Teachers - part 2

So, here we go with the first great teacher in my life.


Mrs Killock


I don’t know what happened to the music teacher that came before Mrs Killock in junior school but I do know she was quite an old lady and one day she was no longer there. She taught us all the old classic songs that still seem obligatory to learn as a child even now – ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’, ‘Doh, a Deer’ and some African jingle in words no one understands just to be ‘culturally appropriate’ so on. She was, in many ways, the worst kind of music teacher because the kids loved her and loved singing the songs and so never realised that we had learned nothing. We enjoyed it because it was an easy lesson – but we learned that music was not a subject to be taken seriously. I see many music teachers doing the same today despite the fact the in the UK we have a national curriculum to prevent this. The children have no idea that they are learning nothing because they are always singing new songs and think this constitutes learning – it doesn’t, it’s just called practice. I don’t want to belittle singing – rightly, it is there in the curriculum too because of the importance it has. I don’t want any singing teacher to think I dismiss it’s value. But oddly, I think such singing lessons have killed off choirs in the UK. Why?


Well, we should have learned from history. Specifically, the mistake the UK made over recorders.


The Plague of Recorders


After the Second World War there was a shortage of metal and, as a result, of instruments in the UK. A need for cheap instruments meant that the recorder (a simple, cheap instrument made from wood) became the school instrument of choice. Millions of children learned to play it extremely badly and most hated it after the initial fun of honking a few notes through it. The rest, who had potential talent, tended to think of it as a ‘child’s’ instrument and moved on to more ‘adult’ instruments like the flute or clarinet as they reached high school. The result was that the recorder, as a serious instrument with hundreds of years of tradition behind it has all but died. In nearly 20 years of teaching I have only ever met one student who took it as a serious instrument and had reached grade 8 by the time she finished her GCSEs. In making use of this instrument’s good points we killed it off. Hunted it to near extinction, if you like.


Singing in schools is having the same affect. Many kids hate it or, at least only tolerate it for the ‘free ride’ it offers for a handful of minutes. Those that like it usually only do because they see the lesson as a chance to ‘get out of doing any real work’. As a result, few go on to more serious choirs at high school age and very few ever think of joining a choir as adults. Once, in the UK, every town boasted a choir. Now, only a few do and most of those are struggling.


Well, Mrs Killock was totally different.


She got us on recorders admittedly (but the previous one had not even done that) and actually tried complicated arrangements with us. She did still get us singing which is fine I guess especially as the songs were more serious and less ‘childlike’. Actually, she varied the lessons really well in this respect long before ‘variety of pace’ was a buzzword amongst teachers. But it is not for these reasons I remember her.


Ludwig Von Beethoven


One day she started teaching us about Beethoven. She taught us about his life and played us recordings of his music. She taught us about his three periods of work and why each was different. And she expected us to learn and remember. There was to be a quiz.


I was hooked. I had never known about musical history before. I had never realised that composers had a story and led fascinating lives. Suddenly the music made sense instead of being boring. I understood that ‘fate was knocking on the door’ in the 5th symphony because Beethoven was going deaf, I understood why the 3rd was ‘heroic’ because originally it had been dedicated to Beethoven’s hero Napoleon. I was fascinated by the twist in the tale that Beethoven had scribbled out the dedication afterwards when Bonaparte had declared himself emperor and became a traitorous villain in Ludwig’s mind. I got a chance to glimpse into the soul of a tortured man for the first time.


I worked liked crazy for that quiz and when it came I answered the questions confidently. When she gave the results back and I was top of the class, both she and I were surprised (I had never shown any ability in class before let alone interest in music - I didn’t think I had any interest myself). This was something I could do. I could learn, I could read, I could understand. I had always thought music was just something you could either ‘do’ or ‘not do’. Now I knew I could, at least, learn to appreciate it if nothing else.


And that one event was enough to keep me interested during three pretty dreadful years that followed at high school (a story for another time involving unrequited love, death and betrayal) until I decided that I really wanted to learn music properly.


