The week before winter holidays, I was asked last-minute to cover a class for another teacher. Handed a brief outline of the lesson (“Age of Exploration and the Spice Trade”), and the class textbook, I left the cozy confines of the infant department – where, contrary to anyone’s expectations, I have become surprisingly comfortable – and headed to the main atrium of the school. Enter: Grade 4.
I realize, obviously, that most teachers start out as substitutes, and this sort of fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants with a class you have never met before is a thing you just get used to. I mean, I think. I don’t really know. They don’t teach you how to be an elementary school teacher in the politics department.
But the thing I forgot about after spending every day with 6-year-olds who screw up their faces in concentration while they struggle to explain in English when they need to use the toilet, or require an eraser, is that when you enter a room of excitable 11-year-olds, they can actually talk back to you. Whatever, I thought. It’s one period. Our curriculums are organized in such a way we basically are told which pages are taught every week, and you teach it appropriately. Anybody should really be able to teach anything, because of this. How bad could it be?
So there I was, with a 45-minute class ahead of me on the spice trade and the Age of Exploration. I asked one of the kids to read aloud so I could covertly borrow a workbook from another and scan the questions I was supposed to be using to teach the material. Which meant I was a little caught off guard when the student reached the part about how shipping routes were introduced as an alternative to land routes because “the Turks and the Tartars” effectively ended the caravans.
Wait, what?
One of the students already had his hand in the air, “Miss, what are ‘Turks and Tartars’?”
There are two things I want to note here. First is my frustration with an American syllabus that, though designed for international schools primarily in the Middle East, is so obviously Western in structure and content that grade one gets taught phrases like “Tom likes to play baseball.” Tom isn’t really a name that catches the ears of Kurdish kids. Neither are Jack, Joan, Meg, or Pam. And shouldn’t Tom be playing football, the most universal of sports?
Second is the ongoing realization of just how Western-centric my/our education is, and the impact that has on myself, and the world around me. This is sort of a wonder to me: that I could spend so much time in university challenging myself to understand alternate histories and frameworks and ways of understanding power, only to come here and be surprised by the fact that the dominant narrative is still being taught. I feel naïve for assuming otherwise – that my personal route through political theory would magically be reflected in the mass reproduction of the American elementary school system for use overseas.
But none of this can take away from the fact that an 11-year old Arab kid just asked my what a Turk was.
“Um, it’s not really a word we should be using – it was about people who lived under the Ottoman Empire, during this period…” I start, stumbling, hugely uncomfortable. How do you announce to a class that their textbook, because of where it’s from, is using a derogatory word used to describe, basically, some sort of gross assumption that there was an ‘uncivilized’ (wtf does that mean anyway. Screw you, Europe) horde of mounted, barbaric militants in the 14th to 17th centuries chasing down nice, organized European merchants who just wanted to bring home some silk and cinnamon? Because that’s exactly what the damn book was doing.
You can’t really pause for more than about 15 or 20 seconds when you teach elementary school. Do I open up a conversation about how the words we use to describe peoples and cultures change the way we think about them? How language impacts our politics? Devin, they’re in grade four.
But it was too late, 10-year-olds catch on quick.
“Turks are from Turkey?” one asked.
“He’s a Turk then!” Another gleefully pointed at the sole Turkish kid in the class.
The kid grinned and announced, “Yeah, I’m from Turkey!”
“Well, they’re not words we use anymore,” I said, trying to keep the conversation from unraveling.
To my deep shame, I decided to power on through with the curriculum, instead of stopping to let the kids discuss the angle the textbook was taking to describe the “Near and Far East”. Where the fuck was Edward Said when I needed him.
“Basically, groups of people in this region,” I pointed vaguely to central Asia and Iran, “attacked the merchant caravans, so they started using ships instead,” I said. Just like that, I skimmed over a few centuries of resulting imperialism and orientalism, and moved on, because I wanted to finish the questions before the end of class. I sort of hated myself.
What I find most difficult to come to terms with is that all of this deprives the children here, the children directly from this area that I vaguely indicated on the map, the knowledge of their own rich history – minimalizing that whole history into a few groups of brigands whose apparent sole purpose was to prevent European traders from reaching their destinations. I was furious, and couldn’t decide whether I was more angry at the book or at myself.
“Look!” I said, distracted, “the trading routes go right through where we are. It doesn’t show Sulaymaniyah, but who can show me where Baghdad is on the map?”
This class epitomizes my struggle with what I do, and how I do it. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I had reservations about teaching English overseas. Part of me is sure that it only perpetuates a modern impression of imperialism. But… I’m here anyway. And I’m incredibly happy here. And I don’t know what that says about me.
When I live and travel in places far from home, I am always reminded that the stories we tell are our own stories, and that part of the reason I like to be in these other places is that I am finally offered some small insight into someone else’s narrative. I worry that when we teach from the perspective of the spice trade, or the age of exploration, that narrative begins to disappear. Travel allows us to realize that the world is a smaller place than we thought it was; but maybe it’s because we’re making it smaller when we lose these other narratives.
Travel is a selfish thing – both individualized and inward-looking as it tries to understand concepts of other, this focus on the question of how do I fit into this place. But at the same time, if those other narratives are able to be told and explored and understood, then we can keep asking questions, and keep hearing other stories, and keep wondering at other languages.
I shouldn’t be surprised that the age of exploration is being taught from the perspective of the West to children living in this part of the world, because I know that imperialism is still happening in a thousand different ways. But I am surprised, because the story from their perspective is actually exciting as hell, and I’m sad they don’t have the chance in this curriculum to learn that side of the story. What frustrates me further is that it feels like the curriculum is actively keeping that side from them. And I don’t know how to get around that in my job.
I returned to the infant department after class, and instead of having my class learn about family members by describing Jack and Tom and Meg’s families, I asked them to write about their own, so we learned about Farah and Saro and Hozyar’s families, and they finally were able to learn the words for sister and brother and mother that we had been struggling with all week. They finished the day happy, and I reconciled myself with the small victory.
But I realized that the next time I get asked who the ‘Turks and Tartars’ were, I’m going to be able to tell everyone to close their books, and answer it the way I should have.
DISPATCHES FROM A FRONTIER 