A Good Hand

A Good Hand

It’s time to try to get writing my impressions of teaching school in Nicaragua.  I really don’t know where to begin so I’ll start with 2 limited observations and try some more later.

Three mornings a week at the instituto there is formación.  All the students assemble in their blue and white uniforms in the dirt plaza in front of the flagpole, each in lines organized by grade.  Usually the assistant principle makes announcements and then she may lecture a bit about the theme of the month (the mothers of Nicaragua for May) and the obligations of the students.  Then it’s the turn of a teacher to expound upon a virtue to be practiced like “solidarity” and to harangue (my admittedly loaded , but nevertheless accurate, word) the students into behaving better.  There’s a lot of talk of “indiscipline,” lack of respect, et cetera. The students stand and listen, but they pay little attention, talking to their friends, poking each other.  One time a girl at the head of her line was filing her nails, with impunity, in plain sight.  The other teachers stand on the sidelines paying no attention to the students and to what is being said to them.  They talk among themselves also. This is a familiar scene in other contexts—people being harangued and paying no attention to the speaker, indeed talking among themselves, but accepting the obligation to submit to the lecture.  As you can imagine this is a hard one to adjust to. It may not be, but it feels like disrespect to me, because in the States people usually accept the responsibility, if not to pay attention, at least to zone out quietly.

The talking while authoritiy figures are talking extends to the classroom.  During a conversation with a counterpart about the abysmal discipline in our classes of 7^th graders (ages 11 to 16, believe it or not) she told me that paying no attention was a cultural trait about which we could probably do little. (I don’t believe that because I have observed classes where there is no talking over the teacher, but I do think that there is a lack of indignation, a kind of resignation that many teachers have in the face of what is, maybe, based on my limited experience, a pretty widespread attitude.  I also think the tolerance for noise, which I noticed and wrote about soon after arriving here, is part of it. People put up with all kinds of noise which Americans wouldn’t tolerate as invading their own right to silent surroundings.  We have a word for it—“noise pollution”—but it is apparently the right of Nicas to make what noise they will.  No one tells anyone to pipe down. It also occurs to me that maybe there is no intention of disrespect which we norteamericanos associate with talking while others are presenting something. However, that still leaves the behavior, value-free, to deal with. 

The formación ends with three songs: the national anthem, a national song for students and the song of my particular instituto.  Students are then dismissed to class which, on the three days of formación, is shortened by the 20 minutes or so formación takes.

In the classroom, I can usually get everyone’s attention to start, but as the long (hour and a half) class wears on, it’s hard to keep.  The best technique is to keep them busy.  We try all kinds of innovative techniques to keep the learning interesting but the one sure-fire way to quiet the class and focus the students is to require that something be copied.  Understand that in my school there are no textbooks, no copying machine, obviously no power point, video or audio equipment.  Nothing, nada (The entire school has 6 miserable, small and inaccurate Spanish/English dictionaries which inspire sentences like, “The boy similar the girl” when the student wanted to say, “The boy likes the girl.”) The students have notebooks and the teachers have a whiteboard and large sheets of paper on which they can write out a reading, for example, or a practice dialogue. That’s it.  Therefore, there is a lot of copying of material into notebooks. 

The students are so used to copying things, tedious as it would be to you or me, that they are actually avid about it.  I sat to the side of class the other day and watched them copy, their bodies bent over their work, faces anxiously raised to the board and back down to their notebooks with what I can only describe as the eagerness of full engagement.  They really like to copy and most do so with precision and flair.  For instance, most students carry a pencil case with multiple colors of pens, erasers and white-out pens.  The work needs to be perfect and it needs to be pretty.  Students actually decorate the page on which they copy with curlicues—and not just girls.  They use multiple colors of ink.  God help us if we teach vocabulary with pictures.  They copy not just the word in English, supplying the Spanish, but they copy the picture! For this reason copying takes a lot of time.

For what it’s worth I’ve developed some theories about the copying, the emphasis on a   beautiful page and decoration in general. One is that in a country with few photocopiers and computers for word processing, a “good hand” as my mother used to call it, is prized.  When I was small, we practiced penmanship, but my children didn’t.  And when my mother was a child, a good hand indicated an educated person, a mark of good character.  How writing looked mattered because clarity mattered.  The teachers here are, I suspect, a little appalled by my scrawl when they look at my notes.  They spend a fair amount of time painstakingly copying a new plan for classes every two months, because the plan is submitted to the principal and the superintendent.  It better be good, clear and even artful.  For that reason they sell a lot of rulers and white-out here.

 Like many requirements, the requirement of a good hand has become internalized so that the students get a kick out of a perfect page.  I can feel them wince when I ask for their pencil or pen to write a correction or translation on their pages.  I try to use pencil.  I suspect they erase my offensive note, apply white-out to the error, and copy the correction.

I want to end by saying how poignant I find the perfect page to be.  It seems to me like other small islands of precision and beauty in this impoverished world, like the perfectly combed, gelled and adorned hair of my students, like the carefully planted flowers and plants in front an adobe-floored house, like the photos of a friend with her baby, photo-shopped onto a photo of a luxurious hotel room, nothing like the humble home in which she actually lives. What’s not to admire about people making what little they have as beautiful as they can?