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.

First Day of Winter

Today was the first real wintry day Sam and I have experienced in Armenia. We got a few inches of snow overnight, and woke to find Sisian transformed into a Winter Wonderland. A slippery Winter Wonderland, as I soon found out- I started my walk to work by falling flat on my ass when I hit a patch of ice hidden beneath the snow. From the sound of spinning tires that echoed around the town, many drivers found themselves in similar situations throughout the day. 

View from School #4

There are few places in Sisian without spectacular mountain views, but even given this, I think that the view from School #4 is particularly nice.

It's really wonderful to walk into the teacher's lounge in the morning and look out the window to see the mountains looking back at me. 

The Food Room

In School #4 there are two teacher's lounges. The official lounge is large, a little chilly, and doesn't see much use. The real teacher's lounge is a small storage closet just next to the official lounge, that I have taken to calling the Food Room.. In the Food Room, there is a long table, some chairs, and- most importantly- a teapot and a fire hazard. I mean a hot plate.

In between classes, teachers come to the Food Room to make themselves and each other cups of Armenian-style coffee on the hot plate (which, and I cannot stress this enough, is a fiery death just waiting to happen), and eat snacks. Everyone brings something: some fruit to be cut up and shared, or walnuts, or candies, all of which are left on the table and eaten over the course of the day. The teachers lives seem to center on this room.It is where they snack, socialize, and decompress between classes. It's also a place of commerce: many teachers bring clothing or makeup that family members in Russia or the US have mailed them to sell. Several times a week, I'll walk into the Food Room and find that it's been transformed into a little khanute (an Armenian word meaning "store" or "shop").

I like the Food Room in general- dangerous hotplates of death not withstanding- but it does pose one significant challenge in my life: because it's purpose is so social-centric, it's not a very productive space in which to work. Conversations about lesson planning are constantly side tracked by the necessary social rituals of coffee, snacking, and chatting that are so important in Armenian culture. Unfortunately, because it is warm and there are snacks, the Food Room is my counterparts' preferred space for lesson planning. Which means we get about 5 minutes of actual work-related discussion accomplished over the  course of an hour. This is difficult for a task-oriented American, but makes complete sense to a relationship-oriented Armenian.

I think that eventually, I'll want to move our lesson planning out of the Food Room and into the official teacher's lounge, but I'll participate in the social aspects of the Food Room a little while longer. If they are so important to my counterparts, I feel I should make an effort to appreciate their significance before pushing them aside in favor of my own priorities.

Besides. The official teacher's lounge will be warmer in the spring. I have a complicated, love-hate relationship with that hot plate.

Storm Clouds

The weather here is generally still holding to a brisk autumn, with occasional brief snowfall. But today I had to rush home from work ahead of an afternoon rainstorm, which rolled into Sisian from the southeast. The sun was low in the sky, so its rays snuck beneath the storm, lighting up the town in stark contrast to a backdrop of dark storm clouds. I made it home just in time to take the laundry off the line, before light drizzle turned into real rain.

Prince Mountain

Shahumyan may have had Mount Ararat, but Sisian has a mountain of it's own to be proud of. Called Ishkhan Sar, or "Prince Mountain", I first saw him when Sasha and Andrea took us to see Zorats Qarer.

At that time, I didn't realize you could see him from Sisian proper, but today I took a slightly different way to work. I rounded a corner, and suddenly there he was- taking up practically teh entire horizon. It took my breath away.

I found them!!

I finally found them! I knew there were farm animals in Sisian! Today, my long search yielded results: 3 calves were staked to a post right off the town's main square! Boom. Cows.