This is Just a Test

In every country, standardized tests suck.

Meet Pema.

“Hello, sir.”

“Hi, Pema.”

Pema is soft-spoken, timid. When I offer him a high-five he cringes a little and hesitantly puts his hand in the air. Once contact is made, he turns away, giggling. Pema is kind. Very kind. He might be one of the kindest students I’ve ever taught, which says a lot because I used to teach four-year old Japanese kids who would incessantly hug my leg.

Pema’s about to take his midterm examinations in a few days. He’s in class twelve, his final year of high school. These examinations will give him a good idea of how he’ll do for the National Board Exam in December.

“It’s very much important,” he reminds me.

The National Board Exam determines where and if Pema will go to college. College acceptance determines if he’ll be a white-collar citizen or remain blue-collar, likely working on a small subsistence farm in his village, or herding yaks, like the generations before him.

“I want to own a business, sir.”

Pema has ambitions. He is studying in the commerce department of the high school so that he can one day leave his village and pursue his dream of entrepreneurship. He gets good marks in his economics class, in accountancy, and in math. His English, however, struggles.

“How many languages do you speak, Pema?”

“I speak our national language, Dzongkha, our local language, Sharchop, and I speak Nepali and Hindi.”

“And you speak English.”

“Not very much good, sir.”

“But you speak it. I mean all of your subjects are taught in English--except your Dzongkha class, of course--so you have to speak English.”

“Understanding is difficult, sir. The exam I am not very much ready for, sir.”

“Have you studied?”

“Somewhat studying, sir.”

I haven’t prepared Pema well. I’ve prepared Kinley well. But before I came Kinley spoke English with a very clear American accent, derived from obsessive American movie and TV watching. I’ve prepared Sampa well. She has a bright smile and an insatiable curiosity. Her questions are astute and well-formed, a product of diligent study done on her own independent time. She now has relative comfort with English, along with three other languages.

But Pema … my instruction is failing poor Pema. I’m one in a successive line of English teachers, perhaps since he started school, that can’t give him the attention he needs to be ready for the board exams. He is surrounded by nearly forty other students in his class, and he rarely asks questions. At this point, I’m estimating that he has to catch up on at least three years of language instruction in order to get the score he would want.

“A sixty percent, sir.”

“Sixty? Come on, Pema. Let’s aim for at least a seventy.”

This is part of my attempt to convey that, with enough studying, he could pull off the impossible. Despite knowing my instruction is failing him, I still believe in him.

“Wha’d’ya think the hardest part of the test is gonna be?”

“Sir?”

“What do you think will be the hardest part? Of the midterm?”

“Oh. Story writing, sir.”

Pema gave me a draft of a short story he had written as practice. For the board exam the students have to demonstrate that they know and can apply the elements of a short story to a creative piece--though, in actuality, it's better to keep the reins tight on the creativity. The story must have characters, setting, conflict, theme and a moral. The plot should follow a traditional, ho-hum, story arc.

Pema’s story went like this

In village Bhutan pema and friend are argument and he say “I am wanting talking to girl and he friend say I helping talking to girl. and they go looking for girl talking about nice day and a bear jump out. boy run and friend is going but than find girl and he talking to girl and it is okay because she say I loving to you. Moral is expect the unexpected.

“Well, Pema, you’ve got characters. So that’s good, “I tell him. “You’ll get points for the characters. You need to develop your setting a bit more though.”

“Sir?”

“You can describe the village. Is it big? Is it small? Does it smell like fire from the woodstoves? Are there flowers? What’s the temperature? What season is it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And your plot is a little confusing. What’s the conflict supposed to be?”

“Bear, sir.”

“Alright. A bear is a problem. What’s going on with the girl though?”

“Pema is in love, sir.” (At this he giggles.)

“See, that’s a conflict too then, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So which one do you want to focus on?”

“Bear, sir. And girl, sir.”

“Well Pema, normally I’d say go for it, but for these types of tests it’s best if you just have one obvious conflict that the person marking the test can follow. It’s the worst way to write a story—to appease some person ticking off each item—but it’s what you’ll have to do if you want to pass.”

“Sir?”

“Pick one: the bear, or the girl.”

I continue to give Pema advice and I’m certain he’s understanding much less than his desired sixty percent. But he takes back his draft and promises he’ll try again.

“You can check second draft, sir?”

“Yeah, I’ll check as many as you can get done before the test. But don’t forget to study for the other parts, too: grammar, drama, essay writing.”

“Okay, sir.”

I tell him to study but I’m afraid that a lot of what he will study will be futile for improving his actual language skills. I’ve seen copies of previous years’ board exams and the expectations are esoteric and, literally, absurd. I mean it. The drama piece that all class twelve students around the country are mandated to study is Jean Anouilh’s 1984, experimental play, An Episode in the Life of an Author. Genre: theater of the absurd.

Pema, his classmates, and I suffered through nearly three weeks of attempts to reenact the farcical play in the classroom. Students wore artificial noses—the only “indispensable” costume requirement, according to the author’s notes—and acted out scenes that intentionally make no sense whatsoever.

“Okay, students. Here you have to imagine that water is raining down from the ceiling while the inspector is jotting down notes. That’s why he opens his umbrella. And the author, he’s on the phone with his friend, talking casually, even though his wife is shooting a pistol at him.”

