Teaching in Bhutan: Bouncing and Singing Hearts

When educating the minds of our youth, we must not forget to educate their hearts.

An e-mail from Lobesa Lower Secondary School in Punakha, Bhutan informs me that they are awaiting my arrival ‘with bouncing hearts’. My bags, brimming with materials I would need to teach 6-15 year-olds – including a well-seasoned ukulele and song charts – are packed, visas are secured and flights are booked. As I sweep the last of the Canadiana gifts into my suitcases, I keep trying to conjure a more accurate image of ‘bouncing hearts’.

The Canadian Connection

Myself and the other five teachers selected to volunteer teach for Bhutan Canada feel honoured to be continuing the legacy left by Canadian teacher, Father Mackey, 65 years ago. A Jesuit priest from New Brunswick, Mackey and his team of Catholic nuns had been recruited from their posts in Darjeeling to establish a school system in Bhutan that would strengthen the country’s indigenous cultural and religious

traditions while helping its people to modernize. To this day, the schools follow a Canadian curriculum, largely overseen by the advisors and directives from the University of Fredericton. When neighbouring countries, like India, have been dictated by colonial mandates, it is a point of pride that a Canadian curriculum is the chosen modus operandi in the schools of Bhutan.

Baptism in Punakha

We converge in the airport of Paro and overnight in the capital city of

Thimphu to shop for supplies and what would become our uniform for the month – the national dress of kira, toega and wonju. The next day and two valleys and 75 mountain switchbacks later, we are in the golden hued, rice paddy filled, rhododendrum blooming valley of Punakha. And, Lord be praised, in a hotel with recognizable fixtures like toilets and showers and balconies and bedside lamps and tables. And an owner whose two gregarious school-aged sons are anxious to be the first to introduce us to our workplace. We agree to meet the following morning, the Sunday before we begin teaching.

“May I bring my Christian friend along?” asks Jigme, the oldest song of Kenzang’s, when we meet at the front steps of the hotel the following morning. Our initiation into Bhutanese culture has begun. My colleague, Lynn, and I gesture to Joel to join us, and the five of us set off up the hillside together. By the time we reach the school fifteen minutes later, many of the magical machinations of Guru Rimpoche (a founding lama of Bhutan) have been revealed to us, my own spiritual beliefs queried, the stability and peacefulness of Bhutan – in contrast to its neighbours – has been established, stories of their favourite basketball stars had been shared, warning about the older boys ‘lurking’ in school

basketball courts given, and treats from a run-down tuck shop adjacent to the school grounds passed around, Behind this animated culture-bending exchange is a school campus dramatically perched over a valley just blossoming into spring, a setting that would become very familiar to us in the days ahead. But today, Bhutan belongs to the boys.

School Traditions in Bhutan

We learn early – in the first hour as teachers in Bhutan – that ritual and pomp and ceremony play a large role in the public life of the Bhutanese. After the principal has introduced us to the student body assembled (about 800 people), establishing our ages, our qualifications and the countries we are representing, we are asked to give some opening remarks. Not batting an eye, we rise to the occasion, establishing our friendly intentions and laying out our hopes for the month. There is a certain openness, we discover, to what is shared in a Buddhist society. A westerner’s expectations of privacy and confidentiality is simply a hang-up best shed upon arrival.

Expectations, too, of what a school needs to operate – in a physical sense – gets re-adjusted quickly in Bhutan. It does not take polished floors, smartboards and AV departments to run an effective and efficient

school. It takes dedicated staff and willing students. And of course in Bhutan it takes a collective understanding of how education contributes to a country’s state-endorsed GNH (gross national happiness), which would include the preservation of culture, environment, others, and informed engagement as a citizen of Bhutan and the world.

One sees this in the well oiled operation of the school. The required social time before school in the morning – to clean up the school

grounds and classrooms and toilets (there are no custodians or maintenance department) – the perfectly choreographed morning assembly with 750 busy kids poured into precisely twenty-five rows of singing, praying, chanting Buddhists and Bhutanese citizens, the eight evenly apportioned class times (the changes to which are still signalled by a hand-rung bell), and the after school clubs all assure students of their purpose and their place.

