Warning: grammar discussion ahead.

Madrasah orientation started upthis week, bringing a close four weeks of leisurely adjustmentto village life. On Monday morning, students flooded into the school’s courtyard to perform marching drills and hear speeches from the administration. Strangely, the day was officially dedicated to “planning” freshmen orientation, leaving me wondering why some students—especially the upperclassmen—even bothered showing.

Sensible or not, the general stirrings of productivity are probably what spurred my counterparts to begin planning for the semester. I hadn’t done much preparing on my own, and could only produce a translated list of classroom rules as my best effort. I’d hoped my English co-workers would see this and decide to take things slowly. However, no one took the hint. One explained, “Mr. Daniel, you’ve lived in Indonesia only three months, but can speak good Indonesian. You must teach our students to speak English like you speak Indonesian.”Running with that logic, they set the bar pretty high with my first task: to prepare a new English syllabus for grades X and XI, so my students can learn to “talk like native speakers.”

Though I’m sure they didn’t realize it, the teachers requested a difficult solution to one of the—if not the—greatest struggles English volunteers face in their Indo classrooms. Organizing a “Conversational English” syllabus itself wasn’t too difficult. Three semesters of college Spanish and my own Indonesian instruction left me plenty of ideas regarding where coursework should start and how it should progress. So in four days, I put together a syllabus that emphasized—at least to me—important elements of conversational teaching: a slow pace,focus on self-expression,and opportunities for reproduction. All Indo volunteers try to adopt this interactive approach in their classrooms in some form or another. It’s a model we’re familiar with, have faith in, and enjoy using. On the other hand, though, we’re also required to teach a national, “genre-based” curriculum that seems better suited to teaching comprehension/grammar than actual communication. The “native speaker,” then, finds himself wedged into a tight spot, pinned partly by teachers’ expectations that he’ll bring fluency to the mute and partly by his own responsibility to prepare students for the grammar-intensive national exam.

I’m hoping to relax my position by meeting my counterparts somewhere in the middle. When presenting the conversational syllabus, I noted that grade X students could dwell in the present tense for an entire semester while mastering some basic grammar. To me, time in the kiddie pool is well spent if it maximizes a student’s ability to survive the deep end later on. The existing curriculum, though, takes a different approach, figuring that real experience is the best teacher. For example, freshmen tackle the following in their very first unit of English: greetings/leave-takings, introductions, spoken announcements, telling past experiences, writing diaries, creating written accounts, and prepositions. Kind of like how a child learns from prolonged exposure to everyday conversation in all its complexities (tense, slang, diction…), so the Indonesian student is expected to retain a little from each encounter, the puzzle pieces sometimes fitting in chunks and sometimes not fitting at all (at least I think that's how it's expected to work). So while I probably can’t slow down my school’s curriculum to a speed that’s manageable for real, conversational achievement that requires substantial time/practice, hopefully I can use my native speaker expertise to at least simplify units and move between them in a natural, well-ordered fashion.

To make up for writing about syllabi this week, here are a few photos from the site.

(1) My bapak's rice paddy, Part I.

(2) A tiger headdress from a reoq performance in town

(3) My bapak's paddy, part II.

(4) Meet Akmal, my nephew. To his right stands my cousin Abid's Jaguar Vespa, one of the coolest rides in town.