Surviving Paradise by Peter Rudiak-Gould Page B

asked—in Marshallese of course—“How do you spell ‘I’?” I wanted to make a shirt with that written on the back and “Marshall Islands Volunteer Teaching 2003–2004” written on the front.
    My students employed what I will euphemistically call “alternative orthography.” They wrote “epdipadi” for “everybody” and “kol” for “girl.” Many attempts were so far from correct that I couldn’t tell what word the student had been trying to spell. How much relation does “niperparl” bear to “anybody,” “camitame” to “something,” “farty” to “after”? The idea that words have one correct spelling wasa foreign concept. Some students rendered even their own names according to the day’s whim. Was it Mordiana or was it Mortiana? Steep or Steve? Croney or Groney?
    The handwriting was atrocious, often bordering on the illegible. A typical fourth grader’s penmanship might pass for a kindergartener’s in the United States. Many had only a tenuous grasp of the difference between upper- and lowercase letters. A few couldn’t even copy words off the board reliably; r ’s became v ’s, h ’s became n ’s, and everything else emerged bent and distorted. One student would copy each word off the board backward—not just with the letters in reverse order, but with each letter a mirror image of its correct form. The students copied sentences not word by word, not letter by letter, but rather stroke by stroke, and they did it so slowly and deliberately that they might as well have been transcribing Egyptian hieroglyphics. By First World standards, four-fifths of my fourth graders suffered from profound dyslexia.
    On a worksheet, the question “Where do you play baseball?” might be answered, simply, “baseball.” The question “When are you going to Majuro?” might be answered “NoIamMejro,” or perhaps “D-IMteSWiyinorvy.” One student answered every question on the worksheet with the same cryptic word: “no’t.” Or a whole paper might be turned in bearing only a sort of Dadaist poem:
Who we you raar bwebwen
Why you raar yes Rule
Who raar you we I am you
Who you semam CamPa fime P.
    I admit that one of my favorite parts of teaching was privately laughing over the written work of my students. When I felt guilty about this, I just remembered the following fact: no school on the planet allows students in the teachers’ lounge. And the reason for this is that the main activity in that room is gossiping about said students, and not always in flattering terms.
    Another pastime was perusing my students’ names. Better than fiberglass fishing spears or grass huts sporting solar panels, these names embodied the commingling of foreign and native. A few of the names were purely Marshallese: Jaiko, Alino, Joab, Jabdor,Rilong, Aknela, Jela, Jojapot. A few were purely English: Mike, Rosanna, Steven, Susan, Ronald, Solomon, Marshall. But most lay in a bizarre nether region between the two languages: Shisminta, Stainy, Rickson, Mickson, Bobson, Wantell, Bolta, Maston, Lobo, Rostiana, Leekey, Ranson, Brenson, Alvin, Almon, Jomly, Franty, Anty, Henty, Kenty, Hackney. (The last one emerged from the Marshallese mouth sounding either like “acne” or like “agony.”) Other names were English in origin, but Marshallese in their use as names. Yes, there really were people named Cement, Superman, and Souvenir. There were rumors of villagers on other islands named Radioshack and Tax Collector, and a father-son pair named Typewriter and Computer.
    I didn’t let my personal feelings toward my curiously named students sway my grading. Satan was a brilliant student, so I gave him As. The sweetest, loveliest child in the universe didn’t know any English, didn’t learn any English, and didn’t try to learn any