Found In Ceylon

I hate to blog as if I’m ignoring what people are asking and remarking in the comments, so here’s my Talkback. When I get enough questions, I’ll write one of these where I’ll tackle as many as I can without going into too much detail. Here goes:

Sophie: Your reports are so articulate about how the Rohana School is… Well done Adam for recognizing and understanding the situation SO quickly… it took me much longer!

I really can’t take the credit…it goes to you, Sophie. Your report explained it all, and your hard work over three months made all the difference. I really do not do well in situations where I am presented with a blank slate and asked to make something of it; you, obviously, excel in this area. I’m only building up on what you’ve done here, and the kids remind me of it daily when they say something about you! I’ll write you an e-mail soon; I gave tests to about half the kids I’m teaching, and many of them did so well (80% and above)!

Bobby: I think it would be a great teaching moment to explain to the deaf students at Rohana what’s happening at Gallaudet and to show them that deaf people around the world are fighting for their rights as human beings.

I think that I would like to do that. My skill in the local sign language isn’t up to par yet for me to start talking about human rights. Many of them were shocked when I explained that there was indeed a deaf university in America named Gallaudet. Their consciousness-raising will continue!

Amanda: Are you planning to be a matron there?

No. I arrived with the full intention of staying in the dormitory, but everyone, and I mean, everyone, told me it was a bad idea. No privacy and I’d be exhausted all the time from talking/trying to sign/trying to understand. I’m not going to be stubborn and think I can handle it, but I hate leaving the campus at 4-5 PM every day; the light does go out of their eyes a little. But usually by that time, my brain’s shut down (I begin work there at 7:30 AM) and I really can’t understand a thing the kids say to me; it’s all Martian to me. Anyway, for now I’m still at Nerissa and David’s house, although I do expect to move to a guesthouse in the next couple of weeks. But I said that two weeks ago.

Gloria: are they fluent in their language?

As far as I can tell, the students are fluent in Sinhala. I say, “as far as I can tell,” because I can’t understand Sinhala, so, for all I know, they might be writing gibberish. I raised this issue with the principal this morning and plan to explore it further. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them had low levels of fluency like many deaf Americans with English. My Grade 7 kids are learning the ABCs because no one has ever taught it to them before. They’ve been copying English passages more as if they were intricate pieces of art rather than the building blocks of language.

Peggy: Adam welcome to the world of education… Ideas like language pragmatics and meaningful writing are replaced with teaching to the test and completing the currriculum. Sometimes it seems like all hell is going to break loose if you don’t get the students to work to page “X” in the curriculum guide, then the work has to be met with a certain profeciency so you can hurrry up, finish and get to the next level.

Tell me about it! Thankfully, I don’t have to teach the book here; and I think the teachers at the school are a little relieved about that, although I think they daren’t admit it to me. However, one of them–the sole deaf teacher–approached me earlier today about doing a class after school for any student who wants extra practice in English, so I’m going to do that tomorrow afternoon. I hope to use a whiteboard…the chalkboards are killer.

Adamzmom: Do you have any idea how deaf some of the students are?
It sounds as though English is being taught as a first language. Are they allowed to learn Sinhala? [...] Do most live there? If so, they probably have not been exposed to many good role models for the languages. Are you sure you know EVERYTHING after just a couple days? HMMM. A great challenge for you! I’m sure the kids like you already. How do they adapt to a foreigner? How is the teacher/student ratio at RSS?

Sinhala is being taught as the first language, that’s for sure. They don’t start using English textbooks until Grade 3; all other subjects are taught in Sinhala. It’s rather disconcerting to read a math book and not understand it because so much of it is written in a non-math language! And you’re right, Mom…I don’t know everything! I get the basic gist of it…but I’m learning every day. For example, I just figured out why some students are having a hard time grasping the concept of capital and lowercase letters–Sinhala has just one script for its alphabet (no lowercase or cursive), and fingerspelling doesn’t have letter cases, either. So for English to have uppercase/lowercase print letters is something new for them. I have to be careful not to slip into cursive writing because they literally can’t read it; a cursive “l” looks to them like an “e.”

