Home /
Campus Life > Center for Social Impact > School Partnerships > Rashmi School, Nepal > Student & Faculty Voices
page tools / 
June 2018, Day 3 in Kathmandu
by Jaya '21 and Tori '21
June 2018 by Dr. Sullivan
It could be easy, I think, to travel to Nepal from the United States and want to give more than you receive in terms of equipment and ideas. Going into the trip, I felt a lot of pressure to be as useful as I could to the people I would work with. I knew that the value of money is very asymmetric for Americans and Nepali people. The cost of my plane ticket could pay for a year’s salary for many people there. I worried that I was not bringing enough lessons, enough equipment, enough ideas. However, I was not thinking rightly. It is indeed useful that we have funded the acquisition of materials that can be used to make science education more interactive at Rashmi. However, I think the biggest benefit for both our Wooster team and the Rashmi students and teachers we worked with was learning about each other. We extracted great value just from going to classes and seeing how students and teachers interact there, and teaching a few minutes of class--giving a picture of how different (and how similar) teaching can be where we are from.
On our first day at Rashmi I taught a lesson with pulleys and paracord. The students knew the material (simple machines), but had never built one or felt the force multiplication happening. There weren’t any brass lab masses to lift, which are what we use in our physics labs at Wooster and at many high schools in the US. However, we had many water bottles with us, and they were a perfect substitute. Water is very dense, and it is easy to adjust the mass of a water bottle to any value you desire. I will probably now use water bottles while teaching at home. It’s interesting to see how having less can make you think more efficiently about how to use the things that you do have. We used parts of a window and a door as lab stands. Sanjeeb asked if there were anything else I’d like to teach. As long as we had water bottles out, It occured to me that there was a connection between blood pressure and mercury sphygmomanometers(which the 10th grade students were learning that day), and more basal information about pressure and how it varies with depth in a fluid. We analyzed together how a straw works, and then demonstrated how a playing card can trap water in an inverted bottle.
Students in Nepal learn in a very hierarchical knowledge framework. For example, they learn four attributes of veins and arteries that distinguish their structure and function. The can and do stand up when questioned and recite facts with an impressive level of hierarchical detail and a great deal of explanation of nomenclature. Sanjeeb explains material in a way that facilitates that building of knowledge hierarchy through the use of repetition and explicit connection to whatever topics preceded the latest knowledge. I think it likely that this mode of teaching and learning came from colonial influence.Data--facts that is--are now cheap. Incredibly cheap compared to the colonial era when many current educational models were developed and spread. In Nepal and the US alike, students now have phones with constant connection to the internet. They can find more facts more quickly than I could with a laptop computer in college. Especially given how easy it is to find facts, I believe it is more meaningful to learn by doing, building, and failing than by receiving information. And yet, there is value in having a base of hierarchical knowledge to put experiences in an organized context. There is value in knowing definitions. There is value in being able to stand, recite a well organized answer, and defend it in front of peers. That activity is more formalized in Nepal, and I admire some things about it.
It was exciting to see Sanjeeb’s teaching change over the course of the week we were there. He was planning in ways that involved using equipment in class. Because of the equipment in class, he was moving around the room more. There were more, “Whoa. What is that?” kinds of reactions among the students when they saw and felt the phenomena they were learning about. I also found that I was explaining things differently while I was there, mimicking some of the repetition techniques that I saw Sanjeeb Sir employing.It was difficult to get used to how much a student would be put on the spot if I called on him or her. I noticed there being fewer girls in the highest level math and science classes at Rashmi, but the same phenomenon exists at our own school. Questions posed to no one in particular were not used in the classes I saw. When you call on a student there, you pose a question to a particular person, and he or she has to stand to answer it. Sitting back down is not allowed until permission to do so is given. That formality was so ingrained that adults asking questions or giving answers at a presentation would end up stuck standing until someone pointed out that they could sit down. There is value in the formal distance between students and teachers in Nepal. There is also value in the less formal relationships between student and teacher at our school. When a teacher enters a room there the whole class stands up and says, “Namaste, Sir.” The teacher returns the greeting and says, “Namaste, you may sit down.”
Sometimes the meaning of namaste that you hear in yoga classes in America sounds spacey and new age to me. “The light in me honors the light in you,” is often the explanation I have heard. However, it really seems to be what it means when I observe Nepali people interacting with each other. Whenever entering a new space I saw people acknowledge each others’ presences and humanity in a way that we sadly often neglect to do. People seem to acknowledge each other more in Nepal, especially strangers or newcomers. Also especially teachers. I learned from observation and from explanation that offering hospitality to guests is fundamental to Hindu culture. Providing food, shelter, and greeting to a needy stranger is a duty. A precept of Hindu scripture is the Sanskrit phrase अतिथिदेवो भव (Atithidevo Bhava-The stranger is equivalent to God). Atithi literally means “one without a set time”, which seems like a very poetic conception of an unexpected guest. The full mantra from the Upanishads is Matrudevo bhava, pitrudevo bhava, acharyadevo bhava, atithidevo bhava. Be one for whom the mother is a God, the father is a God, the teacher is a God, the guest is a God. I learned about Hinduism and Buddhism in college. But in Nepal saw many instances every day through small gestures and larger generosities, even through manners in driving through unbelievably crowded and chaotic traffic that this precept is really a cornerstone of society. It is interesting to be in a place where so many people are observant of a faith--any faith, and still more so to see such a commonly practiced principle borne out in interactions and behaviors.
June 2018, Kathmandu by Lily '21 and Emma '21
July 1, 2016 by Tyler Marcos '16
I have completed all the construction that I can do for my project. I am waiting for an electrician to install some new outlets, and a carpenter to make a new table for the room. Once that is complete, I will teach the faculty how to use the computers. That will be the biggest challenge for me and I am excited to face it.
