, canals which must have been built by the Dutch purely out of nostalgia for home. Canals in tropical, very rainy, flood ridden-places are, quite simply, just a bad idea, and now the canals in Semarang, like the ones in Jakarta, are fetid and garbage strewn, very much not the sort of thing you might float down in a boat for a romantic tour of the city.  We saw a movie (“Unstoppable” – I loved it; I like movies more when I see them with my kids, but I would have liked this one anyway) and then went to Chinatown to check out the night market that is held there on weekends, and we wandered through the alleyways of Chinatown, stopping in the small Buddhist temples that appear from nowhere, festooned with red lanterns and offerings at the altars (crackers, coke, lots of incense, water, whatever people want to offer). We peered into shops, chatted with people on the street, bought stuff, ate delicious sate babi (pork sate – it was enak sekali). It didn’t feel foreign anymore, or exotic, or weird, and we didn’t feel that gut-level sense of dislocation that marked so much of our early visit. That’s what I mean by normalcy – the man fishing in the canal, the cat carrying intestines away from one of the vendors in the market, the fortune teller, the old Chinese men singing Karaoke under a tent, having to laughingly push off the becak drivers who always want to drive us everywhere, even the man we saw from the taxi, walking down the street, talking on his cell phone, and wearing exactly no clothes at all, none of it really seemed to mark the place as uncommon or unusual.  It starts to seem obvious, which is to say it becomes a little harder to write about.

            Perhaps part of it, too, is that the end point is suddenly real. We’re not planning our return home yet, or even really thinking about it, but at least for me it is a material reality in a way it wasn’t before. Laura is interested in a job in Bozeman, doing the ground work she needs to do for her applications, and my mind turns that way a little too. I am less driven about language learning than I was, even though I have so much more to learn, and I think that too has something to do with the move through the halfway mark. We live here, and now I see that we don’t live here, really, more clearly. It’s home, but not really.

            Even so, as I write this, it’s also the case that the time we’ve spent here puts us into positions to experience the place even more. I did a day long writing workshop with a group of people who work for The Nature Conservancy in Indonesia, protecting coral reefs and rain forests, working in partnership with local people and NGOs and the Indonesian government, trying to negotiate the complicated demands of such disparate audiences in all sorts of different texts. I was proud to help out an organization I admire deeply for its work in the United States, in doing desperately needed work in another country I have come to love as well. I attended a conference in Semarang where I met other people from all over Indonesia (and came to resent even further the intellectual colonization of Power Point). I can speak, which is glorious thing – not fluently, not about deep things, but I can talk to the taxi drivers and the people next to me on the bus and the guy at the banana crepe stand, and it’s like a key turning.  In small ways, the country is opening up to us – I say small, because the openings reveal mostly what we will never know about the place and people. Still, even that is progress.

            So I am writing this, and posting it, a blog mostly about nothing at all, because I have found the blog to be an amazing resource for clarity about the experience. Here are just a few of the things that I won’t have time to write about because I stopped writing for so long, but wish I would have explored more fully:

·      The illegal gold-mining and processing in the Southwest corner of Lombok where we spent several days, giant hand made rock-tumblers spinning everywhere all the time processing the gleanings from mines unsparingly exploited;

·      My first temper-tantrum all in Indonesian;

·      Being on the ocean for five days, where I determined finally that my next career with not be as a mariner;

·      Swilling arak (palm liquor, potent and delicious) during a ceremony in a “traditional” village in Flores, surrounded by children (one of them Graham) shooting off bamboo cannons, and dancers, who were simultaneously singing the 700 year history of their village;

·      Listening to the Belgian tourists on the boat describe how much better the “traditional” villages were in Sulawesi than in Flores;

·      The tirade given by the Hungarian man when we failed to see any Komodo dragons in the wild on Komodo Island (“Ve haf been traveling for three days to see the dragons”). We only saw the ones by the trash heap near the kitchen, bloated and immobile. (“Can you hit it with a stick to make it get and walk?”) He promised he would write a letter to the United Nations, complaining about their lousy World Heritage Site.

