The isolation of each student from each other (they rarely have a chance to help each other or discuss an answer) keeps the class atomised and offers little in the way of developing social interaction skills. Meanwhile, as a back bench student, I can relax in the knowledge that the teacher will rarely if ever acknowledge my presence, let alone ask me a question.

The way we focus on those students sitting in the front of our classes sends out a strong message that only the successful are important, only the chosen few are worth bothering with. It means the lesson goes at a pace that suits them and those who cannot follow can be disregarded. As teachers though, our concern should not only focus on those whose family backgrounds, connections, and innate aptitude equip them to be natural survivors here. Their futures are guaranteed, but what about the majority of their classmates? It is they who need support most.

Turning to the lesson content, I wish I had a thousand taka for every time I heard a 'display question' (one whose answer is already known to the teacher). "How long is the Jamuna Bridge?" is a classic example. The glory of Bangladesh's longest bridge is not in question, but surely we would do better to ask our children questions such as "What difference has the Jamuna Bridge made to people living either side of it?" and "How has it changed Bangladesh?" That would at least encourage our students to reflect and formulate opinions, and in doing so they could develop the crucial independence of thought that will serve them both now and in later life.

In our typical classroom, the way the question is asked once and then endlessly repeated points to a fundamental flaw. If we keep asking the same questions, which depend on recall rather than interpretation, we are merely asking our students to go through the motions, to jump through hoops like performing circus animals. Soon they become wise to this as they see it reinforced over thousands of hours of classroom time. It also discourages them from listening to each other. Why bother? We're all saying identical things. The same applies to students reading the same text aloud, another staple of classroom life here (as indeed it was during many turgid lessons in my own adolescence).

A colleague tells a story of a teacher who visited a student's house and then set the class the task of describing where they lived. The student duly produced a detailed description of a corrugated iron slum even though the teacher knew full well that the student lived in an apartment. When asked about this, the student saw nothing surprising — surely the task was simply to produce the requisite number of words, not to actually say anything meaningful?