In the classes, a no-nonsense atmosphere prevails, with students expected to give full attention to their work and teacher’s directions (remember those days?). A stick sits on the teacher’s desk to remind students what happens when they misbehave (though corporal punishment in Bhutan schools is officially outlawed). Daily homework is

assigned, exams are given regularly, marks and school results are published, and students are forced to repeat any grade level they have not ‘mastered’. There are no modified programs or extra assistance given special needs students; their needs are subsumed into those of the other 34 children in the class. Resources are minimal: for the teacher a few pieces of chalk and a dusty board, for the children a roster of carefully guarded textbooks and notebooks.

Bouncing and Singing Hearts

I would like to say, given this context, that the children wowed, that the respect given to the business of learning was beyond anything experienced in a Canadian teacher’s lexicon, but, other than the automatic bowing and scraping upon greeting a person of authority, the children were…..children. They were at times wild (standing atop tables, refusing to get down), heartless (laughing at another child’s misstep), and surprisingly inflexible (when encouraged to step outside their well-worn left-brain thinking processes). I emerge from a week with

kindergarten children bruised and almost defeated; whither are the mannequins of disciplined propriety that one has been conditioned to expect in an Asian school? Happily, finding that I am amidst spirited, want-to-express-themselves children, I am disabused of this stereotypical notion within the first week.

And delighted to find I am amidst children that have an unbridled love of music. Every time I entered a classroom, a collective exhalation of breath is followed by an anticipatory gasp of excitement as the music begins. Glimmers of interest in the K classes become long spells of enchantment with the grade two classes when music is part of English instruction, turning to delirious participation with the grade fours when any form of song and dance is presented. From children falling in line to The Ants Go Marchin In, to the rigorous patschen patterns in N.A. singing games such as John Kanaka and Draw a Bucket of Water to excited decoding of lyrics to Charlotte Diamond songs, and the thrill of linking arms to perform African and Hebrew circle dances at full-throated volume and breakneck tempi, the children plunge into music with mucho gusto. It was obvious that we are turning up the temperature at Lobesa; twenty faces pressed

against the outside windows appear whenever we launch into a song, But, there is no doubt that learning – deep-felt cellular learning – was going on. It is clear in the way students greet me, with snatches of song, in the way that songs become currency in the playground, in the way that staff blame me for the ‘ear-worms’ that I had planted and can not be expunged.

While it is the boys who respond most readily in class, it is on the walks to and from school, or in quiet spots on the school grounds that the girls open up and seek my confidance. Here, the underbelly of Bhutan society – the drug use, the domestic abuse, the racist attitudes – are revealed to

me, as well as current favourite pop stars (Beiber, Ed Sheeran), and clarification about the jewellery and hair accessories the girls can and can’t wear to school. Questions about the health of my family, the weather in my country, and whether I liked their food are followed by requests for my e-mail or facebook address. Being a teacher and 50 years older seemed completely immaterial to them.

Marigold School Hotel

As graciously as we had been ushered in to the Lobesa school community, so are we bid adieu. It is lavish – parties, presentations, parting speeches, presents. By Canadian standards, something one only experiences upon retirement! The handmade cards and notes scribbled on pages torn from their notebooks brim with the sweet sentimentality that is unique to Bhutanese English: “Our beloved Madam Joan” they began. “Alas, the day has come for us to say ‘save journey, mam’. It is heartbreaking to us that you are leaving. Thank you, for which you have showered us with the light of education.” The sonnets of praise continue:  “You are the biggest teacher ever. You are so beautiful, your voice so soft….” “We will never forget you, we will pray for you that successful journey and happy life ahead,”

Yes, Bhutan is still a developing country – its mountain roads are terrifying stray dogs a concern, running water in homes still a rarity – but people’s understandings of the importance of education and teachers to GNH (Gross National Happiness) is highly developed. A concluding speech from a Bhutanese colleague who compares our visit to a dream that they would now have to wake up from could have just as easily been written by us. It would go something like this: “Looking for that school beyond the earth and the sky? Come to Bhutan and check out the Marigold School Hotel. It’s on that hillside midst the magnolias and rhododendrums and the children, lunch baskets over their arms, walking hand in hand to school. Can you hear that brass bell ringing?”