Steamrolling Towards Vacation

As a student, vacation could not come quickly enough. As a teacher, I want to say, “Wait a minute! I need a few more days here!”

Disclaimer: This is going to be another “telling” blog. I originally planned on writing only “showing” blogs (this is something I learned from Mrs. Zides’ AP English 12 class when we were writing our college essays. She’d admonish us to “show, don’t tell!” which basically means write a story using immersive and descriptive language instead of just telling it…or something like that). But the downside of “showing” writing is that you have to take much more time to compose it–at least, for me–and, I don’t know, it provokes a lot of self-criticism when I can’t find the right adverb or that phrase doesn’t sound eloquent enough. So, for now, we’re on “telling” mode together, people.

School ends December 8th. You know that old joke, “What’s a teacher’s three favorite words? June, July, August.” Except here it’s April, August, and December.

In Sri Lanka, vacations are scheduled differently. Instead of bunching the summer months together into a super-vacation, school is out for three one-month periods (Apr, Aug, Dec). I can see that this system has its plus–you spread vacation over more of the year which probably works better for families who may need their strong, energetic children around to repair the house, pull up weeds, or whatever.

Still, from an education perspective, it’s like chopping up brains into bits. Students learn all they can in three months, then they get one month off to forget it all. It must be discouraging for the teachers, but I musn’t jump to conclusions and assume this is actually the case. Besides, the teachers probaby love it.

But back to my present situation. School ends in a bit less than four weeks, but everything’s already going to hell. The Grade 10 and 11 classes are taking their year-end exams all this week. This apparently has the effect of making most of the teachers for Grade 6-11 (who rotate among themselves teaching their subject(s) to different grades) take this week off. Because, well, if two grades are out of commission, why bother teaching the other four, too? Yeah, it’s a real no-brainer.

The next two weeks aren’t too encouraging, either. Grade 6-7 have their exams next week, and 8-9 the week after that.

So I find myself with up to four–sometimes, six–teacherless classes at any point, and the bell schedule is practically defenestrated, so nothing makes sense anymore. It’s so fascinating to see how lax Sri Lanka’s school attendance policies are. Back home, all hell breaks loose if a school is unexpectedly closed for half a day; some districts would require the school to make up for it by tacking on an additional day of school at the end of the academic year.

I lament this loss of order (if what existed before Monday could be considered order) because I was really getting into the groove. Anne’s teaching techniques are truly lighting the kids’ imaginations on fire; and almost all the classes are now writing sentences. I have to remind some of them, however, to not just string words together and hope that I say that it’s proper English. I tell them to think of what they want to express first, then write it down.

A good example: Iresha wrote down, “cat is milk.” I asked her to sign the sentence to me. She signed it exact English: “CAT IS MILK.” I told her, “No, forget the English sentence. What are you trying to say?” She hesitantly signed, “CAT MILK.” I asked her if I came up to her tomorrow morning and signed, “CAT MILK!,” would that make sense? “No,” she said. “So write a new sentence and first, think of what you want to say before you write it down.”

It is a challenge teaching English sentence construction in Sinhala Sign Language; I’ve had to invent new signs for “nouns” and “verbs,” and really, how the heck do you explain what “is” is? I say it’s a verb that you put in when you don’t really have another verb to use. That seems to work for them.

To further enliven this trilingual environment in which I’m teaching, I’ve let the students teach me how to write Sinhala. I am really lucky here because the consonants in the Sinhalese fingerspelt alphabet are almost identical to the ASL alphabet. I can write more than twenty-five Sinhala words, and I can also write (with fair accuracy) any student’s name in Sinhala, too. It is really, really fun. The great thing about learning Sinhala words via fingerspelling is that, because it’s completely phonetic, I know how to say it right away.

This leads to a greater fluency in Sinhala Sign Language because now I can use the proper lip shapes to go with the signs. It can actually be more difficult to understand sign language if the signer’s lips are shut; despite linguists’ railings against ASL being thought as a signed mode of English, the lip-shape of English words used in conjunction with signs does make a large difference in making ASL more intelligible.

The same is true for Sinhala Sign Language; I feel that I am better understood, for example, when I mouth “pol” instead of “coconut” when I sign “coconut.” I find my Sinhala education to be quite agreeable, and I love that it’s a more balanced exchange of knowledge between myself and my students. It is unbelievable that I am able to fingerspell in Sinhala to my students despite learning the language only two weeks ago, but that many of the hostel/custodial staff who have worked at the deaf school for years still do not know how to fingerspell in their own language.

Once again, I can’t rush to judgement on that issue; have they been given the opportunity to learn? I’ll ask the children tomorrow if they’ve tried to teach their matrons the Sinhala fingerspelt alphabet.

In any case, the next few weeks look rocky in terms of teaching my planned curriculum. Actually, that’s a lie; I don’t even plan the night before what I’m going to teach. But, believe me, I do have some sense of direction of where I’m heading, however vague that may be. How much longer can I keep teaching new stuff before it becomes pointless fighting against the dreaded vacationentritis; in other words, when should I stop teaching and go into year-end review mode?

Perhaps I also need to just let go and enjoy the slower pace of schooling in Sri Lanka instead of trying to cling to bureaucratic, Western educational standards. After all, even the provincial government delivered today’s exam papers thirty minutes late to our school. Whoever heard of delivering state-level exams on the same day as the exam itself?

Jenny, another volunteer here in Matara, has wonderfully written up her perspective of Rohana Special School. I think it’s especially enlightening as it’s from a hearing person’s point of view.