Singapore and Thailand: Beating us at our own game?

If you ever wanted confirmation that the US is sliding into second-world status, you need go no further than spend a day in Singapore. With an airport voted the second best in the world and a bus/metro system that is incredibly easy to use, cheap, clean and comfortable. Double-decker buses came often and always had enough room. Take that, Seattle!

Actually the buses here in Almaty at least run often. Unfortunately they are leftovers from East Germany, as are the ancient trams, replete with German signage.
Anyway, back to Singapore. Yes, it has stringent laws. People are forbidden to chew gum (they dnt’ even sell it there). And if you think that’s bad, be forewarned that immigration cards warn you outright drug traffickers will be put to death. Yikes!

I just didn’t click with Singapore. It has every amenity you can imagine, shopping for miles, and great health care – I had to have a crown put on in the day after Christmas and found someone to do it! It was fast, efficient, painless, and cost me the same amount for this “rush” job as it would have cost to have it done over a week’s time in Seattle. I also had to get medicine for my upper respiratory infection I’d developed in Almaty. Again, the doc was thorough and friendly and cheap--$26 for an office visit!

Thailand we found much less snazzy albeit with a pretty good infrastructure. They have their own fab airport (yes, the one that was taken over in December). Roads are in good shape. Cars seem pretty expensive. But many Thais simply set up a hibachi under a tarp just outside their very modest shacks and just sell barbecued meat to the public. Incredibly friendly, must more so than the Kazakhstanis, they smile even at foreign passers-by like me. I’ve hear people refer to the famous Thai smile, and now I know why. I appreciated their calmness and attitude toward animals. Although feral dogs and cats roamed the streets much as they do in Almaty, Thais often put our food for them and although many dogs seemed unkempt and diseased, they seemed to actually have a home.

We had a fabulous time kayaking through a mangrove forest while monkeys jumped on our boats to get bananas, rode elephants through the jungle, went scuba diving in the Indian Ocean, and even petted tigers both big and baby. Had we not all gotten quite ill from food poisoning, the trip would have been ideal. Actually Alexander had to be taken by ambulance down the mountain from the monastery he was staying at and hospitalized for two days, all for $750. Good care too. We’re all on the mend now in our respective homes, but it was a bit dicey.

Update on Alexander’s year off: He is leaving soon for Patagonia to work on a sheep farm, then to Peru to work for an NGO for orphans, and finally to the Dominican Republic to work for a company giving out microloans. Kids – they have all the luck.

Partying in Kazakhstan

I attended a banquet last month held in honor of the participants of a conference held at Karaganda State University. Karaganda is about an hour’s flight northwest from Almaty. I had given a paper at the conference and had made several new friends, as you can see in the accompanying photos.

The conference was very interesting in terms of language policy, which is a hot topic in Kazakhstan since there are three languages competing for money, status, and in the case of Kazakh, cultural and linguistic preservation. There was one speaker, an older man – an eminence grise – who gave an impassioned speech in Kazakh about restoring his language to its original status before the Soviets barged in and took over. But now with Russian so entrenched in the government, and English the language of commerce and technology, it is hard to ignore the necessity of teaching all three languages.

At the party for us conferees, who imbibed with relish and without pause the free wine, vodka, and cognac, I watched these wonderful Kazakhs and some ethnic Russian Kazakhstanis dance and celebrate who they are. Entertainment included several singers and lovely, graceful dancers in national costumes. I saw the pride swell among the Kazakhs about their wonderful traditions and culture.


Kazakhs desperately do not want to lose their beloved language. But they know they will lag woefully behind if they do not learn English. They are trying to enlarge the sphere of influence (and diminish Russian’s) by having all government documents translated from Russian into Kazakh by the end of this year. They will not make their deadline, having plowed through only a scant third of those documents as of mid December 2008. But it may have as much to do with the lack of appropriate legalese in Kazakh as it does with the immensity of the task itself.

