GenEq Sesh in English Club

For the last few weeks, our Advanced English Club has been watching I Am Malala. I really love watching these young women discuss the ways in which Malala has taken control of her life through education, and the similarities and differences they see between Malala's life and their own. 

Organizing For School

So, after traveling pretty extensively throughout September, it's time to get back into the groove of life at site. I spent yesterday in the teacher's lounge at my school, trying to decipher the confusing schedule system they've got in place (which was finalized last week, so now I can get an accurate idea of when and where the English lessons will take place). I also updated my map of the school building, because I'm sick and tired of wandering around trying to find out which classroom my counterpart is in.

ABC Party

Today the 3rd graders, who spend the year learning the Latin alphabet and how to read English had their culminating school event: the ABC Party. The students have spend the last several months rehearsing their parts for the performance in class, and learning songs that they sang for their parents and teachers today. Overall, I think they liked the event very much, and had a good time on stage.

Differing Priorities

There is a fundamental different between the goals of education that I see here in Armenia and the ones I experienced as a student back home. At home, a common saying amongst my teachers was that the journey was more important than the destination. Here, priority is given to product over process. In other words, getting the correct answer is more important than the thinking which lead to that answer. This results in some very different teaching styles.

For example, test taking is very different here. When I was a student, almost every test I took required me to "show my work"- or explain my thought process- in addition to giving an answer to the test question. Even if my answer was correct, if I didn't show my work, I would not be given credit. The reasoning behind this was that the thinking that lead to the correct answer was at least as important (if not more so) than the answer itself. In Armenian classrooms, on the other hand, having the correct answer seems to be all that is important.

Back home, in order to study for an exam, students would be presented with practice problems that required similar thought processes as the questions which they would later encounter in the test itself. Studying for a test here in Armenia often involves going through the actual test booklet and reviewing the correct answers to the problems. This isn't viewed as "cheating" as it would be back home- but rather as the most effective way for students to learn the material they need in order to pass the exam. If a student is able to 'learn' (read: memorize) an answer to a particular question from his or her teacher and then later replicate that answer without assistance, then the student is genuinely considered to have mastered the material and the teacher to have done her job.

Obviously, I'm making generalizations on both sides here. I draw from my limited experience as a student in the US (restricted to small, wealthy private schools with strong liberal-arts tendencies), and my even more limited experience observing a small number of lessons in an even smaller number of schools over just a few months here in Armenia. It is only reasonable to assume that there are teachers here in Armenia who require more of their students than mere memorization, just as there are teachers in America who do not prioritize thought process as my teachers did. But I think that, as generalizations, my observations still hold.

I have been wondering what might have lead to this fundamental difference. I think that it is probably a combination of many things, which can be summarized by saying that as access to information becomes more widely available, accumulating knowledge of facts becomes less important than the skill to synthesize conclusions from a set of facts provided for you. In an environment where people have easy access to libraries or the internet, critical thinking skills (knowing how to ask good questions, how to efficiently search for answers, and being able to generate one's own answers from the information available) is far more important than simple knowing any given piece of information. However, in an environment where information resources like libraries or the internet are not available, critical thinking skills (while still important, of course) are not seen as the main thing to be learned in schools. In these sorts of environments, students attend schools in order to absorb facts and data from their teachers, who serve as walking libraries, since there is no other source from which students can obtain their information. Although libraries and internet access is becoming more and more readily available in Armenia, there is no denying that they are less easily accessible here than back home. Thus, Armenian teacher still fall farther towards the "information resource" end of the teaching spectrum than US teachers, who ought to be more like "critical thinking coaches" than walking reference materials.

There is also another thing,  I think, more specific to Armenia, which has influenced this trend in educational priorities, specifically relating to test taking techniques. It is the extraordinary prevalence and use of low-quality standardized tests. At home, with the exception of a few standardized tests for admission into high school or college, the tests we were given when I was a student had been written by our teachers, and had been tailored to test those things they felt were most important for us to learn. Here, there are booklets with tests already written in them that each student must buy at the beginning of the school year. The tests in these booklets only very loosely corresponds to the material in the text books  (which themselves are extraordinarily bad), but teachers feel they are required to teach from the text and test from the booklets. Additionally, these test booklets are filled with horrible questions: multiple choice questions with multiple correct answers (or no correct answers at all), fill-in-the-blank questions with ambiguous sentences, where multiple words could be grammatically correct with no contextual support. With questions like this- the content of which may or may not have been taught to the students previously- it's no wonder that the only way to help students pass the test in the time available during class is to give them the answers to the questions and hope they are able to remember as many as possible.

