An Alternate Witness

This article by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman really stands out for me as encapsulating a large part of the reason why I have come to the Middle East to teach. In this article, Friedman talks about the experience of opening a girls' school in Afghanistan with Greg Mortenson, author of the amazing Three Cups of Tea and builder of more than 200 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Friedman gives us many wise words from Mortenson, including this passage:

“When a girl gets educated here and then becomes a mother, she will be much less likely to let her son become a militant or insurgent,” he added. “And she will have fewer children. When a girl learns how to read and write, one of the first things she does is teach her own mother. The girls will bring home meat and veggies, wrapped in newspapers, and the mother will ask the girl to read the newspaper to her and the mothers will learn about politics and about women who are exploited.”

I was just telling Keri last weekend that one of my goals as a Peace Corps Volunteer was to inspire great mothers, girls who would grow up appreciating the value of education, and, even if they weren't able to pursue it themselves, would push their own daughters to do well in school and go on to University. Someday maybe I'll make the kind of impact Mortenson is making.

Finally, this both surprised and encouraged me:

Mortenson said he was originally critical of the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he’s changed his views: “The U.S. military has gone through a huge learning curve. They really get it. It’s all about building relationships from the ground up, listening more and serving the people of Afghanistan.”

Is today's education teaching our children to live in their world?

Leaving my job as a second grade teacher at the Modern American School here in Amman, Jordan, has made me rethink a conversation we frequently had in Peace Corps with Jackie and Lynn, who were retired elementary school teachers, and had been students in the American system fifty years ago. They would frequently say that Jordan's education system is about where America's was 50 years ago, and it would take time to catch up. I would say that the Modern American School may be where the American system was 40 years ago, but I keep thinking back to a video I saw on YouTube some time ago:



We can't afford to be stuck in an educational philosophy that is 40 years old. We can't even afford to be stuck in today's educational philosophy.

I don't know what the answer is. That's the whole point. None of us knows what the answer is, what our new teaching model needs to look like. But I know that it shouldn't look like this:

My math class was the hardest to teach, not only because I don't do math the way most people do math, but also because it was a class of extremes. I had one student who needed me to do every problem with her, because she couldn't remember how to do them from one question to the next. I also had about five students who finished their workbook pages in five minutes, finished four or five additional double-sided worksheets, and still had twenty minutes left in the class period, day after day. My mother suggested what seemed to me like a brilliant solution, which I proposed to my supervisor: Elementary school math books are designed to be more or less self-explanatory to students who are competent readers. Couldn't I just put my best students together at one table and allow them to teach themselves at their own pace? It was essentially what those students had been asking to be allowed to do for weeks.

Now, I know that my supervisor was thinking of the third grade teachers when she answered my question. The third grade teachers who would have those students next year, and have to fit them back into the officially sanctioned little boxes. I am sympathetic to my supervisor's answer, but I am shocked nonetheless by it. She said:

"Absolutely not! We can't have students thinking that they can learn by themselves!"

The parents of my students are being told and believe that they are getting the best possible education for their children. What their children are learning, however, is to work within a social system that will be completely irrelevant by the time they finish college. I'm not sure how to teach for that. I think it probably looks something more like the way I taught for nerd camp. What I know is that it's not the way I was being asked to teach the second grade.

There are those really amazing days in teaching when you can see a student finally get it, make that breakthrough that just makes your day....
And then there are days like this....

Bulqiis was one of my brightest first graders. She had learned every word in her vocabulary, she had learned at home to identify all the words and letters in the English alphabet, and she never gave me any trouble in a class that was often quite unruly. Like the Queen of Sheba whose name she shared, Bulqiis was already well on her way to being a very capable, admirable woman.

One day, as I was starting class, Bulqiis raised her hand. "Miss Maryah," she asked, "do you speak Arabic?"

"Of course. We're speaking Arabic right now. You hear me use it a lot in class." Too much, perhaps, though I needed the least amount of Arabic to get the lessons across to my first graders, who had not yet formed the habit of learning English through Arabic. But maybe, I was thinking, I didn't use as much Arabic as I thought, if Bulqiis wasn't sure I spoke the language at all.

Then she asked the question that burst my bubble. "Then why do you always speak to us in English?"

In my second year of Peace Corps, I taught English to the first, second and third grade classes. Perhaps the freshest of my first graders was Sarah, the daughter of an Arabic teacher who lived right next to the school. Sarah's sister Selsabeel was the star of my third grade and the darling of the teachers' room, and Sarah was determined to be different from her sister. I'm sympathetic to this; my sister was in a very similar situation, and eventually she transferred to another school to avoid being compared to me!

Sarah was clearly one of the fastest learners in my class, but determined not to let anyone know it. Sometimes I would walk around the room and ask the girls to point, say, to the number 3 in their books. With a big smirk, Sarah would point to the 4, the fox, the pencil, the 2, the ball.... Sometimes I'd wait for her to point to everything else on the page, and then ask her again to point to the 3, and she would start over, pointing to the fox, to the 1, to the pencil, to the 4.... Anything but the 3, which made it obvious that she knew exactly where the 3 was, but was determined not to let me know it. In addition to trying to act dumb, Sarah did her best to be disruptive. I would turn around to write on the board, and hear some little girl's voice, usually Bulqiis or another of my best students, say, "Miss Maryah, Sarah's sitting under her desk again!"

Every morning, when I entered the first grade classroom, Sarah would ask, "Miss Maryah, do you love God?"

"Of course I love God," was always my automatic response, and I would start class. Though an agnostic with polytheist inclinations at home in my Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Maryland, in Jordan I described myself as a Christian, at Peace Corps' suggestion, and because UUism is hard enough to explain in English!

One morning, however, Sarah tried a different tactic of distraction as I entered the classroom. It was midmorning, with early morning flurries and no heat in the school, and it was cold! As usual that winter, I was wearing pants over second-hand Eighties stirrup pants, two wool sweaters, a wool cloak and my mother's gift from my trip home to Maine the summer before: a big fleece hat . "Miss Maryah," said Sarah in her chipper little voice, "you shouldn't be wearing that hat! You should be wearing a headscarf!"

Without really thinking about the fact that these were only first graders, most of whom had seldom left the village and probably never met another real, flesh-and-blood non-Muslim, I said, "I'm a Christian. I don't have to wear a headscarf." With older children, this was often (but not always!) sufficient explanation.

Immediately, though, another little girl asked, "What's a Christian?"

"Christians are of a religion like Islam," I said. "They worship the same God, but they have different customs. For instance, they don't wear headscarves." I thought this ought to do it: a fairly simple, non-judgemental statement that no parent could take offense to as prosthelytism, with carefully chosen pronouns to not dig myself too deeply into my habitual white lie of being a Christian.

Not so. "Miss Maryah?" asked someone else. "Are you a heretic?"

This hit a little closer to home, and perhaps made my response a little more vehement than necessary. "No, no!" I said. "Christians are People of the Book; they worship the same God as the Muslims. Christians aren't heretics."

"Miss Maryah?" asked yet another first grader. "Are you a pagan?"

Cringing inwardly, I said, "No, no!" Things were starting to get out of hand.

"Miss Maryah?" someone else inquired. "Do you love Satan?"

With a quick "no," I started class with our usual full-body review of the four verbs they knew in English. "Alright, ladies. Stand up. Sit down. Stand up. Jump! Sit down. Stand up. Sit down. Stand up. Turn around."