An education
- Teddy Smile
- Jan 12, 2020
- 8 min read
Sometimes I work in the "Open School", it’s a study support for high school students from tougher backgrounds, this is part of the project’s initiative to step in wherever formal education is lacking behind, wherever normal school doesn’t teach you what you have to know, the “Open School” might.

We’ve got about 7 students from grade 8 at the moment, they’re between 15 and 18 and I even got an old lady who’s very cool and a very good learner. . Bimala, currently studying education in the community college does Health, Social Studies, Maths, Accounting, and Nepali and I do English about twice a week. I took yesterday and todays lesson as Bimala is away at a wedding.
I’ve done about 10 lessons by now, most of them are okay I think. My English is much better than my teaching. And sometimes I mess up. Today I didn’t, actually, it was my first “really good" lesson, it was with two students, which meant I could focus on what I saw they already understood and what they need a bit more time with. This was super nice as I could take a lot of time to do drawings, to explain and keep them active and asking questions.

When we are more, the students who have more ease usually correct the others, they're impatient and eager to show what they know. From what I've seen, is is just what they're used to this way in class, countless competition in a system where after every exam the top 5 are shown with a picture and the bottom 5 in red color. I know this competition from my classroom as well, but it's worse here. The hard thing here has been supporting everyone just at the level that they are, I want the beginners to have time to read a whole sentence without being interrupted, but I want to encourage the faster students too.
Everyone is in the same school year, but they do so differently, ever since they started with English three years ago they've been ridiculed for their mistakes by a teacher who is barely better (!!!). For many it doesn’t make sense to try and give their best in a language they’re apparently so bad at anyway. They’re demotivated and I’ve been trying to convince them that their english is good enough! Better than my Nepali anyway.
This has been hard, I’m not a gifted teacher but I content myself that at least, I can’t be entirely as boring as my old English teachers were.
My first two lessons, I did straight out of their grade 8 book, which is a worn-out book full of mistakes, with few black and white pictures with exercices where even I didn't understand what they actually wanted. It’s hard for me to know what beginners find difficult,
The level was totally inappropriate, but I tried to explain as much as I could. Which just led to me, rambling way too fast and on and on about the meaning of "invigorate", when actually the students were only starting to really learn to make full sentences. Bottom line, They’d haven’t learned nearly as much as they should’ve. And their book was reminding them always that they’re lacking behind, I wanted to encourage them to speak, but actually, I did the opposite. But I don’t want to be on the same side as the teachers, I know, just like the students, that there is a better way of learning English.
We only had three books for seven people, now I don't know whether their school didn't give them any books, or they never bought them, or they just tossed them in the corner.
When, in my third lesson, which was about "Games and sports", there was a sentence that said " Games is good because they promote patriotism", I thought, it's probably the third, they tossed the book in the trash, and actually, I wanted to do the same.
I ditched their book and tried to make up lessons for my own. I noticed that they all liked music, so I prepared one lesson on music from around the world, I probably talked one hour about Brazil, Sweden, Canada, and New Zealand until I realized that they had no idea where South America, Africa or even Asia was on the friggin map. They never had geography, when you ask the whole school to leave their classrooms just to sing the national anthem EVERY DAY, I guess there's no time for explaining the 7 continents for just 1 minute.
Remember when in primary school some of the french-speaking kids said that if only they taught geography and history in French, they'd do so much better? It's kind of like this, if only they had a book with less propaganda and more pictures, they would do soooo much better.
This gap is closing, but private school students still do better than government school students, I've seen both of their English books, Private schools have about the same one I had. It's clear right away: there are so many steps ahead to begin with!
It's like government school students have to perform the same, but with only about half of the resources ( I mean books, teachers, access to Internet,...).
Right now, I'm using a pdf of the English book we had back in Lux, the exercises are straightforward and easy enough, and for the rest I just talk about what I think might be interesting (I taught them the lyrics to Let it be haha). That's working quite well, only thing that sucks is that everything is in western context, and the world is "white" enough as it is. I hope to adapt the texts and exercises so that they become something that they can actually identify with. Up to now, I've done a shit job in terms of representation. We talked about the human body, I looked up a picture of an arm, all the arms on google were white. Looked up a picture of a doctor, all the pictures where from a white man in a fancy hospital, we read a text of about a man who lives on a Scottish Island, he was a postman (in Nepal they're aren't any addresses), a barman (no one here has ever been to a pub) and had a boat (no one of the students has ever been further than the district).
