Teaching Mongolians About Mongolia

At its best, teaching is an essentially open source pursuit.  As a teacher, you should steal/borrow as many ideas as you can, mould them to your students' (and your own) strengths, and pass them along to anyone who asks.  It's many things but teaching is not an art, in which your individual creativity trumps your commitment to making everyone around you better.  Half of the struggle as a young teacher is learning enough activities that might work (and when to use them) in various classroom situations, so that your teaching is varied enough to keep the kids engaged in your lesson and on board with your goals.

I share, borrow and steal at will from any and everyone, whether from supervising teachers during my pre-service days or from friends at schools or from my teachers whose lessons or activities or even just their classroom persona have stuck with me for a long time afterwards.  I had a couple English teachers in Grades 11 and 12 who had a "Words of the Day" exercise.  One word would be a "serious" word that we might be able to use in essays and the other would be "silly" one, usually ridiculously long, complex or completely made up.  At Brimbank, I lifted the concept and added a "Words of the Day" wall to try to improve the concept by making the words literally part of our classroom landscape.  I'd refer to the words posted during lessons and implore the kids to use the serious ones when they were working on essays or questions or debates we'd do in class.

In Mongolia, though, I've been mostly teaching Geography (and one lone class of World History), which has meant that the bank of learning activities I'd been building up has been mostly useless.  One activity though that has carried over after a slight tweak are the Words of the Day, which has been recast as the "Country of the Week."  Basically, I choose a country and, for the first 10 minutes of class, we talk about its location, its size, its literacy rate, its population, its major products and 3 or 4 issues that it has to deal with.

The idea is to expand the kids' knowledge of the world, especially in regions like the Middle East or Africa or South America that they have have no direct experience in or have ever been taught.  So, even if they've struggled through say the concept of the linear model of rural settlement, they've taken on some cool facts about Argentina's massive production of soybeans and its detrimental effects on the country's environment.  When it works, the kids will be offering their guesses about the country's literacy rate or its major products, and I'll either confirm their guesses or, more usually, offer the real facts and tell some stories about the country.  Sometimes, I spin off activities off of it to connect with the concepts we're working on in class (mapping, population density, agriculture, tourism, etc.) and, other times, we move on and talk about something else.  I'm still refining what I do and what its exact purpose might be but my general idea is that the students are so deficient in world awareness and geographic skills that any activity that sticks with them is a plus.

During the last week of term, with a 3 week holiday approaching and midterms on during the mornings, I had a series of classes with all of my Geography classes which were generally useless for starting new topics.  Some of these classes took place before the Geography exams, so we did some revision for the test, which was, to be honest, half hearted since they were mentally exhausted after 4 or so hours of exams.  In the middle of the week, I decided to do a special Country of the Week instead of studying.  After considering something tiny like the Holy See or something famous like the United States, I decided on Mongolia since, basically since the start of the year, the kids had been calling out for it to be anointed as my CotW.  As soon as I announced the week's CotW, a cheer rose up from the class.

As we went through the usual facts and stories, what was most striking wasn't that the kids knew their own country but they had no idea about its facts, its challenges, its strengths, or its fuck-ups.  When I asked if anyone knew the number one product of the country, no one knew it was copper, or of the importance of copper at Oyu Tolgoi to the country's present and its future.  They didn't know about corruption or how widespread it is in Mongolia or why it might be even a problem to pay bribes from time to time.  When I asked about the country's problems, the answer I got back was universally China, which in some respects is completely true.  When I asked why China was a problem, they answered that the Chinese were inferior, weak, racist against Mongolians, and plotting to take over the country.  Their views, I have little doubt, are just parroted versions of what they hear from their parents, on TV, in the school yard and in the streets of UB.  Their personal experiences with Chinese (in Beijing, in UB) were, for the most part, "OK" in their own words.  The nationalism of youth is a purer form, untarnished by cynicism and buttressed by a type of unshakable confidence that we usually lose when we become adults or else become sociopaths with southern cross tattoos (or your own county's equivalent).

In the end of the activity, I led a discussion of what Mongolia needs to do to lead to the future that it desires.  We talked about the need to improve the relationship with China and that discrimination is a two way street and that both sides must improve their approaches to one another.  We talked about how they could be the ones who start that process, and that the ideas that we hold and the way we practise them will influence the future.  We talked about why corruption was a bad thing for the country as a whole. We talked about how Mongolia needs to diversify its industries, to move away from mining to avoid the dreaded resource curse that has befallen so many other nations (and a few previous Countries of the Week).  In this discussion, I found myself in a position that I never thought I was at all going to ever end up in: teaching Mongolians about Mongolia.

As the class ended, I asked if they had thought they had learnt anything about their country.  A quiet murmur ringed around the room as they thought about it.  And then a student put up her hand and said, simply, "Yes."

