The more time I spend at the school the more I realise that we are here not only to teach the kids speak English but also to teach them think.
I know it sounds a bit weird and boastful but we're teaching at primary school so I often found that the kids do not really understand what we're doing just because they don't see the connection between certain things. And here I am not talking about any difficult contents but very fundamental things.
For instance I often found that when we talk about something and I ask them questions they are more or less capable to compete the task. However if we talk about the same matter and then I write my questions on the board they are always confused what to do. Sometimes I just get the feeling that they separate live speech from the written text totally. They can write and read but often it turns out that they are not "actually writing" but just putting words together letter by letter and then spell it out loud.
I have not yet figured out how to address this issue but I think I am going to make them read loudly, I'll write what they read on the board sentence by sentence, so then we can understand the text together. I don't know. Part of the problem is that I don't speak Nepali and also it's probably not only my class when they don't understand the link between spoken and written texts.
Another thing is the "yes culture", which I am also pretty familiar with (hahaha). Whenever there's a word that I suppose the students won't know I ask them if they know what it means and they often say yes without thinking. But when I ask them if they could explain it one another even in Nepali it turns out that they do not know the word just said yes to my question. Of course it is not the end of the world, they're just 8-10 years old but I would like to make sure that they ask when they don't understand something otherwise what is the point of me being here?
I talked about this issue with the principal because I am also concerned that once I leave (in two months) for other volunteers who come it'll take a good while as well to identify these problems. We'll see.
