First Week of School

9th March 2018

Afternoon light on the valley

I think I had forgotten how hard I work in a school in Bhutan!!  And how welcome I am as part of a school community, and how appreciated my efforts are…and…and…and…

It is truly delightful to be back.  Yes, there have been some interesting moments this week but my overall impression, as I sit on the balcony of my hotel room in the late afternoon light on Friday is one of joy and comfort.  And the comfort is more than just the physical comfort of the relative luxury of the Vara Hotel.

The view up the valley.

So I did elect to pay more to have a room to myself.  A luxury I enjoy.  Joan is reaping the benefits of that.  As my BCF reading teacher partner at the school, she therefore gets a room to herself, although she did not elect that option.  The room is spacious with twin king single beds pushed together in my room to make one enormous king sized bed that gives the impression of needing a packed lunch to cross.  There is a comfortable window seat, a small table with the TV (which is now littered with the chargers for my electronic gadgets), a couple of small storage cabinets and a very adequate bathroom with a decent mirror, a comfortable shower (and bucket to wash my clothes – after I made the request), basin and toilet.  The balcony is big enough to house a small party and overlooks the patchwork of terraced fields stepping down to the banks of the Puna Tsang Chhu.  The river here is quite wide and slow, very gentle with sandbanks and looks like a river nearing the end of its course before joining the sea.  A very deceptive appearance because further downstream it becomes far more active.  At this time of the year, towards the end of the dry season, it is blue, and right now, a deep, steel blue, in this late afternoon light.

Our young friends Jigme and Tula in front of the hotel

In some ways the area on this side of the riverbank is a little unusual for Bhutan, it has the appearance of being relatively flat, although the terracing of the fields suggests otherwise.

In the centre of the terraced fields is a lone, traditional 2-story house with an immediate backdrop of trees, which include what appear to be a number of eucalypts.

On the other side of the river, there are a few hills (in Tasmania they would be mountains…)  To my left, are some villages, including that which leads to Chimi Lhakhang – the temple of the “Divine Madman”, the eccentric saint Drukpa Kunley, the story of whom brings to my mind The Life of Brian “He’s not the Messiah, he’s just a naughty boy!”

A traditional house in front of a grove of Eucalypts

Beyond that are the overlapping spurs of the valley of the Mo Chhu, leading to the snow-clad peaks at the head of the valley – peaks we have seen on the only one clear day so far.

We are a short walk from the vegetable market, shops, cafes and the Lobesa Hotel – a range of luxuries that I could only dream of having easily available when I was in Kheni. 

The school is up the hill behind us, clinging to the hillside on 4 different levels, which makes a small trek of moving between a class in the lowest block which houses the 3 pp classes and class 1A and class 3 on the highest level.  I foresee a change in my girth over these 4 weeks!  

Dusk from my balcony

There is a shortcut to the school – of course.  This is Bhutan, there is always a shortcut if one is on foot.  Fortunately the shortcut is actually a cement path and cement steps, although in the monsoon season I suspect it would be slippery from the needles of the chir-pines and the read earth that makes its way onto the path.  So it takes about 10 minutes to walk from our rooms to the staffroom.

The oldest part of the school houses the younger classes and the floorboards are very uneven, I suspect hand-sawn half logs, with many gaps between.  The walls defy attempts to whitewash to brighten up the inside and at least one teacher was busy trying to enhance her interior décor with a length of cloth attached to the wall.

These rooms are really very small, and the choice of these for the younger children is probably appropriate – though the size of these classes is in the vicinity of 30.

The school is a day school only and has no multi purpose hall, but does have a 3-sided sheltered stage on the side of the assembly ground.

Assembly in front of the national flag

On our first day we started with a meeting with the Principal (addressed as Principal, Sir) and Head of (English) Department, Mila Sir, and the timetable coordinator, Sonam Sir.  At the suggestion that we should make ourselves available to all classes and therefore teach 15 different classes each in the first week, I confess to being assertive in a way that is quite foreign to many Bhutanese and suggested that was not a good option and perhaps we could achieve the same outcome by teaching 4 periods to each of 4 classes per week.  After a bit of discussion and clarification, this concept was adopted and in due course we spent the afternoon with Sonam Sir working out the timetable for each of us for the 4 weeks.  We also were treated to another guided tour of the school and a visit to a class 5 Science class while our guide set some work for his students.

At assembly:  class PP in the "stage" ar

It was decided that we would not be required to attend Saturday morning school – an idea I happily agreed to.  There are opportunities for exploration in the local area, although I have already visited some of the more significant sites, and I also want to spend some time with both Zangmo and Phub, who are living and working relatively closeby (well, 4 hours or so drive away…)  We are also to conduct PD sessions while we are here – at least 4 sessions.  I mentioned my passion is gifted education and I would be happy to conduct a session on that topic also.

