End Game

Last few  days in Kathmandu

The PA Fellowship to travel back to Nepal will soon end. In 48 hours I will fly from Kathmandu to Guangzhou (Canton), China, where I have a layover from 5:45 am to 9:00 pm (long!) and then a 12 hour flight to Los Angeles. The Buckley emails, when I can log on, are starting to pull me back into the mindset of Buckley's world, though I can walk outside right now and see cows, rickshaws, careening taxis, and people hawking their wares. I choose to soak up the last of my precious moments here rather than pull away. But I can feel the rapid change coming.

Reflecting in Kathmandu

Big themes for this trip have been time to reflect on the teaching profession. A colleague at Chadwick wrote her dissertation on the importance for teachers and teacher leaders to build in time for reflection, but don't. Summers could serve that function, but some administrators work nearly year round, some teachers teach summer school, and the rest merely rest and recuperate. This journey back to the beginnings of my teaching has been uniquely suited to self-reflection. For one, I have been alone a lot of the time, and even when one is "alone" in Los Angeles, there is no solitude, really. Also, I've reconnected with the practice of keeping journals, which I did constantly in Nepal when I was here before. I started by re-reading all my journals, which sparked a dual reality or consciousness of time past and time present, of lived reality transformed into language, then re-experienced through reading. This re-experiencing of feelings and events impressed upon me that moments are not always fleeting, but can be re-accessed later and reflected upon. Specifically, I was amused by the contents of  the 22-year-old mind, fresh, but immature, by later standards, worrying about the future excessively, and like a toddler asking questions. That's probably too harsh. I was in a difficult and novel situation, relying on myself not my parents or teachers for the first time in my life. Of course, the stream of consciousness, which I faithfully and honestly recorded, to my younger self's credit, was anxious and jumbled. That honestly was part of the pleasure of the re-reading.

Ganesh mask above my bed

Most tourists in Nepal go trekking into the Himalayas. I did that decades ago and still find the mountains breathtaking. But my instincts were to visit schools, not mountains. And trusting my gut proved right for me. My hobby is visiting schools, so I know how much I can get out of it. But I was not prepared for two things on this trip: 1) how welcoming, hospitable, and open educators were in every school I visited, and 2) how much I reveled in watching teachers teach and students learn, how much I can get out of just observing, and how much the conversations afterwards moved me. Not for everyone, this journey proved perfect for me. I got to reflect not only on my own past as an educator, but also on the current state of affairs in education in a developing country like Nepal. This gives me a unique perspective that will allow me to converse with others about globalization and the global schoolroom (did I coin that term?). My experiences before and today make me uniquely qualified to talk about education in specific terms in developing versus developed countries.

Wait, that sounds too broad, I admit it. I took some snapshots of four schools in Nepal and formed my first impressions. But having observed classrooms for most of my life, I have a feeling my first impressions are accurate enough.

I don't know exactly if or when this expertise will be useful, but that was part of the open mind and open journey of coming here in the first place. My initial proposal sounds now like an open ticket, carte blanche, to find what I find. It's a little like teaching (as I anticipate the new year and reflect on the beginnings of the new school year at schools in Nepal). Experienced teachers plan and prep, prep and plan, set long term goals and student outcomes, prioritize goals among skills, development of young minds, critical thinking, love of the subject (in my case love of literature and composition), but then when you meet your students, you are flexible as well. You have  to teach the students you have, not the idealized version of the students you once had. Every year I get better at connecting with the actual students, their personalities, especially discovering each student's strengths and nurturing those, and working on each student's weakness. So it is with my journey here to Nepal: I had a plan and intentions, did my best to get invitations to visit schools, and walked onto each campus with no agenda whatsoever, with an open mind and an open heart to what each school, each teacher, each student that I sat next to had to offer. I would like to instill that spirit of openness in my students, a sense of curiosity and discovery without loads of preconceptions, a willingness to discover together what each book, each line of inquiry has to offer us.

In that sense, I find, I have been like my own ideal student, willing and capable to go wherever the path leads, to think for himself but be observant, not judgmental, open to what each lesson has to offer. Grades and standardized test scores don't measure these qualities in life learners, but with a lot of solitude and time for reflection, we can discover these qualities in ourselves. That is the lesson I hope to retain.