Teaching Indonesian...

I am on my final practicum and I am enjoying it a great deal. I am working in a great little country town. The school is well run, the staff are accommodating and helpful, and the students for the most part are engaged in the learning process. I am learning, and learning lots. Hopefully, I will be a better teacher for the opportunity and the experience.

I am teaching three classes; Modern History, Advanced English, and a LOTE class (Indonesian). I enjoy them all. However, the LOTE class raises some interesting issues for me. Most significant among these is the syllabus and the expectations of proper and correct Indonesian. The materials / content that I have been teaching is most definitely Bahasa Indonesia yang baik dan benar. Yet, herein lies part of the problem, which might be best noted as a question..."how often do Indonesians use Indonesian that is proper and correct in their daily lives?"

To be honest, this is not really a dilemma for me anywhere but of my own making and in my own head. The reality is that I have to teach these youngsters the material and content that will allow them to successfully negotiate their half-yearly and yearly exams.

Today was fun because we were doing sentence drills. It was fun because I quite often find myself trying to remember what it was like for me as a beginner, particularly in trying to pronounce the foreign words. Today reminded me a lot of that MTV advertisement that played in Indonesia for a while, "gue banget". This was almost always pronounced "gooey bang get".

What is interesting to me is that a small country town like the one I am in chooses Indonesian. What is even more enlightening is that there are students who are really keen to learn. So, hopefully, I can help them gain an appreciation for Indonesian and the opportunities that being an Indonesian speaker will open for them in the future.