I have this student, part 4

Romain never smiles. He rarely talks. He mostly just sleeps, or at least that’s what is appears he’s doing in the back row, leaning against the back chalkboard of my 7th grade class.

He’s the class-appointed person who erases the board, but it’s rare that another boy doesn’t beat him to the task at the end of class. He’s old for the seventh grade, not because he’s retaking the class, but because his parents started him at school late. He’s becoming used to being one of the oldest students in class. That he knows the age difference between him and me and me is significantly less than that between me and my other students is what gives him his gravitas. He’s taken all the stereotypical behaviors of teenaged boys and amplified them through a Beninese speaker: he lies about where he’s going when he leaves class, he never does the activities I put on the board and he doesn’t seem to care about any of it.

Today, in Romain’s class, we were playing a vocabulary review game where I wrote all the words from the last unit on the board and the students had to smack the word I called out with a fly swatter. (We had finished the curriculum weeks ago - I was reaching to find things to do in class.) I had divided the class into boys v. girls. The stakes were high.

I was waving up the students two-by-two to take their turn at the front of the room. Romain was begrudgingly paired with Odette, another older student in the class. 

I called out the word “doctor.” Romain looked around the board for a moment. Then his fly swatter solidly collided with the word. When he pulled back, the plastic was marked with white chalk dust.

The boys erupted in cheers.

And Romain, as he handed the wire handle back to me, smiled.

The case of the missing pate

You’re in class when one of your students asks you if he can go to the bathroom. You hesitate because it’s in this class that the students like to ask if they can go to the bathroom but then actually go do something else.

His friend sitting across from him tells you to refuse. He says he’s just going to go eat his pate, fried dough served with a spicy sauce that is typical snack food around here.

You allow it. But tell him to leave his pate in the classroom.

When the student gets back a few minutes later, his pate is gone. He immediately blames his friend who sits across from him. You agree with this action. His friend is a good student but has been known to get into trouble when he’s already finished the assignment.

You ask his friend if he really ate the pate. He giggles manically and nods.

Unbeknownst to you, he hasn’t eaten the snack. He’s only switched the black plastic bag that held the pate with another empty one he’d already had.

You ask the first student how much he paid for it. You are prepared to make his friend pay him back.

You’re in the middle of this line of questioning when the friend suddenly produces the bag that actually has the pate in it and chucks it across the table at the first student.

Your belief is reinforced that you students might be what make everything else that happens here worth it. 

Escape

I followed my students out to the overgrown area that slowly, with hoes, rakes and machetes, is becoming the soccer field. Normally, I would have been teaching at this time, but the vice principal had declared all the students of the school would be working this morning. And, in the hierarchy of our school system, I did not have the power to refuse him. 

My vice principal and I do not have the best relationship. He thinks it’s funny to talk to me in languages he knows I don’t understand. I abhor how he carries out the primary function of his job: disciplining students. Today, he is the one who has the power to make me stay and watch students weed and cut down trees for two hours.

I stopped under a tree to evaluate my plan for sneaking away. 

“Are you going to work too?” one of my students asked.

I shook my head. “I’m going to go home,” I said, tracking the movements of the vice principal. If I left now, would he see me? I watched him pass from group to group.

“Do you have to work again this afternoon?” I ask the same student.

She shrugs. “If the vice principal says to work, then we have to work.” We both knew no student would ever refuse.

I stood there for a few moments longer.

“Madame, what are you waiting for,” she asks. As I watch him disappear behind a grove of trees, I decide I can make a break for it.

What she doesn’t realize is that I, too, am a little afraid of the vice principal.

Striken

Last week, representatives of the teacher’s union and the department of education reached an agreement that ended the teacher’s strike that had closed schools across the country since the beginning of the year. Now, as we wait for the official number of weeks the school year will be extended, I offer these final thoughts for the permanent teachers:

If you’re going to strike, strike for the students. Strike because none of the department of education’s money leaves the southern schools. Strike because your students have never even seen the textbook their curriculum is supposed to be based on. Strike because a person’s quality of education should not be dependent on his or her geographic location.

Don’t strike because you want more. Strike because your students deserve more.

It’s that time of year again

It is with my up-most disappointment and disagreement that I have to report that, once again, we are in the midst of a strike of permanent teachers over salary disputes and an overly violent reaction to a protest by the ministry of education that has lasted so long there are talks of canceling the school year meaning every student will restart the same grade next year in an education system that is fast showing me that the most important thing is not our students, but our pockets. 

