Grammar After Hours

Morning Assembly, Punakha Higher Secondary School

Those of us from the west teaching in Bhutan have been rending our clothes and grinding our teeth in the face of feckless faculty meetings, missing timetables, unannounced changes in our teaching responsibilities and intermittent water/electricity/internet/English-only language instruction (which is mandated by the Ministry of Education).  Though our students are charming, kind, polite, and at least somewhat committed to doing their best, most are so far behind where they need to be in their reading and writing in English that it is hard to imagine them making it from lower primary school into upper primary, let alone scoring well enough on the 12th grade exam to qualify for a coveted seat at one of Bhutan's Royal Colleges.

Formative assessments of my 11th and 12th class students' writing reveal significant gaps in their understanding of basic grammar, very limited vocabularies, and inexplicable sentence constructions.  As we've been repeatedly warned, Bhutan has not yet developed a reading culture (there is one public library IN THE COUNTRY, so far as I know), so there is no reinforcement of language acquisition outside of school other than bad Hollywood movies and Miley Cyrus singles.  Thus, the combination of an incomprehensible school system and alarmingly under-prepared students can engender in a teacher a real sense of hopelessness or, at best, the feeling one is simply treading water under the crest of a Hokusai wave.

Given all of this, I thought the least I could do would be to identify the students who are at greatest risk of doing poorly on the upcoming quarterly exams and use their writing to analyze which skills they most need to improve.  Each day, all boarding students have Morning, Evening, and Night Study, an hour each of mandated study time.  The boys meet in the classroom (students stay in one room all day and teachers move from class to class) and girls in the dining hall to complete homework, read, practice writing in Dzongkha, or prepare speeches for the morning assemblies.  I figured I could pull a small group of students out of Evening Study to work with them on grammar and then see in another formative assessment if it had helped their writing.

I identified four girls and two boys in my twelfth class to work with first on subject/verb agreement.  In class, I announced that I would be seeing them in Evening Study and that I would spend half the period with the boys and half with the girls.  This announcement, not surprisingly, was met with silence; I wondered if I would come to Evening Study and find my students inexplicably absent or be regaled with lame excuses for why it would be impossible for them to give up their precious Evening Study time.  Nevertheless, I prepared twenty practice questions and had the office assistant make four copies (we are not permitted to make more than a few copies of anything; if we really want a class set of something, we have to take a taxi to Kuruthang, 3 km away, and pay for copies ourselves).   I imagined spending about fifteen minutes going over the definitions of "subject", "pronoun" and "verb" and another fifteen minutes helping whomever I could rustle up with the practice questions.  Heck, it was worth a try.

Imagine my surprise when I showed up for boys' evening study and was met by a small group of students from our class asking if they, too, could come to the grammar session even though I hadn't called their names.  I thought they were trying to make it a social affair, so I rebuffed their entreaties, but they persisted.  "Miss," they asserted, "we did not learn the grammar and we need it to improve our writing."  I was flabbergasted: were teenage boys begging to have grammar lessons outside of the regular school day?  Then more boys came into the room (Evening Study was about to formally begin) and ALL of them asked if they could come to the study session.  Then, the four girls I had 'invited' came in to find out where we'd be meeting, and when they heard the boys asking for a whole-class session, they joined in, insisting that all the girls wanted to have special grammar instruction during Evening Study.

And so it came to pass: at about 5:40, all forty-two of my 12th class boarding students came for an hour long grammar lesson.  Even the so-called knuckleheads (my term of endearment for the kids who have a hard time paying attention in class) were attentive; all the students participated; they asked excellent questions; they took thorough notes.  When the bell for evening prayer rang and I was packing up to go, they asked me to do more sessions each night of the week at which I demurred: "I need some nights off, you guys!" I told them.  

One of my classrooms

As the class began to disperse, the students were so appreciative and expressed so much gratitude I was overwhelmed.  A few of the boys told me they loved me; a bunch of them demanded high-fives, and many of them as they left the room gave me "thumbs up," a corny Americanism I use to establish a positive atmosphere in class.  They offered to carry my backpack; they escorted me across the campus; both girls and boys repeatedly wished me "Good Night, Miss," in a tone that was somehow more earnest than the usual requisite "Good Night" I hear as I walk home in the evenings.  

It may be that all the goodwill and mutual feelings of respect and affection generated this evening are fleeting; sometimes, a single auspicious day can bring about magical encounters with ephemeral results.  Then again, perhaps tonight marked a real and lasting step forward in these students' learning as well as in my deep appreciation and respect for the crazy, unpredictable,  maddening school system of Bhutan.

Punakha Higher Secondary School Academic Building