This obvious pride in one’s language made me think about the time I was in Germany and heard a radio talk show host ask listeners what made them feel most proud about being German. One caller stated that the German language was unquestionably what made him feel that way. I remarked to myself that I had never in my life felt that way about English. Never – not once. I think it’s neat that English boasts a bulging word stock – over 600,000 words (depending on how you count them) and way more than many European languages put together – and that we are unstinting in welcoming new words to be part of our language.

In other cultures, such as many American Indian communities, where many languages are dying, people do what they can to slow the process, such as set up schools for the kids to learn in immersion environments and conduct traditional ceremonies in that language. The president, Nursultan Nazerbaev, himself a Kazakh, has made all signage bilingual (in some cases trilingual), which is great. It increases the status of the language and the possibility that many will absorb it without working at it. But knowing how to say ‘bookstore’ or ‘pharmacy’ in Kazakh is a far cry from giving a speech or reading a book in it.

Nationalistic feelings about preserving Kazakh make the ethnic Russians feel as if they are outsiders. They will naturally feel more and more isolated as Kazakh gains heft. When Russian bus drivers go through Kazakh parts of Almaty – the Kazakhs will not tolerate the bus driver speaking in Russian and respond only in Kazakh. Or at least won’t speak to him in Russian. It’s their small way of rebelling. Just think if the Chinese took over America and decided to forbid everyone to speak in English. I think we Americans would really put up a fight – on the buses, in the streets, and everywhere else. Pity the poor country that tries to do that!

But tonight, it made me feel quite touched to see the Kazakhstani citizens of both Kazakh and Russian decent – dancing together and celebrating who they are. Maybe the booze helped. It wouldn’t be the first difficult relationship that alcohol has helped get through another night.

Speaking at conference in Karaganda

In Kazakhstan, it pays to be flexible. I was scheduled to give a talk the second day of the conference, and planned to refine my talk and PowerPoint slides that first night in my hotel room. But when I arrived today at 10am, having gotten up at 3:30 that morning to catch my flight, the people at the registration desk rushed up to me, threw my ID badge at me, and asked if I could present right then and there, or at least in an hour or so.

I panicked a bit, since this has been my lifelong recurring nightmare – I arrive at the theater and don’t even know what play I’m in let, let alone have my costume or remember any lines. I drew in a big breath and told myself I could do this. But the next problem cropped up – they didn’t have any ability to project my PowerPoint, so now I was faced with redoing my whole talk without having to rely on the slides that would walk the audience through my arguments. So that was out the window. Now I really had to punt. As if that weren’t bad enough, I THEN found out that most of the 200 or so people don’t speak very good or even any English so I needed to have my talk translated, sentence by sentence, even phrase by phrase. This would eat up about half the time. Now I had a grand total of 7 minutes to give a talk. The speakers who preceded me that morning had taken more than their share of the time. So I was under pressure to keep it short and sweet and yet make a point – without slides and while being translated. Oh yeah, this is the stuff nightmares are made of.

But I pulled it off! I actually think it was a pretty good talk. I didn’t cover very much, and I repeated my main point – that students don’t need more grammar to learn how to write better; they need to learn how to think. And that goes for any student, anywhere, writing in any language. I allowed as how they would probably write more in their native language, but it would not necessarily be better organized. Most teachers don’t think about that.

Afterwards one teacher came up to me to ask if I thought that by asking students to listen to a story and then recording it from memory would help them do critical thinking. I had to state unequivocally no, that it would not because they need to be generating their own ideas and then weighing the arguments. Copying someone’s ideas doesn’t have anything to do with critical thinking. I hate to say it, but that’s pretty typical Kazakhstani thinking that by copying someone’s ideas you are actually teaching someone how to write. I said that it probably helped with sentence structure – because they had a model, and perhaps vocabulary, but it was not encouraging any kind of higher level thinking. She looked totally bemused about how to even approach such a task, and asked if I ever traveled to Karaganda to give seminars.

A Mini Tour of Almaty

All,

I have been derelict in writing but with good excuse – Steve has been visiting for two wonderful weeks. I have not provided very many photos of the city and shall rectify that now. Included here are various areas and structures in the city I find interesting. Alas, they are presented without any logical order. I’ll write more as in the coming weeks. Please let me know if there are specific questions about, say, food or transportation.