Bottom line is, not everyone can teach and I'm certainly not a natural talent. But I'm learning, and government school students seem to be the right people that could use my help.
At this point, I'll drift off a little cause these two things seem like two sides of the same coin to me, both talk about government matters and just show that government MATTERS.
At the moment, Nepali is hosting the South Asian Games (kinda like mini-Olympia). They've got almost all disciplines, among them swimming. Nepal never won a medal here and explaining why that is, is where it gets interesting.
There's a "biological argument" that I heard for the first time when someone talked about why people from Africa are such great runners. From what I’ve heard their weight distribution is different, which makes them more agile and ultimately faster. If they wear the same running shoes than westerners, they win in most cases. In running, a sport that doesn't require any infrastructure, this biological argument probably makes sense.
Now it's a different thing when you talk about swimming.
It doesn't matter whether you compare an Australian swimmer to a Zimbabwe swimmer or a Nepali swimmer to a swimmer from Sri Lanka or the Maldives
( the only 2 countries in Asia rated high in Human Development Index), the discussion is quite similar, westerners loveeeee to apply the biological argument to swimming, explaining proudly that the main reason why people from Africa or Nepal never win a medal is because off their center of gravity, implying they're just biologically disadvantaged not socio-economically.
For the record, I don't know much, BUT I do know that that's bullshit, if this is even a thing it plays only a minor role, the one main reason why African and Nepali people and any other developing country don't win medals in swimming is because of the fact that you need swimming pools, which are hella expensive, and not available to nations who are currently still struggling to get safe drinking water, health insurance, and electricity to their people.
Now I know many westerners are not well acquainted with what it means to not be privileged, and that's why they think the biological argument makes total sense. It DOESN'T, in Nepal most people get by on 50 euros a month on average, they're not exactly in the position to care about their kids having a pool or not. We want to believe that our swimmers are the best in the world when actually the next best person from the slum could beat them if only he or she had the chance.
We watched the opening ceremony of the South Asian games on TV. It was about 500 dancers in shiny new tracksuits with light show and all.
I thought to myself:" Is this the same country that takes 10 years to build a community hospital?".
Now it's cool when your country does well in sports, and to some extent, it surely helps when a country has something to be proud of, BUT, these tracksuits (not to speak of the rest) must've cost the government a fortune.
I would love to meet the person that has the guts to allow so much money to be spent on freaking tracksuits, and, in the same breath tells community schools that "unfortunately", the government is unable to pay for better books and teachers, which is something these kids are ENTITLED to! Access to quality education is a human right, a government that doesn't prioritize that young kids with big potential get this opportunity, deliberately limit them, ain't no one goin’ to convince me otherwise.
This is all part of this pessimistic worldview that the powerful will help the powerless in a way that saves them from destitution, but they never get enough help to become truly empowered themselves.
This was true 50 years ago, I refuse to think that nothing has changed. In neighboring countries, government schools are improving day by day, why not in Nepal?
Minister of Education? Why isn't anything moving?
Feels like someone should go up to his or her office door and go:
Knock, Knock?
Who's there?
Priorities, it seems we haven't met yet.
You put patriotism over basic education?
Telling these kids to be satisfied with what they get, to keep quiet, teaching them that obedience is the holy grail, teaching to stand up and sing when the national anthem is playing. Now that is a joke that's not really funny a all.
Government matters!!!!
Here's an open letter to the Nepali government: You drive me furious, get your shit together. If a white privileged girl of 19 has to tell you this, you know it's serious.
What's the worst thing about it is that I've seen the normal people do soooo much to rectify what the government does wrong: Right in the middle of Pharping, there's a football ground, and on its walls, someone (I'm pretty sure it was the primary school) wrote:
"I had the blues, because I had no shoes. Until I met on the street, a man who had no feet. "
On the back of a bus I've seen written:
" Someone is happy with less than what you have"

To me this means that despite all of this, Nepali people are humble, kind and helpful, of course, they are unhappy about the political situation, but it feels like, in regards to inequality in the community, they feel like it's more upon them than upon the government to do something. Maybe this is because they realized that the government is bad at its job, or maybe it was never even the governments’ job to begin with. Either way, I hope things change fast, a lot and soon.
In Friendship,
Teddy Smile
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