Variety is the spice of life


As a teacher I look back and realised that Mrs Killock was the first music teacher to give us variety of task. Instead of spending 40 minutes singing a small selection of songs a couple of times each week, we sang, played, learned to read music a little, learned history. We dipped our toes in the water of musical learning. I’m sure some hated the history, but loved the singing. I was the other way around. The point was that there was something for everyone.


I’ve learned in my own teaching that you can never please everyone all the time. I used to think that kids only wanted to learn about pop and rock music but soon found that when I actually taught modules on this more arguments broke out amongst the kids than with anything else. If I played rock then half the class would complain loudly. If I played pop then the other half would complain instead. Oddly, if I played classical and made it interesting – told them the story behind the music as Mrs Killock had done – then I never got complaints at all. They could see the point even if this was not the kind of music they normally chose to listen to.


Take up a hobby today


So, these days, I give variety where possible and I try to put variety in my own life too. I recommend it to anyone really. Life is too short to focus on only one thing or become so obsessed with work you have no room for anything else. I’ve just taken up Japanese for that reason despite being overloaded with learning Bangla and a few other useful languages. I’m doing it just for fun, for a few minutes each day with a Japanese friend giving me a little help once a week. No pressure, no tedious hours spent on it, just something new.


If you haven’t already done so, I warmly recommend you take up a hobby. Not to be good at it, just to do something a little different in your life. 10 minutes a day doing something new. It has become recognised in the Business world as well as many other places that some kind of activity that is purely for enjoyment is good for you and makes you are better employee. More importantly, if it involves physical as well as mental activity then there are many health benefits for you too. Sport, painting, juggling – anything really. You could even take up an instrument.


But maybe not the recorder. Please.

Teachers – Part 1

As I continue on my quest to find the perfect teaching method (and failing, I might add) I have spent many years pondering over which teachers in my own life I considered influential and why. I have known for some time that different teachers were special to me for different reasons but it is not a bad idea to reflect over just why they were special. Sometimes, it was the circumstances that made them special, a case of being the ‘right person at the right time’. Other times, they were just an amazing teacher and influenced many as a result.

As the expression goes “One man’s meat is another man’s poison” so it is probably true that some I will list were probably hated by others. Again though, there were a few who just seemed to be universally loved by all they taught. I would love to have been one of those kind of teachers and still aspire to get there one day. I am proud that over the years I have won over the hearts of some tough kids who found other teachers unpalatable but I know there were some I never reached and am sure I saw pure hatred in their eyes sometimes. Those children I feel I failed.

Still, you never know. I was recently very surprised and please when one young man I taught many years ago got in touch with me through Facebook. At school he had been a terror and I regularly had to tell him off or even give him detentions. He did not do well at school and was eventually expelled. But in chatting with him on Facebook he had clearly changed. He knew he had been a bit of an idiot at school and regretted it. He also had nothing but praise for my teaching and the times we spent together and was quite apologetic for his behaviour.

That really touched my heart and gives me hope that the few who got away and whom I just could not get through to maybe, at least, don’t hate me.

That’s my worst fear. That there may be young men and women around today who look back and think ‘eugh, Mr FP? He was horrible. He made my life miserable.’ If there are some like that and they happen to be reading this, then I hope they will forgive me.

But, I think it is always best to look at what has been positive in your life rather than focus on the bad and with this in mind over the next few blogs I will list my own top few best teachers ever. Maybe it will inspire you to think about your own choices. Feel free to comment about them here and add in to the discussion. You will notice that often I give criticism of teaching or teachers in general but this is not to knock my fellow teachers. Instead it is to give the background to why these chosen ones of mine were special and maybe give a context for yourself and your own teachers about why they were good or bad. My aim here is to show my favourite ones up in a good light and explain just what it is about them that I hope I have tried to pick up in my own life.

I will look at each teacher in chronological order and consider them as follows:

• As they meant to me as a student
• As they mean to me now as a teacher
• What I have learned about people as a result of their input in my life

I hope you find this, at least, interesting and maybe useful. If you grew up with me you may know some of these people and might like to comment about them yourself. If you are a student or ex-student of mine you might be interested in a different perspective on teachers. If you are neither of these you will, I hope, be interested in my thoughts on life stemming from these experiences. Feel free to comment on any of these things and I will endeavour to make sure your comment gets posted quickly.

