Auntie... Auntie... I have a doubt. The furrowed brow...the wringing of hands, eyes near tears. "Is it 'followup examination', 'follow-up examination' or 'follow up examination'?" She so desperately wants to use the correct one. It is up to me to give her a rule, a hard and fast rule that will make this choice a nonissue. That's the thing about Indians. They want to know EXACTLY what to do in every case. There are no conditional answers. The challenge is to come up with a way to make it exact. I am sure many of you know this business we're in is subjective to a certain extent. Take a look at the AAMT Book of Style, for example. We have choices to make. Choices give Indians furrowed brows. I can't answer with the true answer, which would be that either "follow-up or "followup" is correct. This girl trusts me to give her the answer, and only one answer will do, thank you. For this particular case, I arbitrarily removed the choice of "follow-up", leaving only one correct answer to the question.

In order to mentor Indian MTs, I had to think differently. I had to modify my teaching style to remove multiplicity of choice. Where there was a choice, I made a judgment call based on personal preference and then I made it a rule. This was not because I was drunk with power, but because the choices were baffling my charges. How do they know which is right? Is one choice more right than another? Not exactly, but it is up to the mentor to make one more right and eliminate the doubt, or there will be a furrowed brow.

I had the privilege of observing Indian children in a school setting. There are rules for every subject. There is a lot of rote learning. There is nothing wrong with learning by rote; critical thinking develops anyway, no matter how we Americans may look at it. Each child sings a song of math (maths, to the Indians), out loud with everyone else. "Two twos are four, two fours are eight," on and on they go. There are songs and poems for many things. These songs become memories, the same way I dredge up the month poem whenever I need to know how many days there are in any given month. You know the one, "Thirty days hath September, April, June and November..." It works every time!

I observed there is very little freedom of choice in school. Electives are uncommon; there are too many required courses. There will be tests. Big ugly tests. Every Indian student learns English as well as Hindi and their own native language on top of that. They are writing essays in cursive in English in the second grade. Their facility for learning is tremendous. Scholastic achievement is paramount. It is a family affair, parents fret over their children's test scores. Their lives depend on it, literally. Competition is too great, which gets us back to the furrowed brow. They all want to succeed, moreover, they want to be the best.

My students expected me to train them the way they learned everything else. I had to cram their heads full to brimming with knowledge. I then had to have them memorize it. There were many lively question and answer sessions, honing their skills to the point of a quick answer. Homework was expected, and heaven help me if I didn't assign it. Once they were satisfied that they had memorized this gargantuan amount of information, they were ready for the TEST. Not a pop quiz, not a 20-question test, please. That's not a test of knowledge. They want 250 of the hardest questions possible. Now, that's a test!

Indian MTs expect to be challenged. They want to test themselves. They want to know there is only one answer. It is up to me as a mentor and an "Auntie" to give it to them.


Cheryl J. Blake