Amanda: i thought the report I read from the previous volunteer touched upon a certain degree of privitization, not so much by a company, but rather no longer getting government support. about the educational centers that are owned and managed by private organizations with meager assistance from the govt

Sorry for the confusion! No, the education is completely public and regulated by the Colombo government. I’m not an expert on the educational bureaucracy, but I get the feeling that the education system is completely uniform nationwide, unlike America where we have all the state and county and district school boards with different standards, etc. All the kids in the entire country wear the same school uniform. Principal Abeygunawardana told me this morning (we tend to have a morning chat every day) refers to the government often, as if it is his immediate superior.

Niknws: 1) Have you looked into the connection between reading and writing? [...] Do you have ESL experience? [...] It seems apparent the children understand grammar if they are able to compose in the way you are stating they can. It is the “gap” that could use assessing. A good place to start would be to assess whether they can spell (writing) in their own language and spell in SSL. Is the spelling carrying over between the two native languages?

No, I don’t have any ESL experience. I somehow thought that perhaps my bilingualism would help out here (and it has, don’t get me wrong), but the lessons I’m teaching are so basic that I can’t remember learning them myself because I was too young to remember how I learned them in the first place. One of my focuses is solidfying the connection between reading and writing, because there is definitely a gap there. Some kids are able to recite the fingerspelled alphabet perfectly but can’t write it down correctly! They definitely can spell and write in their own language, but English and Sinhala are so different and I, unfortunately, don’t know Sinhala and am halfway fluent in Sinhala Sign Language too, making for a messy, but fun, teaching experience!

AdamzSis: Do tell us at some point how you teach ‘em in a language you don’t know and how they understand you. With the mesh of BSL, ASL, and bits of SSL, I’m wondering just how you’ll teach them basic command of English.

Tell me about it! After a lesson on man/woman/person and their plural forms, I went to teach them how to read, “How many men/women/people are in this room/school/country.” It quickly devolved into messy bilingualism as I was telling them to ignore “are in this” and read “How many” as one unit and do it all in sign language…oh boy.

Tayler: Does this mean you may be returning to Sri Lanka after January?

I honestly don’t know.

Sasha: maybe you could try to visit one or 2 other deaf schools and see how they are doing with english, and hopefull give u some more insight into the best way to teach them english. more knowledge always help.

I would love to do that. I’ll talk with David and Nerissa and see if they know anything about the other schools.

Last Friday morning, Amila and I rode onto the school campus in a green three-wheeler and were met by boys who looked distraught. It was a poya day; this meant no classes and a three-day weekend. Nothing for overactive boys to be upset about, right?

“Bald-Head is leaving! He’s leaving us!” they cried.

Rohana Special School employs three male matrons (or four; I’m never sure) to watch the boys who sleep in the dormitory. All are hearing, and none of them are remotely fluent in Sinhala Sign Language. Daily, their job shifts begin at 1:30 PM and conclude at 7:30 AM the next morning when the students assemble in front of the Buddha shrine for morning prayers.

Imagine being hours away from your home village, in the care of people who did not understand your language, and have not bothered to learn even after years of continued employment.

We–that is, all the people who have an interest in seeing Rohana become the best school in the country–wanted to see the male matrons go. All of them. So, after some behind-the-scenes work, one of them was finally on his way out the door.

Except that, on this Friday morning, it seemed as if we had gotten rid of the wrong one. The boys apparently didn’t despise Bald-Head (his sign name refers to his bald spot) .

“He helped me when I was sick,” Gayan said.

Priyathkara added, “He’s nice to me. The other two are so mean, they yell at us.”

What the boys were telling us now were contrary to what we had heard from all the past volunteers about this same person.

One day, Sophie asked Bald-Head what he would do if the boys’ dormitory suddenly burst into flames.

“I don’t care,” he replied.

Peter, another volunteer, worked at Rohana for one year and quickly became fluent in Sinhala Sign Language, while watching Bald-Head fail to even learn how to say “good morning.” He expressed to David that he wanted to strangle him daily.

Could this really be the same person that the boys so desperately wanted to keep around?

After a few hours, it became clear that Bald-Head, who was walking around the second floor red-eyed from tears, had voluntarily resigned. There was really nothing we could do. I felt terrible for the boys. So what if he couldn’t sign “how are you?” as long as he could help the boys and, as Gayan said, take care of them when they were sick?

A game of football proved to be a good distraction, and at the end of the day Amila and I headed back home. What followed was a long, long discussion between Amila, David, and myself on the importance of sign language as the primary language used at Rohana.