Of Socks and Cucumbers

I live in a world where food tastes of socks, where men demand kisses from other men, where some worship belly buttons and cucumbers are known to ride three-wheeled bicycles.

Have I been imbibing some alcoholic beverage? Am I hallucinating? Is my beloved Bangladesh a den of iniquity and filled with mind-altering drugs or has the heat finally got to me and I have lost the plot?

Actually, none of the above (well, those who know me well may debate the last one). Instead, I live in the kind of world that is experienced wherever people from different cultures and languages meet. It is a wonderful place because those who are best in this world (such as myself – a definite expert in this area) are really the most incompetent. We excel because we fail - and in doing so are able to provide some humour, some ray of hope, some sunshine on an otherwise grey day for others to enjoy.

It is, of course, the world of communication (or, more accurately, miscommunication). It is a happy world because, in the very attempt to make contact with fellow brothers and sisters from a different culture to ours, we fail so miserably that the humour it creates actually makes a stronger bond than that which any correct communication would have achieved in the first place. In other words, everyone loves a guy who makes an ass of himself.

I could bore you with lots of examples of my own pratfalls here in Bangladesh, but if you know me you may well have heard them before and, over time I have picked up a few from others that make some of my errors just look amateurish. I share with you now – for your amusement and sage reflection – some recent ones I have heard as well as some classics. Almost all of them are from here in Bangladesh and, bar one, come from firsthand accounts.

Our own first attempts at Bangla were, of course, pretty awful. In a country where respect and honour are so very important, we did not ingratiate ourselves with our first ayah by constantly telling her that the food she gave us tasted of socks. There was all the difference, it seemed, between mOja (socks) and moja (tasty). In much the same way, I regularly used to imply to shopkeepers that their establishment had killed me (ami shesh) instead of informing them that my shopping was finished (amar shesh) and I was ready to pay.

A friend of ours here at our NGO went one better by asking her ayah if her clothes (hanging on the washing line) were pigs. Confused, the ayah tried to clarify the situation but the conversation took quite some time until both realised that the confusion lay over the words for pig (Shukor) and dry (shukna).

That same ayah, who is a good friend of ours, then made her own faux pas in the English language with us, a few weeks later when she kept asking us to squeeze her. Not that I would have minded actually but it is not the culturally done thing so it was mildly surprising from a young married Bangladeshi woman until it quickly dawned on us that “Squeeze me” was actually meant to be “Excuse me”. I’m so glad I resisted the British urge to please even when really not sure of what someone is asking and refrained from giving a bear hug.

Still, such small differences are easy to miss and all cultures have their little ways about them. The South-Asian ‘head wobble’ is one such mannerism that causes confusion. To us Brits it looks like “I’m saying yes but I’m not happy and don’t really want to do it”. To the Bangladeshi it can mean…well anything you want it to mean really! Usually it means yes, but don’t get on a Rickshaw on the strength of the head wobble and assume you won’t get a massive argument over the price when you reach your destination.

For this reason, one foreign couple came to a row of CNG’s (motorised scooters that, along with Rickshaws are the main forms of transport in Dhaka) and asked the one at the front if the driver would take them to a certain part of town. The driver appeared to say he didn’t really want to so, being good polite Westerners they moved to the next driver who also signalled that he wasn’t interested. And so they moved to the next and so on all the way along the line and eventually walked there instead. It was only afterwards that they came to realise they had misread the head wobble and all the drivers had been perfectly happy to take them. Still, the exercise probably did them good.

It is not just us beginners who make mistakes though. Nerves can attack anyone. One friend of ours who has lived here many, many years and speaks Bangla fluently attempted to give a talk to a crowded church about Jesus the Last Old Testament Belly button. Alas, our friend had not appreciated the similarity in sound of prophet (nobi) and belly button (nabhi) though Bangladeshis delighted in pointing out his error afterwards.