An Educational Essential

At the school I taught at in Australia, there was a vice principal named Jim, who was a thoroughly decent fellow.  A technocrat by comportment, one of Jim's major tasks was compiling the school's term calender.  On an almost weekly basis during the regular morning meetings, Jim would offer updates about minor changes to the existing calender ("The English meeting will now be in B205, not B210!"), as well as the ongoing progress of the next term or two ("We're working on it.  I'll have a draft copy in a few days.") or if he was going to send said draft out to the entire school ("Version 3 of Term 3 will be in your inboxes by 11 AM today").  Jim's calender status reports were unrelenting in their frequency and detail.  At times, as he spoke, I would zone out, or, if I was really a jerk, I'd check any number of social networks.

I now know that's Jim's task was absolutely essential to a normal, functioning school.  I should have been riveted by his speeches and thankful of all the hard work he put into it.  My current school has a calender but it's vague, poorly thought out and constantly changing.  There are no updates from our Jim.  (There is no Jim, come to think of it.)  There is no apparent process behind the changes that come through.  Some of the changes are unavoidable:  the Mongolian government declares a holiday in a week's time or to prolong winter break because of the cold or perhaps half the school comes down with self inflicted dysentery.  Other changes are due to the prioritisation of educationally deficient activities such as the talent show or a prom that cancelled an entire day's school for all grades although the prom was only for kids in grades 9 to 11.  Jim though did his thankless job and kept a chaotic school (in many ways) basically on track.

A few weeks ago, I took some time to take stock of how each class was going and whether my plans were on track, despite the constant days off for made up holidays and intramural competitive dance and singing competitions.  After that audit, I planned out the last few weeks of term, to try to force some shape (the reflection stage of the 5 step learning cycle) on the term.  Unlike first term's dysentery imposed hurried conclusion, I wanted to give some logic to the end of my sequence.  I set up some enquiry projects for the kids to do, and planned out some mandated monthly tests to wrap everything up neatly.

Unfortunately Christmas (I took 2 days off) and New Years (everyone got another 2 days off) tripped up many of the enquiry projects, which turned out to be more formulaic and teacher directed than I would have liked.  We're supposed to give tests every month (I do one every unit, which takes 8 to 10 weeks) which are more hassle than they're worth due to rampant cheating and low written skills in English.

In any case, last Thursday, I wrote 2 versions of the grade 6 test and I went to get them copied.  At our school, there's a person whose entire job is to make copies for teachers (and sometimes take payments for notebooks and stationary from students).  She's slow and inefficient in that Mongolian kind of way, which makes the process of getting a few photocopies into a laborious, frustrating and useless process to be only undertaken if absolutely necessary.  This time was even more of a endurance test: she asked me to get written permission from a person in the administration for these copies.

I said sure, but cursed under my breath and ran to the opposite side of the school to get approval, which was instantly given.  As I left the administration's office, the high school coordinator asked me if these were the midterms for Grade 6.  Midterms?  I hadn't heard of any midterm week.  It wasn't on the calender.  It hadn't been mentioned to any foreign teacher.  Bullshitting and thinking quickly, I told her that they were, and she then informed me that I also needed to write midterms for grades 7, 8, 9 and 10 geography, as well as grade 8 history.  And these tests needed to be done on Friday, i.e. tomorrow, a day in which I taught 6 straight lessons (from 10:30 to 3 basically) without a break, as well as had to go to the Chinese Embassy to apply for a visa.

I wrote the tests, I got the visa, I taught the classes, and then we had a dinner party that night.  It was an exhausting day but I got through it.  The real test has been this week, where the midterms have happened in the mornings and then a new, extremely random schedule was drawn up for grades 6 to 8 in the afternoon.  The schedule, naturally, didn't have any times attached to it and the bells were turned off so the transition between classes has been random guesswork.

In the past 3 days, I've marked about 250 or so exams and then written reports for each of these students.  Reports here doesn't mean the same thing as in Australia where typical reports are immensely detailed exercises, but instead an old school 1 or 2 line brief statement per kid, which is fine except when you have 20 kids named Munkh across all the classes, most of whom do not excel or fail enough to make themselves conspicuous.  I know most of the names and I know all the faces now, but it's hard to find enough to say about each kid, especially when I have so damn many to think about.

It's all done now and tomorrow, which is supposed to be a "normal" school day though I have nothing prepared because of all the grading and writing, I jump on a flight out of UB.  We're going to Indonesia for 2 weeks and, in typical Aussie fashion, we'll be making a side trip to Bali, and then back to Beijing for a week before we touch back down at the familiar, unfriendly confines of Chinggis Khan International Airport in early February.  I might not be able to write for a few weeks, but I'll try my best.