Honestly, it seems to me that Peace Corps Volunteers can advocate for more progressive teaching practices as much as they want, but that the only way real positive change can happen within the Armenian Educational System is if internet access is improved (along with computer literacy) or the teachers are unshackled from these horrible text books and allowed to create their own assessments.

What am I teaching these kids...

The textbooks here are truly horrendous. In the few days that I've been working at School #4 in Sisian, I've seen text book exercises ranging from the harmlessly amusing:

to the factually inaccurate:

To the downright insidious. Today I was asked to read a poem from the 7th graders textbook, so that they could hear what a native speaker sounded like. I opened book borrowed from one of the students to the page specified by my counterpart and read:

What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned that Washington never told a lie.
I learned that soldiers seldom die.
I learned that everybody's free.
And that's what teacher said to me.

I learned that policemen are my friends.
I learned that justice never ends.
I learned that murderers die for their crimes.
Even if we make a mistake sometimes.

I learned our government must be strong.
It's always right and never wrong,
Our leaders are the finest men.
And we elect them again and again.
That's what I learned in school today.
That's what I learned in school.  

This being Armenia (where plagerism isn't really a thing), the 'poem' was not cited, of course. Had it been so, the book would have informed students that it wasn't in fact a poem at all, but the truncated lyrics of a song written by a young Tom Paxton, recorded in 1964. If the book had cited the work, it probably also would have mentioned that the song was written as a criticism of the national education system,  and was quickly taken up as a rallying call by critics of the US government protesting the Vietnam War. Essentially, the song existed to indicate that the things which it presents as factual pieces of information are falsehoods we tell to children in school. Ironically, that's exactly what I was doing.

As is was, none of this contextual information was included in the textbook. I read the passage aloud as I had been asked to do, and sat there as the students translated the 'poem' line by line into Armenian. 

I struggled with the issue of whether or not I should say anything. 

On the one hand, my counterpart seemed not to know about the passage's history- and why should she? These days it's a fairly obscure piece of music, relatively speaking. There's no reason for someone living halfway around the world to have ever heard of Tom Paxton or his songs. But Armenian culture is very authoritarian- for many English teachers, to have their knowledge of all things English-language related questioned in the slightest would be completely unacceptable. My relationship with my counterpart is probably the most important factor in the relative success or failure of my work in School #4. I really didn't want to jeopardize it by pointing out something she didn't know (in front of students, no less) so early in our work together.

On the other hand, the idea of teaching young students that "our government must be strong, it's always right and never wrong...."- especially given the authoritarian and militaristic tendencies within Armenian culture- really didn't sit well with me.

Surprisingly, it was the students themselves who helped me out of this predicament. I should have given them more credit. As I struggled with my thoughts, they continued to translate away until they reached the line which read "Our leaders are the finest men...". The students faltered in their translation. A few giggled. One girl said something to my counterpart in Armenian that I didn't understand. I assumed it was something to do with the rampant corruption that plagues the Armenian government. I took my opening:

"I should also say" I started, directing my gaze at my counterpart as if I were talking to her rather than the students, but trying to pick my words so that the students could also understand them. I spoke slowly and carefully, trying to be as clear as possible- I had to communicate a concept that would not be easy for the students to understand, as there isn't much space for political satire in Armenia's public discourse. "that this was written ironically- the man who wrote it did not believe any of the things he said. Instead, he believed these things were lies. He wrote this to criticize the government." 

My counterpart looked surprized and amused- thankfully neither angry nor upset- "Oh- I didn't know that," She said. "I don't know how we should teach this poem now." It was as positive a response as I could hoped to have received, although she did not translate my comments for her students as she normally would have. I'm not sure how much of my little speech they understood. Of course, it sounded like the students already knew that at least parts of the 'poem' didn't coincide with their reality, so maybe they didn't need my explanation as much as I thought they did.

I'm sure this won't be the last time I'm confronted with inaccuracies in the text. Some are easy to let go: what difference does it make in these children's lives if they are taught that there are "more than 50 states" in the US? Or that "Eskimos live in Arizona and Indians live in Alaska" (issues of politically correct language and respect of indigenous peoples aside)? These small factual errors have little bearing on their lives and can be easily corrected later on if necessary. 

Passages like "What Did You Learn in School Today?" raise much more significant problems. I don't know how to deal with situations like this one. Today I was lucky- the students caught the problem with their text and all I had to do was confirm their suspicions. What if I'm not given that opening next time?

I think that the solution lies in my relationship with my counterpart. If we can be comfortable enough with each other, it won't be a big deal when I point out problems I have with the textbooks. And if we can develop a pattern of lesson planning together, I will have a chance to talk wit her about my concerns before we present the information to the students. They tell you during training that relationships are everything here. I'm beginning to understand what they meant.