I am doing well, notwithstanding a nasty cold I developed while Steve was here. They turn the heat on here Oct. 15 and turn it off April 15. There are two main areas in the city that provide the hot water and heating for ALL buildings in Almaty. That’s taking the notion of central heating to an extreme. There is no regulating the heat, so the hot, dry air has caused problems.


One of the most beautiful buildings is Zenkov Cathedral, only a five-minute walk from my apartment. I stumbled on it one day as I was exploring my new neighborhood. The Lonely Planet Guide to Central Asia says that it was built in 1904 by AP Zenkov and reports it is one of Almaty's few surviving tsarist-era buildings, with most of the others having been destroyed in the 1911 earthquake. It is built entirely of wood, including the nails. In the Soviet era, it was used as a museum and concert hall, then boarded up. Not until 1995 was it returned to the Russian Orthodox Church and now services are held there twice a day during the week and three times on Sunday. I have attended (part of) one of the hour and a half long services. Everyone stands while the priests perform the ceremony in wonderfully rich, embroidered garb carrying icons and surrounded by walls decorated with murals of saints.

Well, I am having some trouble uploading all the photos I wanted to show you. I promise to return soon with more as soon as I figure it all out.

Best!!
Nancy

Soviet Teaching Methods Strangle Innovation

Whenever one visits a foreign country, danger always lurks in making judgments too quickly about the population. After all, there is unlimited data to understand about the culture, history, language – well, everything about the place. But one must function based on what one knows and sees to date. And so I write this entry with the caveat that I’ve spent a scant two months in Almaty and have gotten some impressions, many of which have been formed by contact with my students. So, let’s talk about them.

I teach two classes of undergraduates. Since our Academic Reading and Writing is a gateway course to the others at the university, it means we have students who are new to the university system, in other words, Freshmen. As odious as the task is in the U.S. to indoctrinate them into the culture of academic rigor and inquiry, it means they have practically zilch study skills, and need I say anything about writing ability? I have some students who have spent a year abroad in the states. They are much better at writing and critical thinking. The others have limited English and in some cases an even more restricted attention span or interest in being there. So, along with helping them learn to speak, read, write, and take notes in English, we have to answer questions such as “How many days can I miss before it affects my grade?”

KIMEP is an all-English university. (Most instructors are foreign-born and speak some version of English, many of whom are not all that intelligible to me. But that probably goes both ways.) As much as I find these students lacking in their English, they come out shining when compared to the students at the neighboring Agro University, I’m told, which attracts students from small villages who speak only Kazakh. Along with such lack of exposure to English comes their nonexistent exposure to Western teaching methods. That means they learn – and expect to be taught – by the very Soviet style methods I described in my earlier entry – arm up, stand up, recite, sit down. Repeat as necessary until all the exercises have been gone over. This is the entire class! Teachers do not dare stray from the drill-and-kill exercises in the book, nor do students expect there will be anything asked of them beyond getting the answer right. This of course flies in the face of the teaching methodologies more progressive institutions are encouraging, i.e., asking open- ended questions as well as encouraging dialog, self-discovery of answers, critical thinking about issues, etc. etc. Unfortunately, the Soviet-style system is self-perpetuating because teachers taught via the old Soviet system do not always know alternative ways of presenting material, thereby spawning another generation of students who in turn want their own children to be taught that way because “that’s how we did it.” I s’pose that way of thinking goes for any educational system in the world unless someone seeks out change.

The director of our MA TESOL program at is doing just that by offering seminars on reading, writing, and critical thinking to about 40 colleagues in the Language Center. I am particularly interested in assisting with these seminars since my training has taught me that organization and reasoning should be the targets of writing instruction, not the misplaced comma. We begin these seminars in a few weeks. I’m sure I will learn a lot too, thereby providing ample fodder for this blog. Stay tuned.

