JUNE 17 — On a muggy Thursday afternoon at SMK Munshi Sulaiman in Batu Pahat, Johor, Malaysia, a bevy of uniformed students are shuffling about in the classroom, chattering loudly while shooting crumpled-paper basketballs into the dustbin.

“Alright class, relax. Take a seat,” says the teacher, Jonathan S Weintraub. The students hush quickly and scramble to their desks.

Across town at SMK Datin Onn Jaafar, a parallel scene is taking place and another teacher, Madhu Narasimhan, is just about to start his Form 6 class.

“MH370” is written on the whiteboard. Articles from various newspapers and online media outlets are distributed. Divided into small groups, the students are asked to identify and catalog the facts, the unconfirmed reports and rumors, and the linguistic devices that journalists employ in these periodicals.

The students are forced to discriminate between varied and conflicting sources in English – a second or third language for most. Discussing and debating among themselves, poring over magazines and press conference transcripts, the kids pull out their notebooks and begin composing careful notes and essays.

We, the authors of this piece, Jonathan and Madhu, are young Americans serving as Fulbright English Teaching Assistants (ETAs) at secondary schools in Johor for the 2014 academic year. We devised this lesson in our schools in order to offer some sense of clarity and hope to our students in the aftermath of the March 8 MH370 incident.

The MH370 lesson asks students to think critically and reflect. This kind of exercise helps students cull information from multiple sources so they can approach the issue from more than one point of view. It asks them to separate facts from hearsay, to truly decipher the current state of affairs.

Unfortunately, over the past weeks, a tragic story about a plane disappearance has given way to a chorus of rumor and speculation; everyone has become a theorist or an “expert.” During this difficult time, we want to equip our students with the analytical skills to make sense of the turbulent world around them. At around 2:15pm, Madhu calls on one of the groups to come up. Sitting at a roundtable at the front of the class, this group of students briefs their peers on the issue.

“They may have detected beeping signals from the black box in the southern Indian Ocean,” one student states.

A student in the back raises her hand: “What is a black box?” Another defines it for her.

As they start discussing the MH370 search operations, Kumar, a boy who has stayed relatively quiet up till now, suddenly chimes in: “Many are coming to Malaysia’s aid. This is a tough time for all of us, and we appreciate the support, from people within and outside.

As Kumar evokes the language of emotion, others around the classroom nod in agreement. Others also express their thoughts and feelings on the disappearance of their national carrier and their fellow compatriots. In this discussion of hardship and loss, the class is bound together. It becomes apparent that this is not simply an English lesson, or a study of facts, of analysis, of cerebral discernment; it is a demonstration of genuine reflection, a moment of solidarity among Malaysian citizens.

Witnessing this moment within the walls of the classroom, we also ponder, more broadly, upon the roles of peoples and nations around the world during the MH370 crisis. Our Malaysian students are navigating above the sea of chaos, media talking heads, speculation, and blame; they teach us that although humanity’s challenges are grave and difficult, these challenges are best fought together. In that regard, we are encouraged by the support we have seen from our own government and the United States Navy, which has provided ships, aircraft, and critical technology to assist Malaysia’s ongoing search for the plane.

As American Fulbrighters in Malaysia, we have learned something meaningful from our students’ response to this classroom exercise: the notion of solidarity in the face of the unknown. In fact, that is precisely what the Fulbright Program itself is really about. Fulbright was founded seven decades ago to increase mutual understanding and cooperation among peoples of the world.

Through an English-language class and a lesson in critical thinking, we hope that we have struck on something that is perhaps even more fundamental: our common humanity.

* Madhu Narasimhan and Jonathan S Weintraub are 2014 Fulbright Scholars based in Batu Pahat, Johor, Malaysia.

** This is the personal opinion of the writer and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malay Mail Online.