"And maid is still crying, sir?"

Reading drama and dispensing with the artificial noses.

"Yeah. The maid is still crying."

The students sought clarity from me desperately throughout the play. I am, after all, the native English speaker and eight-year veteran teacher that is supposed to clear up all the strange mysteries of the English language. But even when I heard myself explain for the umpteenth time, “It’s not supposed have meaning. It’s supposed to be illogical,” or better yet, “It’s a critique on the ability of language to be an effective means of communication,” I disbelieved my own rhetoric and stood in front of the room deflated. In every single pair of eyes I could see panic arising from the realization, “This? We have to understand this for the board exam?”

Inevitably I fell into the bane of educational methodology: “Just memorize ‘illogical,’ ‘avant garde,’ and ‘satire of communication and language’ and write about it on the test. Don’t worry. It’ll be fine.” I cringe still, knowing my pedagogy was reduced to the lowest common denominator. But for the students it was comfortable; something like a tangible answer that they could study; something worth their time.

The farce extends far beyond French modernism. I’m meant to teach grammar incorrectly. The students are required to do “Sentence Transformations”, a language development strategy that ignores all current research regarding language acquisition. That isn’t the ridiculous part though. In the students’ study guide, a tome of practice exercises and notes specifically for the Bhutanese board exam, the students are asked to change the sentences by adding in a new word. For example, “I need to go to the store, but don’t have any money” using the word “nevertheless.” Pema writes:

I don’t have any money, nevertheless I need to go the store.

I catch him on the comma splice, like the good grammar teacher that I am.

I tell him, “You can replace the comma with a period or a semicolon, Pema.”

But he flips to the section in the book that says “nevertheless” and shows me the examples with their answers. There it is, just as Pema wrote it. All the other examples follow the same structure. I insist that it’s incorrect, all of them are, but Pema and the other students don’t believe me.

“It’s here in the guide, sir. This is what we have to study for the board exam.”

It’s a conundrum. I could teach them the correct grammar, but then they’ll likely get the answers wrong on the test. I’ve seen this happen too, where a teacher just looks at the answer key and marks “X” if the slightest thing varies from the example answer, an answer that the teacher pulled from the same study guide. For active to passive voice exercises, for example, the students have to change “A book was given to the little boy by a friend yesterday,” to “Yesterday, a friend gave the little boy a book.”

Pema wrote:

A friend gave the little boy a book yesterday.

It was marked wrong.

Group work. Consulting the "guide" book, just in case.

I’m at a loss. It seems that there is only one right answer, and in the case of “nevertheless,” “inspite of” [sic], and a slew of other grammar, spelling, and punctuation examples, the right answer is the wrong answer. In order to make Pema’s English score better, I have to make his English worse.

It’s one of many walls dividing me from my students. Commonly I defer to the rebellious adage of, “Tests aren’t real learning,” a proclamation that has endeared me to a number of American high schoolers. But here in Bhutan the test is everything to the class twelve students. To say, “Don’t worry about the test,” is equatable to saying, “Don’t worry about your future,” though my intention is just the opposite. When I say, “Don’t worry about the tests,” I mean that they should learn because learning is fun and interesting. To show that they have authentically learned something—and not just regurgitated it onto a test—they should practice speaking, explaining, demonstrating, and creating. They should be passionate about something and pursue that passion doggedly. They should develop critical thinking skills; the ability to discern a source’s validity, for one, which social systems to trust, for another, and which systems to rail against so that unfairness doesn’t befall the next generation. But for students who simply want to ascend the social ladder a single step, who don’t want to toil in potato fields until they're old, passing a few tests seems a worthy obstacle to prepare for.

A teacher is ultimately a servant of his students and their culture. Both my social-justice and learn-for-the-joy-of-learning narratives are something I should offer for consideration, as a new perspective, but are not something to be imposed. In a strange twist of fate, now teaching-to-the-test (a technique I loathed) is actually student-centered instruction (a philosophy I adhere to religiously). In class I find myself saying, “The guidebook, and likely the board exam, probably wants you to write the answer this way,” while the students take diligent notes. Occasionally I’ll suggest, “But another way to do it is this way, though it might be wrong on the exam” and I’ll see one or two students writing down my digression.

It’s a humbling lesson in pedagogy. But it's also a confirmation of a maxim that has held true in Peru, Japan, America, and now Bhutan: Know your students. Know their ambitions, their goals, their fears, and their insecurities. Develop instruction that is sensitive to all their needs and helps them become the better people that they envision themselves becoming.

Pema wants to be a kid that can confidently pass the English section of the board exam.

“Sir?”

“Yes, Pema.”

“I have other short story, sir. Other draft.”

“Alright, let’s take a look at it.”

In big village Bhutan that smell like woodstove and have many red flower and is cold because it winter pema and friend are argument and he say “I am wanting talking to girl and he friend say I helping talking to girl. and they go looking for girl talking about nice day. Girl and pema fall in love and they marriage and they are happy. Pema is owning business and he work hard and wife is happy with pema and pema happy because he work in nice job where he helping others. Moral is dreams come true.

Pema is improving, nevertheless we’ve got a lot more studying to do before the board exam.