Getting Campy

Lazy blogging: Here is a write-up I had to do for my Fulbright mid-year meeting, handily converted into a blog post. And by "handily converted" I mean "copied and pasted." Enjoy! You may note that my tone is more inspirational and slightly less sarcastic than usual, given the report's semi-official status. Still, I must say that good English camps are sort of inherently inspirational, even to cynical me.

Let's try having pictures first.

The butler did it! For real, Max, the ETA playing the butler in our mystery-themed camp, gave me the lovely gift of a thumbprint on my forehead.

English Camp: Cracking the Code

Recently I found myself, bleary-eyed at 7 am, tying blue string to curtain hooks at both ends of a room to create a “laser alarm system obstacle course” for Malaysian 12- and 13-year-olds. When I walked across the field at my college graduation, this was not what I pictured myself doing in one year’s time. But it’s all part of the unexpected, and often odd, life of an ETA.

Creating the obstacle course was part of my duties as a facilitator for an English camp at my school, SMK Teluk Chempedak in Kuantan. Running an English camp involves a lot of cheerleader-style spirit, consummate attention to detail, arts and crafts skills, and the ability to corral large numbers of students. It’s a trial perfectly formulated to give a bookish, scatterbrained, sometimes shy type like me hives.

This particular English camp had a mystery theme. The premise was that the students had to discover which of the dastardly suspects (the ETAs) had stolen the Sultan of Pahang’s family jewels. And how, you may ask, were they to solve this shocking crime? By successfully completing English language activities, of course—basically the same way the likes of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot did it. (I give extra credit to Poirot, who, like our students, is not a native English speaker.)

At the beginning of the camp, with the “lasers” carefully strung and a big group of ETAs sporting pseudonyms like “Robin Banks” assembled, I couldn’t tell whether the students understood or were excited about the mystery theme. As far as I could see, they were still in the process of warming up to their unfamiliar group leaders, getting to know students from other schools, shaking themselves out of their morning daze, and adjusting to an English-only Saturday. That’s a lot to tackle all at the same time. When we broke for breakfast at 10 am, one of my students told me, “Teacher, I bored. Want to go home, play iPad.” My heart sank, but I just laughed and suggested that she pretend she had her iPad with her. I touched an imaginary screen and made beeping noises in the air. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in Malaysia, it’s this: When all else fails, just act like you’re crazy and hope people are amused.

Matters improved after lunch, when students began rotating through a series of activities led by ETAs. I found myself manning the arts and crafts station, cursing whoever had assigned clumsy me this role—until I realized that I was the one who had matched ETAs to stations. I helped students use stamps to create pictures and spell words with their fingerprints while we talked about how fingerprinting works. ETA Shai Knight-Winnig came in with his group and shared some interesting facts about how common each basic type of fingerprint is. The students eagerly checked their own prints and compared them with their friends. Next, ETA Max Fulgoni, playing the butler (spoiler alert: he did it) burst into the room with his group, full of energy as usual. He promptly stamped his blue thumbprint squarely in the middle of my forehead. My students retaliated by stamping their whole palm prints on the back of his white Fulbright T-shirt. Get ‘em, girls. As ETAs rotated in and out of the room, I thought about how lucky I am that this multitalented and wacky group of Americans abroad always has my back.

By the late afternoon, students were dashing around like madmen in their haste to find the suspects. They dutifully decoded clues with small mirrors and played English games with abandon in the hopes of being the first to solve the mystery. When the camp concluded, students enthusiastically ran after the guilty butler and dragged him back to the “police chief.” Watching diminutive twelve-year-olds pull 6-foot-5-inch tall Max back onto the stage with all their might was an oddly satisfying culminating moment. If only the students were always this determined when it comes to learning English.

The next day, when I logged onto my “Cikgu [Teacher] Elizabeth” Facebook account, the reviews were in. One student had posted a picture collage of herself posing with various ETAs. Several girls wrote statuses about how much they enjoyed English camp. One of my favorite students wrote on my wall, “Teacher, I love it today.”

And what about our dear friend who missed her iPad? At school on Monday she rushed up to me to ask, “Teacher, when is the next English camp?”

How to get through to students is an ongoing mystery, but hosting a good English camp seems to be an important step towards solving the puzzle. 

Oh, also, I'm teaching and stuff.

I've noticed my tendency to blog way more often about my trips than about my day-to-day life as a teacher. That's mostly because trips are way more exciting than teaching, and it's less common for teenagers to laugh at me on trips. (But only slightly less common.)

