Today I taught my last class of the semester – thanks to various holidays, tests, some kind of inter-class competition, and a two-week break, I won’t be teaching a normal class until after January 17. This information came as quite a surprise to me a week ago, and now, along with being appalled by how quickly time passes, I’m feeling guilty that I’ve barely mentioned teaching in this barely-updated blog.
“Postpone No More” suddenly seems like a very ironic title. Oops.
It has been a fun, bewildering, and educational first few months at SMA Negri 2. Officially I teach all of grade 10, each class for 90 minutes a week. In reality, I each more classes than that, because seriously, when a group of adorable, jilbab-clad girls comes up to me and says (huge eyes, often emphasized by creepy blue or purple contacts, pleading), “Miss Claire, will you join our class today?” it is pretty hard to say no.
High school here is three years, grades 10 through 12. After grade 10, students are divided by subject of concentration – at my school we have science and social studies “tracks.” It’s essentially based totally on test scores; the smarter students are pushed to do science, regardless of their actual interests or goals.
Unlike an American high school, where students move from classroom to classroom for each subject, students stay in the same room all day and the teachers come and go each period. This means that by the time I teach the last period of the day, my students have been sitting in the same room for like 6 hours (for this reason, I adore my early morning classes). Also, classes here are not of mixed ability; instead they are “ranked” by the scores they got on their high school admissions exams. So in grade 10, class 10-1 has the “best” students, and class 10-6 has the poorest students. This means I’ve had to learn to create activities that I can adjust for the level of each class, which was tough at first, but gets easier the more I get to know them.
Based on comparing my experiences with my fellow ETAs, I think my school is a relatively good one, as far as Indonesian high schools go. Here in Depok, public schools are considered much more prestigious than most private ones. Unlike the vast majority of Indonesian SMA students, over half of mine will go onto college, and many to some of the best schools in the country (a few are even applying to universities in Singapore and Japan – and I have my eye on a few eleventh graders who I think could be competitive for scholarships to the US).
Only about 60% of Indonesians graduate from high school, and only a little over 15% from university, so when I talk about my school, keep in mind that my students don’t necessarily represent what is “normal” in Indonesian education. Public school is not free here; you have to be able to afford tuition to attend.
Still, a lot about my school seems (from my American perspective) disorganized and confusing. Classes are big, most about 40 students, so its impossible for teachers to make sure they’re all actually paying attention and doing their own work. There is also no such thing as substitute teachers. If teachers are sick or have to miss school (which some do a lot), they just don’t show up and the students sit there for 90 minutes with no teacher. Can you guess who ends up getting to substitute a lot? J
The English curriculum isn’t as bad as I’d been warned it might be – I’d heard horror stories of English teachers who couldn’t speak English at all – but it is kind of bizarre. I really want to work my lessons into what the teachers are doing for the week, but it’s hard when their curriculum is so incredibly random. One day they might learn about “expressing happiness,” the next about advertisements, and the next about weather reports. There is little review of previous lessons or any kind of syllabus to provide the students with a structure for what they are learning. My counterpart claims they Indonesian teachers don’t understand the curriculum either, and have to go to special workshops that try to explain it to them (because it is so weird). Woo-hoo.
I’d say most of my students understand English well enough to follow my instructions and “enjoy” (who knows if they really do?) my lessons. There is a very clear correlation between students whose families can afford to send them to English classes outside of school (these are the ones who speak good English) and those who can’t (they are the ones who just copy others’ papers).
The English ability of the teachers is pretty varied. There are four English teachers at my school, and I’d say two speak really good English, one speaks decent English (and also does the most creative stuff with her students) and one who, um, kind of speaks her own version of English that I’ve had to learn to understand. The latter is the teacher I teach with the most.
This, I think, is the biggest problem with the way English is taught at my school. Even the best teachers just don’t have anything near a mastery of the language, which really hinders their ability to do anything creative or engaging with their lessons. They blindly follow the textbooks (which are full of mistakes) and give the students really dull assignments. Pretty much every day they do some sort of listening comprehension activity in which they have to fill the in blanks by listening to a passage being read. This would be fine, except the teachers themselves don’t understand the meanings of a lot of the words the students have to identify. So no one can ask questions about the language, and the teachers are afraid to really “teach” anything, simply because they don’t understand the answers.
Of course, most of this isn’t their fault at all – all the English teachers at SMA 2 work really, really hard and are very dedicated to teaching.
What am I doing in the middle all of this, you may ask? Well, a lot of being confused and probably failing to get my students to truly understand what I am trying to teach them, but whatever. I am getting better at it. More than anything else, if by the time I leave I can get all of them to 1) not be ridiculously shy about speaking English out loud and 2) think critically and creatively instead of copying each other or freaking out when I tell them there is no “right” answer, I’ll consider myself successful.
Most importantly: my students are utterly, fantastically wonderful. Even when they are being crazy and immature and making fun of my accent (they can do a pretty good imitation of an American drawl by now) instead of paying attention, I adore them. They are just so happy all the time. Nothing about this entire Indonesian experience makes me happier than arriving at school to be greeted by choruses of “Meeess Claire!” wherever I go.
It’s usually either that or a chorus of “Umbrella, ella, ella, ella,” because, yes, it turns out Rihanna makes a pretty great teaching tool. Though after singing “Umbrella” with 11 different classes, my god, I never want to hear that song again.
Name: Karen Collys
Name: Munin
Name: Maemunah
Name: Vin Diesel
Name: George W. Bud
Name: Paginem
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