I actually work

However hard it is to believe, I do actually work… sometimes. I have spent the last two weeks in “radio silence” for two reasons. One, it is incredibly difficult to communicate from Myanmar and secondly I have been too busy working. It is actually kind of fun. In week one I was in Mandalay giving full day workshops on assessment and evaluation as well as cooperative learning. I remember I used to be in awe of presenters with their powerpoint presentations, their management of large groups and their expertise. Now, it seems, I am one of those guys. If I can do it believe me, it can’t be that hard. The trick is, don’t try to accomplish too much in one session and only focus on a little bit at a time. It is easy to be an expert in one little area, sort of, depending on what you consider an expert.

This week I spent every day evaluating teachers in Yangon to get some baseline data on next steps for growth. I created a four page rubric and one page of open text where I could write what their strengths were and their next steps for growth. I spent at least 8 hours with each teacher seeing all of their classes during the day and then generally had supper with them each night to discuss my findings. They were incredibly open and forthcoming. I do realize that change takes a lot of time and just measuring something does not make it better. For example, one teacher spoke to a class of ten kids as if there was a hundred people in the room his voice was so loud, which he acknowledged when I pointed it out to him. When I went into the class the next day, guess what, no change whatsoever which should have been relatively easy to correct one would think. Their paradigm of teaching, of course, is far more difficult to change and that takes time and continual renewal and discussion. In fact, I probably could never get them to change their style of teaching from what they experienced as a student.

I have also been working on an online component of my work with teachers. I now have compiled courses in fundamentals of pedagogy, cooperative learning and mentoring. I intend to create courses in assessment and evaluation, action research, leadership, and a number of other courses but at the moment, I just have to take teachers where they are and believe me, they are not there yet .What is interesting is that the Myanmar programmer promised me that the site would be up about two months ago and I will be lucky if it gets up today. By the time you read this hopefully you can have a look if you want. Let me know if you want to get into the bits and pieces and I will get you a guest user name and password. The site is http://www.rvi-institute.com/



As an aside, maybe the most important thing I have ever done in my life is help someone learn to read. I discovered that the lady that cleans my apartment could not read in English or Thai. Imagine going through life not be able to read? Before I left for Myanmar, I paid the manager of the building to give her one hour of lessons every day and when I pass edby the office, I can’t believe how hard they were working. Both were getting great pleasure out of the exercise, for sure and little do they know that I am getting the most pleasure, especially when I offered to buy something for them the day I left from the corner stand and asked the cleaning woman to write it down for me so I would bring back the right food. Wow…it took her about ten minutes with her book of letters to write one word, but what a word!!!! She did it, the corner lady could read it and she got her som tam.. I jumped for joy.



I remember Temi teaching some illiterates how to read years ago and now I know the pleasure she must have derived from this. What a different life for this woman as she takes the subway home and can read the stations as opposed to counting her stops, or understand the headlines in a newspaper or reads a note from a customer asking her to do something in the apartment. I think I gave her the greatest gift of all. In fact, I can’t wait to get home today to see what progress she made and find out if she studied diligently the last few weeks.