Telling Time

The lessons in my elementary level class at Tibet Charity have been fun to teach lately. Last week we covered adjectives and Friday and today we worked on adverbs of frequency and telling time. The book contained a short article on Okinawa, an island in Japan, and how its residents are some of the longest-lived people in the world. It explored why this might be using phrases like “they usually have seven portions of fruit and vegetables a day” and “people don't usually drink much alcohol or smoke.” I had students compare their homes and lifestyles to this, and it was really interesting to hear some of their responses.

Most of my students come from Tibet, a landlocked area that officially is located in western China. Obviously people in Tibet don't eat as much seafood as the Okinawans, and they also don't congregate on the beach for sunsets. According to my students, Tibetans live relatively short lives, often only until “65 or 75,” and many of them suffer from health issues. The one thing they all agreed on that was the same between Tibetans and Okinawans was that they stay active well into their old age.

It's interesting to have a questionnaire activity where nearly all the students in the class answer questions like “How often do you drink alcohol?” with Hardly ever/never and “How often do you eat meat?” with Once a day or less. It's certainly different from what I'd expect from the average class full of adults in America.

I am kept on my toes by the fact that my students don't always understand concepts that I think will be easy – but sometimes they get the ones that I expect to be trickier for them. Today we had an exercise explaining phrases like “every day,” “every month,” “twice a week,” “three times a year,” that sort of thing. It took me considerably longer than I expected to get them to see how “January, April, July, October” is four times a year, not four times a month. And then I had to show them how it's four times a year, not four times a years. We also talked about how “one time” is “once,” “two times” is “twice,” and how to use “a couple” and “a few.” (I did not go into “a lot,” “a whole lot,” or “a buttload.” That'll be another lesson. [I can not find a video to link that to anywhere online... I guess if you don't get it you're outta luck. Sorry.])

I think being a teacher has forced me to use my brain nearly as much as being a student forces them to use theirs. I have to think on the spot and try to devise clever ways to explain things when they don't understand. I am beginning to get a feel for ideas I can fall back on in a pinch, though; learning a bit about Tibetan culture means I can come up with examples that are more relevant to them. Instead of talking about having sushi and hamburgers, which most of them have never seen, I can talk about eating tsampa and momos, which are staples of the Tibetan diet. Instead of beer and wine we talk about milk tea and butter tea. The idea of a flat or apartment is foreign for people who come from a place where generations of a family share one house, or they live in tents. A lift/elevator is something many of them have heard vaguely about but have never actually seen, and the same with a microwave.

It's fun and interesting to see the associations that students make when they don't quite understand something. I remember one day I had to explain the difference between a sandwich and a hamburger. Another time I had to explain what a pet was, and then revise my definition when they started talking about yaks and sheep as pets. For many of them, the idea of having an animal hang around the house for no practical reason other than companionship is a bit foreign.

A few of my more ambitious students attend conversation classes at various locations around McLeod Ganj throughout the week. One of them comes up to me nearly every day when class is over and asks me to pronounce and sometimes define the vocabulary words he's picked up from another teacher. Sometimes they're useful and other times they're pretty obscure (actually, obscure was one of the words last week); today he asked me about “goose pimples” and “preacherman.” I wonder if they were working with a song in class?

It's this sort of thing that keeps us from strictly adhering to the book all the time. We start with it, but then I have to adjust on the fly depending on the students' needs. There was one day a few weeks back where I had used a word and explained the suffix on it – I think it might have been “journalist” – and that led to an entire lesson on prefixes, suffixes, and root words. It wasn't in the book, but I am a firm believer that if you can break down a large concept it's easier to understand, especially later on. I personally always want to understand the theory and construction behind why things work the way they do, and language is no different. We have lots of repetition in class; I ask them to define words throughout a class period to keep them thinking. They help each other out when they don't know the answer, and when we have a new word I always ask to see if someone knows it before I explain it. Sometimes they know, and sometimes they don't. Occasionally I get really bizarre answers, so that's always fun. Having them define and redefine words we've learned helps I figure this also forces them to use the words they know to define and describe, which is good practice for if they can't think of a word or they can't be understood and need to explain something a different way.

I've had one student so far give me a jump drive so I can put English language movies on it so he can practice his listening and comprehension. I hope more of them follow. How fun would it be to have a class sometime where we can discuss the finer points of Finding Nemo or Toy Story? I have a couple of other students who have asked for my email address or phone number so they can ask me questions when we have stretches of time off from school, like next week when His Holiness is teaching again at the temple. I have one student who found me on Google+; he sends me messages from time to time which I don't mind at all, it's good practice, but at the moment I'm struggling to get him to give up his Google Translate habit – all it does is get him hung up on using big words when what he really needs to do is learn how to use the more basic ones first.

Every day is an adventure, and I enjoy it. It can be exhausting though, and I'm only teaching one to two classes a day. Tomorrow we talk about ordinal numbers (first, twelfth, etc.) and phrases like “the last Friday of the month.” I'll have to get used to writing the date 24/9/2013 so I don't confuse them too much; that's how it's done in Britain so that's how it's done in the book, and also in India besides.