Best,
Nancy

Cheating Kazakh-Style

For those of you teachers familiar with the concept of cheating, I’ve got news for you – they have made it an Olympic sport in Kazakhstan, and, I should add, other erstwhile Soviet satellite countries. They learned well from Mother Russia.

While I have not had cheating incidents that I know of– yet—I have served on a disciplinary committee already that took five students to task for having cheated on their Intensive English listening exam. Five! They were from different classes, but they had all gotten the answers and pasted them to their notebooks, which they had placed conveniently on their laps. Although the teachers said they did not actually witness their using the crib sheets, their intention was clear. Several of the students in the meeting cried, but not because they’d lost face or were ashamed; they were just sorry they got caught. Actually, we found out that one of the students -- the only boy -- had bought the answers for $200 from someone on the street in front of the university. Only they were the wrong answers! This selling of answers is not at all unusual and has turned into quite a cottage industry. Too bad he had no return policy for his bogus answers.

Cheating seems to be one of those wonderful hand-me-down habits from the Soviet period when it was more important to appear to be right than to actually know the answers. Frank Thoms, who spent a lot of time observing the students in the Soviet system, wrote Through Their Eyes: Encounters with Soviet People, (don’t know if it’s published), said that students went to such elaborate lengths to cheat that they often spent more time preparing the cheat sheets than it would have taken to learn the material. He cites writing on their hands, thighs, the inside of their jackets, notes tucked inside the cap of a Bic pen, and so forth. One student at my university had apparently spent many, many hours writing formulas and what not on the long table in the back of the room where the teacher couldn’t see. With every seat in the room taken by examinees, he was certain to be able to sit in the back and have practically his entire textbook etched into the table. He was only found out because the janitor saw it one evening and told the teacher.

The system developed, Mr. Thoms suggests, because cheating “serves the collective. But unlike American students, Soviets do not cheat from one another but with one another [emphasis his], with the brighter students helping the weaker ones…cheating enables some teachers and their students to proceed through assignments with success.”

He talks a lot about the prompting that goes on. Students provide answers to those who lag behind. “Prompting kindles the collective spirit,” Mr. Thoms points out. “Prompting ensures that…slower students will not be left behind. Prompting provides for success at every lesson. It enables lessons to move along, to keep pace with the demands of the curriculum. Without it there would be silence, the dreaded silence of failure. There is no time for waiting in a Soviet classroom, no time for pausing, no time for reflecting.” He also points out that prompting replaces personal responsibility and initiative. Everyone learns to stay together and no one is allowed to get ahead, thus perpetuating mediocrity. “Excelling breeds envy.”

So cheating has a different etiology and a different purpose over here. Unfortunately the result is still the same – students don’t learn. The dirty little secret is that teachers collude with the students. They want them to succeed because it makes them look good. In fact, even the teachers who came to the disciplinary hearing tried to defend the students in that they “didn’t actually see them cheat.” Come on, folks. I only need to hear the quacking and I know it’s a duck. I’ll be on the lookout for cheaters. But then cheaters aren’t new to me. Just the reasons behind it.

Cheers everyone!

Apartment pix

Hello again,

I'm feeling very prolific of late as well as computer savvy so I thought I'd post pictures of my apartment and Almaty. Here goes!

My apartment is a three-room sixth-floor very sunny place with a great 180 view of the city. It's much cheerier than other places I've seen, although as you will see, the exterior does not bode well. Most apartments that live up to western standards have been renovated, and mine is no exception. The hallways have lights, which is not true of all buildings.

This is a picture of my living room that faces north.

My office has only a couch and desk, lots off room for books and things that I don't need to buy but probably will.

My kitchen faces east toward the moutains and is a delight in the morning - very sunny and breezy. Unfortunately, there is a very strange digging project going on outside my window whose mission I cannot identify. I hear banging and shouting at all hours of the day and night, even on weekends, with lights making it seem almost like day time. My landlord just said, "They're digging." But it keeps my imagination active as to its purpose. We writers need such stimuli.
Here are some pictures of my apartment building. The first is the front, the second is the back where I enter.Notice the black kitty who lets me pet her when I come home. I left out some tuna juice for her today.