I was struck the other day by how intelligent one of my Bhutanese colleagues is and I realized that I was being a bit arrogant. It happened again today. From the moment I arrived, I recognized intelligence, however, language gets in the way of conversation. I hope my arrogance does not show outwardly, as I am aware of it and do respect the Bhutanese knowledge, culture and experience.
I think my problem is that I can only communicate in an English full of cropped sentences and grammatical differences. This tends to limit the conversation somewhat. Somewhere in my brain I get frustrated with the way things are done, or the lack of depth of discussion, or a cultural quirk and part of me dismisses or looks down on the Bhutanese and their experience. Not actively or outwardly or even truly, as I have lot of respect for them. When I first began orientation I was startled by the depth of thought they had invested in education. All of the educators I met during training were amazingly thoughtful and intelligent.
The other day I was once again immersed in that intelligence. We had a pd session on preparing test questions and Blooms Taxonomy. Tests - or midterm and final exams are pretty important here. 80% of the mark. In Class 10 failing means not going forward in the public, funded system. High stakes. Our discussions were thoughtful and it is obvious that they put a lot of effort into creating balanced exams. Personally I think that an 80% weighting for exams is not a good practice, but since that is the way they do it, it is heartening to know they take the process seriously.
The system of education is new and each one of the teachers I work with seems intent on making it work. The intensity at a professional development workshop where the material is hands on like today is high. I cannot imagine teachers at home engaging in a discussion of the application of Bloom's Taxonomy to the test questions as actively as I experienced today.
There were some points on grammar in the test questions and I became frustrated with the argument and was a bit vocal (moi??). There are so many quirky grammatical habits, amongst both the Bhutanese and the Indian teachers. NOT that my grammar is great, however, there are some things that drive most of the Canadian teachers crazy. I often contemplate the evolution of language as I have seen in my lifetime many changes in the colloquial use of words that are now found in the dictionary. (Is Party a verb? Not when I was a child :) In that contemplation I wonder how much to work at changing the language of my students. Will the language evolve here to hold the expressions they use and I find horrid? On the other hand, if Bhutanese want to interact with the rest of the world it feels important to teach the correct usage of the phrases that have been corrupted in translation from Dzongkha.
What brings me back to a sense of wonder and amazement is the short time and lack of experience the Bhutanese have in the "modern" world and the way they negotiate everything from technology to technocracy so easily. It is as if in completely missing the industrial revolution, they have managed to bring ancient wisdom directly into the information age. It makes for a fascinating intelligence.
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