School Life: Experiences and Challenges

I think it’s just about time for me to write a bit about the actual work, we are doing here, during our volunteer period, as well, as write a bit about the Nepalese school system and what we experience day by day out of this.

Our first interactions with the school happened around our third week spent in Nepal, when we started visiting some schools where we could possibly work. Finally, we have been to four different schools – all with different backgrounds, atmosphere and expectations: from the elite-looking private school, where they were looking for third language teachers (beside Nepali and English) to the public school where the most important priority was to teach the kids English – especially creative writing. To understand the situation better, it might be important to know that in Kathmandu you can almost find a school at every corner – most of which are private schools. There’s no obligatory education here, only in the first few classes, and also the number of public schools provided by the government is not enough. Therefore schools here seem kind of a business to me: with different admission fees, different prestige and continuous competition between each other. Also, as I have observed is, while the official language here is Nepali, English language knowledge is pretty important to manage better in life – at least if one lives in the city. (In the countryside – as far as I understood – the situation is more complicated due to the more than 100 language spoken in the country and due to the fact that in the countryside, people often even lack Nepali language knowledge.) Despite that while in most private schools, education is in English, in public schools the teachers can choose whether to teach in Nepali or in English – which will result in better understanding of the subject, but weaker English knowledge as well. I think this kind of background setting can explain why we were facing different needs in different schools.

Later, as we started working at the field, we experienced more and more about Nepalese life, the school system, and realized more and more differences and similarities between the schools.

As for me, I finally started working in one public (Guheswore Public School) and one private (Societal School) school, besides spending weekly two days in the office as well. I found that spending time in the school is a great way to get to know more about Nepalese way of life, way of thinking and also a great platform to exchange culture, ideas, stories etc. One of the biggest different that I felt compared to the system in Hungary, is that in a way school pretty strict here: every day is starting with a morning assembly and by singing the national anthem, usually the students and the teachers, too are wearing uniform, the most usual teaching method is to make students repeat the material again and again and there’s not too much platform for the students to express their own ideas, feelings – especially if it’s different from the teacher’s own. Well, it’s true, that regarding this issue, there’s a slight different between the public and the private school: in my public school I experienced slightly more space for freedom and creativity. Because of these differences, you have to balance pretty carefully between adapting to local teaching methods and sticking to your own beliefs and trying to “provoke” the system by making the lessons more interactive and paying attention on individuals, too, not only the group.

Connected to the different background, different teaching methods and also our different native languages, sometimes it can mean quite a challenge to control the class, keep their attention while somewhere presenting a different attitude than the local teachers. Being alone in the class (with not too much teaching experience) where the students all speak a different language and you have no control tools in your hand (we are not giving marks, no punishments etc.), I think the only way to still rule a class, is to make the lesson as interesting, interactive and appealing, as possible. Another thing that might raise some challenges is related to the gender roles here, which are pretty different from the ones in Europe. In both my schools I realized that boys and girls hardly ever sit by each other – normally all the girls are in one side of the class and all the boys in the other side. When asking any questions, boys are lot more probable to answer and express their thoughts than girls, while girls often just look down when a question is addressed to them and just say quietly: “I don’t know”. Playing a game, when the kids had to group themselves according to different categories, I also faced the difficulty of mixing up girls and boys, because identifying themselves as a member of gender groups was so strong that it took some time to get them disconnected from these categories.

 Despite all these challenges, I have to add that working in the schools can be really-really rewarding: once you have caught their attention and taken the control of the class, the students are all very curious about anything, you want to teach them and are very happy and excited about having foreign teachers in their class.

The activities that we launch at the schools always depend on the schools’ and the children’s needs and interest. As for me, in the private school, the only request was to follow the children’s wishes – according to which we started learning a bit about Europe, play games about European countries, and make comparisons between Hungary and Nepal. Later, I would love to launch some awareness programs with the teenagers about for example discrimination or peer violence, as well.

Meanwhile, at the public school, the expectations from me were more concrete: they asked me to work on the kid’s English knowledge, learn about letter and essay writing, as well, as prepare some conversations for them. Finally, I followed these instructions with the upper classes (class 7 and 8, aged around 14-15), while with the younger ones (class 5 and 6, aged 10-13) we concentrate more on stories, in order to improve their English, as well as understand some of the morals of for example Aesop’s Fables. It was also a very interesting experience to guide some activities when they had to finish an uncompleted story or make their own stories. It showed to me for example, how clear they are about right and wrong and how much they are trying to solve all kinds of conflicts in a very peaceful way. For example the ending of a story about some too proud animals that were caught in a hunter’s trap, except for one, was that the one will obviously help the others and they will all be very ashamed of the way they behaved before and about the way, how they didn’t care about each other. Another story was about some guys fighting over a girl, who finally started talking and understanding each other’s point of view, at the end deciding to be rather friends and not care about the girl anymore.