Above average

This morning, I sat in our director’s office with my colleagues in an awkward circle interrupted by the various chairs, desks and piles of cashew nuts (It’s cashew season. There are a lot of trees at our school.). We were there to discuss the students’ conduct grade, a number out of 20 influenced by how the students have behaved and worked at school during the last semester.

I was prepared for a fight.

There aren’t a lot of steady jobs here, which, unfortunately, means that sometimes people get this steady job purely for the sake of having a steady job. Unlike I would say most of my teachers when I was in school, Beninese teachers don’t always to want to do what would be most helpful or best for their students. Despite them being the reason they have a job, students seem to be sometimes the barrier to a paycheck as opposed to the reason a teacher is receiving one.

This is going to one of those posts where my colleagues challenge the cynicism that sometimes plagues me here.

The French teacher to my right opened the discussion with his proposition for the grade each student would receive.

“I propose 18,” he said before sitting back in his chair.