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Lost in Translation: Wolf hats and word fumbles – The Student Life
May
Claremont Colleges News
One Wednesday this September, I found myself standing in front of a room of 34 fifth grade students, wearing a furry wolf hat and holding a giant plastic flower.
My goal for that week’s Chinese class, shared by my teaching partner, Emma Wei SC ’27, was to teach the seasons of the year. We’d strategized, planned, located props, rehearsed our lines and even assumed the personas of cartoon animals, all in preparation for this single 45-minute class.
All of that planning, only to stand up there looking out at a sea of enthusiastically confused children.
Every Wednesday Emma and I, alongside the rest of our Foreign Language Teaching Clinic class, take a bus to Chaparral Elementary School to teach Chinese language and culture to Mr. Dahl’s fifth grade class. As the semester has progressed, we’ve built a whole universe for these children to learn within: our class mascots have families and friends, the Jade Emperor often comes to visit and our activities include elaborate storylines of prison breaks and ancient dance troupes.
Yet despite all this planning, sometimes our lesson simply doesn’t land. On the bus ride back to campus those days, I sit with the uneasy feeling that our efforts are fruitless. There’s no way these children are going to actually learn how to speak Chinese in 45 minutes — so what’s the point?
If you’ve never been humbled before, try teaching a class of students exclusively in a language they don’t understand. In moments where the activity just isn’t landing, or when our words seem to be falling on deaf ears, it’s easy to fall into the pit of self-doubt.
On the bus ride home from teaching our students about seasons, I got a notification that there’d been an earthquake in the Annapurna region of Nepal. As we crossed Foothill, my mind wandered back to my days of walking home from teaching at a Nepali elementary school at dusk, shouldering a backpack full of textbooks, flashcards and lesson plans.
In 2022, as the pandemic finally felt like it was coming to a close, I graduated high school and my family moved from Hong Kong to Washington, D.C. Just as I felt like the ground was crumbling under my feet, I reconnected with an old friend who’d found a way to trade her time and effort for free lodging in a Himalayan village.
Two months and one teaching certificate later, I trekked my way through the Annapurna region of Nepal to the small village of Tolka, where I began working as an English liaison and librarian at the local government school.
Every morning I would meticulously plan out my lessons, and yet many evenings my walk home was filled with all the mistakes I’d made that day — every moment where I’d looked out to find a sea of blank, confused faces.
Many volunteer programs, like those in Chaparral and Nepal, tend to frame their mission as “giving back to a community.” Standing in front of a classroom waving my plastic flower wand at confused children, I often wonder what exactly we “give” when we are “giving back.”
What am I giving these students when I stand up there teaching them how to say “summer” in Mandarin?
When I look back at the languages of my childhood, I see a similar world of confusion. Between Hong Kong’s streets of Cantonese, my grandmother’s Tagalog, my parent’s English and my school’s Mandarin, I spent many an hour staring blankly up at adults as their words fell on my deaf ears.
“What am I giving these students when I stand up there teaching them how to say “summer” in Mandarin?”
Navigating the world of linguistic disorientation often left me feeling alone and incompetent. With the gift of retrospect, however, I’ve come to understand that without all those hours of sitting there confused, I never would’ve been given the access and ability to move between these languages and the worlds that they hold.
When babies first learn to speak, they babble. Walking around Tolka with my beginner’s Nepali, I babbled with the determination of a newborn crying through a long haul flight. I pointed at every object; I conversed with first graders; I carried around a notebook where I recorded every phrase I heard.
Initially, my feverish desire to learn Nepali was inspired by the practical access that a language can give you. With no English speakers in sight, I craved the ability to voice my feelings, ask for food and water and give instructions to my students.
What was I given? With relentless practice, babbling became stilted conversations, which became invitations to tea. Over tea we discussed food, and suddenly I was spending my evenings with students’ families, planting potatoes, milking yak and swimming in the river.
“A different language is a different vision of life.” If you’ve ever seen the cult classic film “La Dolce Vita,” or thrown yourself into a new language, you’ll understand exactly what the director Fellini meant with those words.
Learning Nepali not only gave me a new way to communicate, but also allowed me to see and interact with the world through a new medium. This new world was not my own, but was given to me by all the people who held my hand as I babbled, guiding me through the confusion.
45 minutes a week is not nearly enough to learn how to speak Mandarin. Over the semester, Emma and I have learned this the hard way. Yet somehow the more I realize this, the more I see the value in teaching our class.
What have we given them? I think back to last week, when we taught the class about food from different Chinese-speaking regions. Ira, a native Chinese speaker in the front row, jumped out of his chair with excitement when we showed pictures — “That’s my food! I’ve eaten all those foods!”
Ira’s tablemate is Sebastian, a soft-spoken boy who’s rarely comfortable participating. “That sounds really good,” he whispered, looking up at Ira. “I’d like to try it.”
Claire SC ’27 has thoughts.
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