Children, of course, will make many errors and my son loves to babble away in Bangla bewildering our ayahs who look at him in much the same way that English friends do when he babbles just as bizarrely in English. He speaks well, but his mind is often on another planet – proof, if I needed it, that he is most certainly my son. No such excuse for our daughter who is older yet still aged her best friend by 10 years when wishing her a happy 23^rd birthday (teish) instead of 13^th (tero) recently.

I should stop at this point and make clear that I don’t pick on any particular type of person. We can all get it wrong and it is good that we do. When I first began teaching I was told a personal tale by my tutor of a teacher from France who came over to the UK to teach French there. Though able to speak English, she was nervous about using the language and made careful preparations. On her first day her class were standing outside her room waiting to be told to come in to the class in an orderly fashion and stand behind their chairs before being told to sit. Instead she greeted the class with “Good morning, pleeze sit down!”

Being a good class they promptly did. The horror on her face was a picture.

“No, no, no what are you doing you naughty children? Get up, get up!”

Bewildered, but obedient, the class returned to their feet.

“Thank you. Now. Pleeze sit down”

Well you can imagine the scene as an increasingly bemused class and angry teacher repeated this several times more, the French teacher becoming more and more flustered, until a kindly colleague, hearing the fuss and realising what was going on, stepped up to her and whispered in her ear that perhaps she had confused her carefully practised commands of “line up” for outside the class and “sit down” for in. Red-faced, embarrassed but now considerably wiser, she hurried the class indoors.

And I guess that is the point. Whilst we make these great gaffs, we are learning about ourselves and about others as well as picking up the subtleties of the language in a way that keeps us humble (always a good thing). In becoming wiser we also become more accepted. When people make mistakes which are harmless and funny, you cannot help but warm to them. Your enemy cannot seem threatening to you when they have just landed (metaphorically or otherwise) on their backside.

Nevertheless, there is a dangerous side to this. It is one that can give very false impressions. Thankfully, one of our foreign staff members at our NGO here a few years ago was well known when she stood up and announced she was going home to eat her husband. Much amusement, rather than shock was the response from her friends and co-workers who demanded, after the laughter had died away to know what she thought she had said in Bangla. One needs to know the difference in Bangladesh between shami (husband) and shemai (a kind of sweet wheat-like snack) if one is not in good company - and even more so if one is.

The closest to a difficult situation I know, however, came from one foreigner staying at our Guest House who turned to the cook in the kitchen and asked for a spoon from him.

“I’m sorry sir” the cook replied in Bangla “I can’t do that”.

Irritated, but aware that possibly he had been not quite properly understood, the man demanded a spoon again. Now.

“I’m sorry I won’t do that sir” said the cook.

This was the moment that things could have turned sour as the cook was most certainly not doing his job. The foreigner, raising his voice but just keeping calm said “I need a spoon from you now!”

The more sensible of the two (the Bangladeshi of course) at this point asked him what he thought he was asking for in English and the man told him again that it was a spoon. It was then that the humble cook gave this educated and highly intelligent Westerner possibly the most important lesson he would learn in Bangladesh. That a Chamoch is a spoon but a chumu (which he had repeatedly said with such certainty) was not.

It was a kiss.

Thankfully, both were able to see the funny side of it and one of them, at least, left a wiser man.

As one wise person once told me, the only way to learn to play Chess well is to lose. How true this is in all walks of life. We learn as we make mistakes. The wonderful thing about language errors when you are in the country of the language you are learning is that in making these errors we make friends along the way. Laughter always breaks the ice.

Despite this, there must be at least one Rickshaw driver in Dhaka who does not think highly of a young foreign woman we met whilst doing our language training there in the capital. She came into the language school in fits of giggles one morning. “Oh my goodness” she said, gasping for breath “I’ve just shouted at our Rickshaw wallah and called him a fruit!”

In trying to persuade him to go straight on (shoja) she had got more irate as he continued to not understand her Bangla and shouted “Shosha, shosha” all the more. Shosha, of course, is a cucumber.

Not all mistakes are good ones.