Rewarding class 3 hard workers

So, my first day of teaching classes gave me 3 class 1 sections and a class 3 section.  The class teacher was there for the first of my class 1 sections, I had a free period then the class teacher was with me for the third period with class 3A.  They went really well, and the class teacher for class 3A was grateful for the teaching ideas and strategies I demonstrated.  For the last period before lunch with class 1 B and the class after lunch with class 1C, the class teachers were not present.  Interesting.  I have no formal training for working with class 1, other than with Life Education, so my classroom management technique for that age is principally use of vicarious reinforcement.  When the students don’t understand my accent, that just does not work.  Result:  Chaos!

So, a couple of conversations with the class teachers to tell them I really wanted them there – benefits to them, benefits to me, benefits to the students.

Joan’s experience was even worse.  She had no teachers attend their classes with her and she had 3 class PP sections and a class 2.  She’d come back her room after classes and gone to find a beer.  There was much debriefing over dinner at the Lobesa!

Rewards for hard works in class 1

Wednesday was no assembly but reading period instead, so I went down to assist with reading period for the class I was scheduled to take first:  the class of the class 1 section for which the teacher had actually attended the day before.  No teacher.  I took them for the reading period, reading them 2 “Spot” books I had brought with me and then proceeded to take the lesson on my own.  Not as bad as the classes the previous day when the teachers did not attend, but not the best.

I caught up with the class 1B teacher between classes and she said she was visiting the Gewog office, and would be back….she made it back for the last 5 minutes.  The class was marginally more subdued to start with, as she had scolded them, but there were a number of children who were rather naughty and one request to go to the toilet snowballed.  I allowed only one boy, one girl at a time.  I figured that the snowball effect requests were not truly needs based and fortunately I was right.

So, with class 1, we read stories:  pretty simple stuff – go through any vocab they might need, read to them with them following then reading together.  After doing that 4 days in a row, try some partner reading…. The latter was probably quite a new activity for them, especially this early in the year.  To some of them actually being asked to read themselves seemed a bit of a shock!

We also learned body parts through playing “Sonam Says…” and I introduced them to  “Look cover write check” as a way of learning to spell words.  That was challenging to some of them also!  On the last day we did a “spelling test”  - drawing a face and labeling the parts from memory (having first revised the names of the parts with the whole class).  As I had not specified that it was a “test”, I was pleased to see a few students looking back in their books to see how to spell words, but then concerned that any word starting with the correct letter might be copied….

Class 1C classroom

We had fun in class 3 with “bossy E” and their pronunciation seemed pretty spot on after a bit of that 3 days in a row.  I’d read them a Bhutanese story, having first gone through any vocab that might be challenging and was impressed by their extensive vocab.  The class teacher asked if I could introduce adjectives, which I did, and we had a lovely competition amongst the classroom groups at their tables to see who could find the most adjectives to describe particular nouns, and points were only awarded to those groups which could provide new adjectives from the list compiled during a measured time.  For this class that required 8 rounds so each table would have a chance to give their words first.  We didn’t quite get through all groups before the final bell, but their class teacher thought she would finish the competition – about which I was pleased.

It was quite nice to hear from 2 of the teachers that they would be using teaching ideas I had demonstrated, though none of what I did was really rocket science.

It was also great that the principal, when I suggested it to him, agreed that time spent observing our classes could count as PD hours for the class teachers.

Class 1B classroom

I’d been sitting having a drink with Joan on Wednesday when I realized that we’d not had it confirmed whether PD would be Thursday or Friday so I made use of my recently acquired phone number list and called the principal to check – Thursday it would be.  So the remainder of the evening was spent putting together some ideas for encouraging reading.  Joan, with apologies for being negative, suggested some ideas were less than realistic, but many were only what had been promoted during the national reading year during 2015, so I was not really introducing anything new.  At Joan’s suggestion, we both introduced ourselves in the context of our professional expertise more thoroughly to the staff. 

Class 3 classroom

During the week I shared a couple of ideas with Head of Department Mila Sir; one a poster competition to encourage reading and the other an extension of the limited book buddies program in which older, weaker readers could be coached to read a particular storybook well, with the aim of reading to younger children.  He was enthusiastic about both ideas, and I prepared formal proposals for both.

Reward for good work

The poster competition was signed off by the principal when Sonam Sir came to talk to me about possibly incorporating it into celebrations for clean water day.  Thoroughly unsure about how this might work, and Sonam being interrupted from the conversation by a small boy with a head injury that needed attention, the conversation was postponed until the morrow.  As I arrive at school the next day, he told me that the poster competition should go ahead as planned – he and Mila Sir had discussed it. So I made the announcement in assembly, with a Dzongkha teacher also delivering the announcement in that language, at my request, for the benefit of those who may not understand my accent.

Dinner tonight at the Lobesa hotel was table service rather than buffet.  We were, of course, served a huge amount of food – not from the menu, what had been prepared was delivered to the table and since it had already been brought to our table, we requested that the leftovers be packaged up for us.  As we left, we both agreed that such a request was quite OK but to request that we take away from the buffet was a much more difficult conversation!  Even though what I would put in a lunchbox for the next day would be way less than what was packaged to take away.

Though, there would be the advantage that if we were to be taking rice and other dishes for lunch, our colleagues may consider that to be more real food than the couple of slices of toast and the boiled egg or part of an omelet that has comprised my lunch!