Over the Christmas break, Professor Mary Hadley traveled to Bangladesh to conduct workshops for native teachers. Below are some reports from the wonderful experience.

12/17/08 Dear all, Arrived safely in Chittagong to be met by my colleague, Alak, his school principal, another colleague and two little boys bearing a bunch of flowers for me. I felt like the queen on a state visit. Alak was filming the whole thing, which added to the air of royalty! Chittagong appears much like India with lots of little shops, trash in the streets and beautiful old municipal buildings. The streets are crowded with rickshaws all of which are painted in vibrant colors. The drivers are all scrawny but at least those being driven also seem to be thin and underweight. Am settled into my hotel which is in fact an Investors Club for the managers of the companies who have their factories here. The Gap and WalMart personnel stay here! I hope to visit a garment factory if my amazingly busy itinerary allows. I start my workshops on Saturday and am glad to have a little down time. Keep in touch and I'll be keeping a journal to remember my first impressions. M

12/21/08

Dear Kathy, You asked for my impressions of Bangladesh and some details of my workshop, so here they are. First, as you can see, I'm using my yahoo personal account. The reason for this is because it's the middle of the afternoon here and accessing my Georgia Southern account is only possible between midnight and 6 a.m. I'm not quire sure why that is so, but I presume it's to do with the connection and the amount of data on the GSU website which just takes forever to download. So that's the first impression of the country; it's not efficient, and in fact that lack of efficiency is pervasive and leads to: "I can't do that; we are a poor country; that's not possible here." I've been hearing these words over and over from the teachers at the workshops. They sound defeated and defeatist, which is a real pity.

That being said there are several in the 60 participants who are really eager to learn new methodologies and gain new ideas to increase student participation even in those dreaded classes of 300 I told you about earlier. Can you imagine teaching a foreign language to a class of 300, and not just 300 students of all one level of ability, but of mixed abilities, and in addition in classrooms without a microphone or any type of technology

other than a flaking blackboard and very dusty chalk. Hence their comments, "We can't do that." Within the workshops I too have huge ranges of English ability. Some of the teachers, who teach in the private English Medium schools (where all the subjects are taught in English), have total fluency in English. On the other hand, some of the teachers, who were trained in the 1980s and early 1990s, have really poor speaking and listening skills because, when they were being trained in those years, all they had to do were reading and writing exercises. As a result, explaining how to modify the game of chutes and ladders to teach verbs or vocabulary was pretty hilarious since some of the participants had no idea at all what they were doing. Interestingly, whatever their age, the women seem much more willing to try new ideas and have fun in the workshops. Is it because I'm female, too? I don't know. One or two of the men look with a certain amount of suspicion at me and they remind me of the old Arabs who used to sit in the souks in Dubai in 1980 and spit on the ground at my feet if I wasn't wearing sufficiently modest clothes. This is amusing for me to remember, since the Dubai of 2008 is exactly like New York and such an act would never happen today as bare skin everywhere. Therefore, there are certainly difficulties doing workshops here, but the good points are immense. The help I have gotten from my co-grant writer, Alak Chakraborty, is unreal. He's provided me with a cell phone since Skype is so bad here; he's given me cookies to have with my afternoon tea; he's introduced me to all the big wigs

around who have welcomed me like a long lost sister. There's a lot to be said for people with really warm hearts. Tomorrow is the last in the three workshops and in the afternoon I'm going to visit a garment factory. The following day we travel to Cox's Bazaar - the longest natural beach in the world - 85 miles long! There I'll give the three workshops again and have the opportunity to meet some more rural teachers which should be most enlightening. Hope all this was of interest to you and anyone else. I'll be thinking of you at Christmas. Mary