·      Our amazing tour guide in Flores, and our great driver there, and the five men who sang beautifully 60s rock anthems on the steps of our restaurant in Bajawa;

·      The keynote speaker at the conference from Bowling Green State University, an expert on jazz, who said he would improvise his paper in the spirit of jazz, and said nothing of interest for ½ hour, and annoyed me tremendously by his clumsy cover of laziness pretending to be creativity;

·      The tendency of Indonesian conference presenters to run out of time to discuss the topic of their paper because they are so comprehensive about the theoretical background and the methodology (all excruciatingly detailed on Power Point);

·      The incredible student performance, and the faculty follies (which I played in as well) that demonstrated a kind of department spirit and camaraderie that I envy, and that seems impossible to imagine among American students and faculty;

It’s like that, a list that reminds me why I need to write the blog, because it always helps me notice what I forget to notice, what passes me by like it’s just obvious. I so easily get tricked into seeing things as normal.

Image to save for a future metaphor

       In a bungalow on a beautiful and quiet beach on the south coast of Flores, Laura and I watched from our bed as a spider wove a web inside the top of our closed mosquito netting.

We're back

            Lost a little blog momentum in the three week hiatus through a big chunk of eastern Indonesia, a bus, boat, car, plane, train extravaganza that was marked by moving. We started on a 24 hour bus ride from Salatiga to Lombok, which required a 12 hour drive on an express bus from Solo to the tip of east Java, a 45 minute ferry ride to Bali, a five hour bus ride across Bali, a five hour ferry ride, and then we had an hour taxi to our hotel in Lombok, where we arrived on Christmas Eve exhausted and overwhelmed. The most extraordinary part of this leg was the bus ride in Java, on a bus which a woman I met later compared to the busses in Harry Potter, that suddenly get skinny and survive the passing. We were in the front seats of a bus ride that started at 8 PM; I thought the front seat would be the best seat, with the best view, but it was really the best view of our impending death. Everything comes back to an island 1/3 the size of Montana with 130 million people – on mostly two lane highways, with bus drivers who are in a hurry.  Motorcycles were seemingly invisible to the drivers, forced off the road (they seem quite resigned to this) on multiple occasions. I could not sleep for most of the night for multiple reasons:

1. I could not close my eyes to the driving, which caused enormous amounts of adrenaline to course through my body. I was almost killed that night by several trucks, cars, busses and various other hazards of the road, headlights flashing frantically at our driver just before the bus got skinny again and suddenly appeared back on the right side (the left side here) of the road.
2. “No smoking” in Indonesia can be interpreted in multiple ways. Most typically, it means, “no smoking unless you really want a cigarette in which case nobody is going to stop you.” On the bus, “No smoking” meant “No smoking unless you are one of the two drivers or the guy on board to help them,” all of them sitting in the front, puffing furiously. Of course I believed that their nicotine could be the difference between survival and death, so we said nothing.
3. Graham.
4. Graham.
5. Graham, who after about three hours in any moving vehicle suddenly turns into a kind of gremlin. He becomes frantic, panicked about not being able to sleep, uncomfortable, and resentful of any forces that have conspired to put him in this situation (obviously only in order to torment him), those forces being me, Laura, and Seamus, depending on who is in closer proximity. At about two in the morning, speeding somewhere through East Java, I very nearly just told the bus driver to let Graham and me out, and that we would figure things out from there.
6. The seats, which were somewhat spacious, sort of, but also broken.
7. Gnawing hunger. About 10 o’clock in the night, and about 10 o’clock the next morning, we stopped for the most god-awful food I have eaten since we landed in Indonesia. Perhaps like the busses the food was sort of magic, food that stops your hunger without your even having to eat it. We had plates full of stuff that we couldn’t identify, and we sort of just stared at them, a little depressed, already exhausted.

We arrived safely, however, and spent a marvelous Christmas on a beach in Lombok, rifling through stockings that Santa somehow got to us, eating fresh seafood, snorkeling, sleeping, on a nearly unvisited part of the island. It was so quiet, and so relaxing, and so perfect, after the semester we had, that it wiped out the memory of the bus trip (which we avoided for the way home by booking a flight).

            I just wanted to announce our safe return, and wish a Happy New Year to any readers who are still with the blog. And if my Grote friends read this, I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I can’t believe you picked the first Grote ski trip for the year I will not see snow.

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.