Amila and even I, in some small part, were leaning towards the “better of two evils” position — that it was probably better to just keep Bald-Head because, at the very least, he helped.

So we, as two deaf people, found ourselves in the remarkable position of being lectured by a hearing Englishman that the right to communication is, and should always be, unconditional at the school. Especially when considering the matrons, who act as the deaf children’s primary guardians.

Pretty quickly, I silently admonished myself for willing to settle for less. I grew up in a deaf institute–and while it was not a signing environment, I couldn’t imagine the torment I’d have to endure if my houseparents couldn’t understand anything I was saying.

Side note: I will admit that the boys are now left with the two worser matrons; it would have been infinitely better if Bald-Head could have stayed on until after the other two were dismissed, but sometimes you just have to take your chances as they come.

It took about fifteen more minutes before I was finally able to convince Amila, using my not-quite-fluent-yet-but-getting-there Sinhala Sign Language skills, that it was frankly ridiculous that Bald-Head didn’t know sign language. He had worked there for four years. Would a teacher for the blind be qualified if she didn’t know Braille? Could a teacher teach English if she didn’t know the ABC’s? The same rule applied here. If you don’t learn sign at a deaf school, you deserve to be fired.

David said it best: “People who do not learn sign language make deaf people disabled.”

I walked away from the intense discussion feeling a little dazed. On one hand, I had just attended a consciousness-raising session; Deaf power was surging through me.

On the other hand, I realized with sadness how I had taken communication access for granted in America. Sure, we have problems–audism/oppression at deaf universities, educating the ignorant about the ADA–but when all’s said and done, we have it pretty damned good back there.

Here we were, David and I, trying to convince a Deaf sri Lankan that matrons at deaf schools should be able to sign, and it took us thirty minutes.

In a country whose sign language vocabulary classifies people as either “deaf” or “people,” as if to imply that deaf people are not actually people, the widespread realization that communication access is a human right, not a privilege, is still far off.

A few minutes later, Amila repeated back to me what he understood from the discussion.

“Of course they should be able to sign.”

Mission accomplished.

Thursday was my first full day of teaching at the school. In two days at the Rohana Special School, I’ve just about learned all there is to know about English education for the deaf in Sri Lanka.

Despite my limited (but not for long!) fluency in Sinhala Sign Language, my inability to read or speak Sinhala, and my inexperience with the teaching profession in general, it’s already been clear that the students aren’t learning English now, and have not been learning English despite sitting through English classes since Grade 3.

If you look at their workbooks, they certainly look proficient in English. They’re writing complex sentences, answering fill-in-the-blank questions, and analyzing long English passages in their textbooks.

But when I reviewed vocabulary lists such as animals (dog, cat, hen, cow, snake, rabbit…) or sports (volleyball, cricket, football, carom, netball…), they had tremendous difficulty spelling out the words. One student tried to spell cricket like this: c-h-l-g-h-e-t.

Students’ levels of English skills varied wildly along the dimensions of reading, spelling, meaning, and usage. There are a few who are quite good at finger-spelling words using the British two-handed alphabet, but cannot decipher the same words when written on a blackboard. Nearly all of them show confusion within the lowercase b/d, t/l/i, e/c, and n/r/h letter groups.

One Grade 9 student insisted that I spelled “GALLE” wrong, and rewrote it as “Galle.” A few others, when fingerspelling the ABCs, could not reach the letter z without my assistance; the same was true for writing it out.

So what’s going on here? Their workbooks reveal an advanced command of English with deftly-composed paragraphs about Sri Lankan life, but classroom instruction shows their English levels to be rudimentary at best.

Sophie, the volunteer from the United Kingdom who worked at Rohana for three months (and went back to university in Scotland just three weeks before I arrived), wrote a wonderfully detailed report on Rohana’s English instruction. She wrote about this very same discrepancy between the workbook contents and the in-class exercises, and explained that the students, through “careful trickery (through looking at what words are in the same in the question as in the text), a skill in being able to copy, and a HUGE amount of guesswork,” are able to reproduce a high level of English use in their workbooks.

And the students have been doing this for years. Grade 11 is devoted mainly to preparing for the Ordinary Level (O/L) examinations, which I think are like a combination of the SATs and high school exit exams, to use American terms. To me, they look like the SAT II English Comprehension exam, covering adverbial clauses of condition, gerunditive terms, and using analytical reasoning to draw inferences from passages.

