Finis Origine Pendet
A Year in Bangladesh By Emma Hiza ’05
Editor’s Note: Following her graduation from Exeter in 2005, Emma Hiza attended Johns Hopkins University, graduating in 2009. After teaching for two years in Philadelphia, she traveled to Bangladesh as a volunteer teacher at the Asian University for Women. Emma returns to Johns Hopkins in July to pursue a master’s degree in public health. Please note that the students’ names in this piece have been changed.
article in front of her.The 18-year-old’s thick, black bangs hang over her eyes, but I know she is wearing an expression of frustration mixed with self-defeat. I have asked her to write an analysis of the author’s argument in the article she is holding. “Assumption …” she murmurs to herself, desperately scanning through the pages. Nearly exasperated, she turns back to the beginning of the article in order to reread each line again, searching for the answer to my question. I moved to Chittagong, Bangladesh, in August 2011 to spend a year volunteering as a writing teacher at the Asian University for Women (AUW). We have been working on these analysis skills for a few weeks, but Anh is still struggling. I can tell that she spent the night before carefully reading each line, waiting for the answer to jump out at her. All of her previous experience with education has taught her to approach learning in this way—finding the right answer in a text and copying it down. She is good at this and therefore was a good student in Vietnam. Now, she doesn’t understand why she is failing. I gently take the article out of her hands. The sentence she is looking for is not in the text. Also 18, Safia waits for the other students to leave at the end of class before coming to me, holding the draft of her essay. She points to my comment in the margin: More analysis, less summary—I want to read your ideas, not the author’s. “I The solutions to the troubles of don’t understand,” she says, clearly frustrated. Safia has an their countries are not written intensity about her that must have been what pushed her out of her village in India and propelled her to Bangladesh. in textbooks ... . I worry about She recalls the reactions she would get from her communitheir nebulous and lofty dreams. ty when she would talk about her dreams for the future: “They would tell me, ‘Be practical.You cannot change the world in one day.’ But when I learned about this university, I learned that there were others who thought like me and I knew I had to come here.” Presently, Safia’s intensity is focused on what she fears might result in a poor grade on her final draft of this essay. “I know we have been talking about this in class,” she acknowledges, “but it is still very difficult for me. I thought I was a good student, now I am not so sure. In my old school I used to read what I was told to read and memorize it and then write it back for my teacher on essays and exams. But that doesn’t work here.” She has finished the equivalent of 12th grade in her country without (continued on page 111) ever having been asked to analyze something, to ask
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The Exeter Bulletin
S UMMER 2012
FRED CARLSON
I
t is October and Anh is sitting across from me at my desk, frowning down at the