For the past two weeks, I've been teaching students about the 4th of July. It is news to many of my students that the capital of the United States is not, in fact, London, so I had to start slow. But really, by comparison, how much Malaysian history did I know when I was 12? Did I know Malaysia was a country when I was 12?

The best explanatory brainwave of last week was my sudden inspiration of how to explain the Boston Tea Party to my higher-level students. With a very serious look in my eye, I said, "Imagine your principal went to Genting Highlands [the Vegas of Malaysia, only more family-friendly] and got into a lot of debt. Then, imagine that the school decided that to pay off the principal's debt, they were going to charge you double on your Milo ice [basically, iced ovaltine] in the school canteen."
Students: "Not fair, teacher!"
Pretend-teacher Liz: "Not fair indeed, students, not fair indeed."

I don't have a lot of explanatory brainwaves, to be frank. It's really, really, really hard to teach students whose English comprehension is low. Lately I've been learning that less is more. Sometimes a really simple lesson works better than any of my more involved lesson plans, especially with the younger students whose English proficiency is lower. My most successful recent lesson with them involved having them do dialogues as if they were customers and waiters in a restaurant. The kids seemed to enjoy playing the role of an impatient waiter, a rude customer, a clumsy customer, a very hungry customer, etc. when I assigned them, and they hammed it up in their performances.

One boy with excellent English, who gave a highly memorable performance as a sort of tough-guy, gangsterish waiter, came to me the next week before class. "Miss Liz, what will we do in class today?" When I told him that I would be showing a presentation of 4th of July pictures from around the United States, he seemed very relieved. When I asked why he wanted to know, he said, "I'm nervous, teacher. I'm afraid we do drama again." Great, just what I like to hear.

Speaking of drama, my drama club put on a really great performance at Teacher's Day! After weeks of battling to get students to attend practice consistently and swapping parts at the last minute and asking students to edit my script on "A Day in the Life of a Teacher," the big day arrived.  The drama ended with a very tame performance of the "Harlem Shake," which my students were really excited about including. Of course, as is the perennial fate of all low-budget school dramas, the inadequate PA system took its toll. All the teachers sitting in the back of our large, open air hall were unable to hear a word of the drama, according to my mentor. The students in the audience seemed to really enjoy it, though, and the students in drama club were over the moon about how well they had done. The students' happiness, even if the teachers were unimpressed, made me feel it had been a success. I've decided that this must be positive sign that I am slowly getting less dependent on the approval of authority figures.We had the very first performance slot at Teacher's Day, and one student in the drama told me afterwards, "Everyone was laughing so much! It was like a warm-up for happiness." Yessss. "A warm-up for happiness" is such a great phrase and concept, don't you think?

Teacher's Day in and of itself was very amusing. I didn't really understand what a big day it is here until I was groggily stepping out of my car at 7:30 am to be greeted by two students chirping, "Happy Teacher's Day! Are we the first ones to say it?!" I joined all the teachers, who had been asked to dress in purple for the occasion, for an opening parade. We marched through a kind of triumphal archway behind a group of 10-15 boys beating drums. Of course, bunga manga was involved. I tried not to laugh. Then, there were the inevitable speeches, the principal ceremonially unfurled two special banners, we were presented with flowers, and each of us received a gift from the students' association. The rest of the day continued with a potluck sponsored by a parent, more food that students prepared for us, gifts from students, a silly sports competition between teachers, student performances in honor of the teachers, and so, so, so much bad karaoke sung by enthusiastic teachers. Unfortunately, I have mostly video instead of pictures, which takes too long to upload here.

Wow, now that I sit down to write about teaching, I find that I have a lot more to say than I thought! I think I'm going to save some of it, especially the description of the English camp I helped run, for another post. For now I will say that, although it really has its ups and downs, Malaysia is starting to feel ok (perhaps partly because time is moving on and going home is less of a distant dream). I'm realizing that even though I don't want to be a teacher in the long-term, I'm not terrible at it. I feel really energized when a lesson goes well, and I do enjoy talking to my students in the hallways and after class. Today, as I was driving home from an English camp at my friend's school, I looked at the ocean and the tropical flowers and the water buffaloes dangerously close to the roadside and thought about my weekend with the lovely ETAs who shared a celebratory homemade lasagna meal and the cute, enthusiastic primary school students who had enjoyed baking soda and vinegar explosions at Silly Science camp, and decided that this kind of life is not so bad at all.