I remind you that the Grade 11 students at Rohana are still learning the alphabet.

The teachers have been powerless because the English syllabus is decided by the national education department in Colombo. No modifications have been made for instructing English to deaf students or even special-needs students, for that matter. As all teachers in Sri Lanka are government-paid employees, they are bound to the national curriculum; deviation from the norm can result in dismissal (and the salary is good enough to cause a glut of teachers in this country; one nearby school with 50 students has 25 teachers).

The last few days have been somewhat difficult as I try to absorb the magnitude of this problem concerning English education. For years and years, these students have been simply copying English passages from their textbooks into their workbooks. Imagine that…copying and guessing for seven years. Instead of teaching deaf children how to understand even the most basic English, Sri Lanka’s educational bureaucracy has turned them into glorified xerox machines. It makes me want to cry.

And now, what I’ve just said all concerns English. In America, we have enough difficulties teaching deaf students English, and it’s our primary language. In Sri Lanka, it’s a second language (or even a third; they also learn Tamil). What of their Sinhala, math, science, history, agriculture, art, and life skills proficiencies? Has the system also failed deaf students in these aspects? Should the meager resources expended on English education be allocated to other, more useful subjects instead?

Anyone who visits Rohana can see there is dire need for improvement at all levels. The first two changes would be to boost the allocation of money to deaf schools, which currently receive 50 rupees per student per month. That’s $0.50…for Rohana, which has about 100 students, it adds up to $50.00 a month (teacher salaries are paid separately by the government). The second change would be to initiate a nationwide dialogue on deaf education as it stands today and begin collecting change recommendations for educational reform.

Well, all talk for now, but we’ll see. For now, my task is to go back to the basics, build on Sophie’s past successes with the children (alphabet drills and basic vocabulary), and maybe even help them begin constructing basic English sentences.

Despite the sorry state of English education, the children are so, so delightful to be around. I’m already looking forward to Monday…it’s a sheer joy to be around them and to provide them with a radically different teaching approach. I have so much more to say about that…but later!

Did you know that yesterday was the International Day of the Deaf? I think it’s shameful that it’s such a non-holiday in America’s deaf community.

So yesterday, I was introduced to the deaf community living in Sri Lanka’s southern province (although most were from the greater Matara area). I’ve already been to the school a couple times, which have been supremely delightful experiences and will be detailed further in another blog, so yesterday isn’t the first time I’ve met a deaf Sri Lankan.

But for just about every single deaf Sri Lankan I’ve met so far, I am the first white/foreigner Deaf person they’ve ever met. As Nerissa said, I’m Justin Timberlake to them. There’s twenty of them surrounding me at any time, eagerly asking me questions like, am I married? 9/11? Did I go to university? Am I English or American? What’s that on my head? Am I really, truly deaf? Do I hate Pakistan? Do I have a girlfriend back home? What am I doing here? When do I go back? Did Iraq really go to war with Lebanon?

My only concern is that, between the school and yesterday’s IDD event, I’ve talked almost exclusively with men and boys. If conversation length could be measured in dollars, and with the way things have been going, women’d be earning $0.02 to every $1 that men earn. I mean, it’s a cultural thing, that’s for sure, but I don’t want to appear like I’m ignoring all the women here.

Back to IDD. The local deaf association, RSCD (I have the full name somewhere in my photos; will edit this later), put on a three-hour performance at the community center (where all this took place). It involved about ten separate Sri Lankan dances, two magic shows, a couple speeches, two skits, and a candle-lighting ceremony involving local important people like the police chief, the president of the CFD (Central Federation of the Deaf), the principal of Rohana, and a couple others. Of course, it was all interpreted in Sinhala Sign Language, so much of it went over my head.

It was delightful to watch the show, and afterwards, everyone wanted to know my opinion right away. I told them I loved it as I’ve never seen Sri Lankan cultural dance before, and that, considering their resources, they put on a better show with a greater audience turnout than many American deaf state associations could accomplish, and that they should be proud.

But honestly, it was clear that they didn’t need my validation. They already knew they pulled off a great IDD.

I have pictures and so many more words to say, but I have a meeting soon with the principal of the school, Mr. N. Abeygunawardana. I’m on a dial-up connection (230 kbps) but, again, once I move into a guesthouse, I’ll start using one of Matara’s internet cafes which have faster connection speeds (supposedly).