The new normal

When my English club stood up to close this week’s meeting by singing “Hello, Goodbye,” I thought about how we would look to an outsider:

Me, in front of 19 middle school-aged Beninese students, wearing pants in traditional fabric, plus my bright yellow dry-fit shirt from last year’s half marathon. My postmate’s dog is at my feet. He has just spent the better part of the meeting doing laps around the classroom with his tongue hanging out and scaring every student he approached. My postmate was in the back, dirty from that day’s bike rides and had just finished a conversation with a French teacher about how we elect presidents in the US.

I thought about my role in this ragtag group signing the Beatles and wondered when exactly this had become normal to me.

Mind the gap

This morning, I stood up in front of 53 parents and explained, for some three years into their child’s education at the secondary level, how we calculate grades. This was the first time being at our school for a handful of parents. One said she didn’t know her son was failing his classes last year until he brought home his report card in June.

When I was in school, there were open houses and parent-teacher conferences and calls home when someone was in danger of failing a class.

Here it’s hard for me to understand the gap between the house and the school. My parents were involved. More so than most. And I know that. But it was their nagging (as I thought of it at the time) about my schoolwork and consistent involvement in my education that cultivated the work ethic I have today.

But I don’t blame them. I don’t blame my students’ parents for their children’s performance at school. It’s not that they didn’t want to be involved with their child’s education. It’s that they didn’t know they were supposed to be involved with their child’s education.

I have this student, part 3

I do not remember the last time Sabine spoke in class. She’s one of the youngest and smallest in my 5eme class and tends to stick with the people she knows. I accidentally make her cry once last year when a rearrangement of her 6eme class put her in the back where she couldn’t see the board and I couldn’t see her. 

But, on the soccer field, she comes alive.

Wherever the ball is, she isn’t far off.  When there’s a skirmish, she’s in the middle of it. She’s responsible for two of the four goals that have ever been scored during our scrimmages.

Turns out, to get her to talk, all you have to do is put a soccer ball at her feet. 

Please don't blame me for having to do my job

Today, after too many months of letting them slip in (and the vice principal having already talked to me about allowing student in after the bells rings instead of sending them to his office) I kicked out about 15 students from my class who tried to come in 15 minutes after I was supposed to start.

This is my 8^th grade class, and I can tell you the name of almost kid in this class. This is their second year with me, and yes, maybe occasionally I think of them more of my friends than my subordinates. And yes, maybe, I’m not always as harsh on them as I should be. And yes, I’m also their homeroom teacher so it’s in my best interest that I keep them happy. And yes, so maybe I was extra goofy for the rest of the class period.

Two years in, I still want them all to like me.

An excerpt from my student’s English Valentine’s Day cards

Being a few hours away from break didn’t exactly serve as a catalyst for me to come up with a different idea for my English club this week other than making valentines in English, despite being a week after the holiday.

But, I was impressed with my 8^th grade students’ abilities to string together English phrases for their messages of love after giving them certain vocabulary.

From Isaak:

“Oo, my valentine, I love you everyday. When I see you, I am over the moon always because you are beautiful and I love you. I love you and I will love for always.”

Maybe next time

Today, in my 8th grade class, I decided to try something different. It was the last class before a weeklong break, and I knew we were at least three weeks in front of the other class, so I loaded up all the children’s English books my family had sent me over the past 20 months and brought my English library to school. 

I divided the class into groups and each group had 30 minutes to read their book together and then write a summary. I walked around answering mainly vocabulary questions, but a few general questions, like why is this dog sleeping in a bad? (Go Dog Go), Who is this furry, blue creature? (Grover) and Why does this pigeon driving a bus? (Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus)

On one of my last laps, I passed Suzane, one of my smartest students. She stopped me. 

“Madam, this book,” she said shaking her head. “In this book, it’s only animals who talk. And everyone knows animals can’t talk.”

I was just glad she understood the English of the Little Red Hen. The imagination? Maybe next week.

Gratitude

I was packing up my bag in my 7^th grade class this evening when one of my students, Agathe, approached me.

Recently, my students had learned the present perfect tense, one of those tenses in English that I use all the time, although up until a couple years ago couldn’t tell you why I used it or what it was called. To form the tense, you have to use the past participle, something that is especially hard in a language like English where most past participles seem to be irregular as opposed to following the rule. To try to help, I had typed a list of the most common irregular past participles, their verb base and the verb in French and given each student a copy of the two-paged document (about 2000 CFA, $4 to photocopy) today in class.

When Agathe walked to me, I noticed she was holding these two pieces of paper. She gestured to them and then, slightly curtsying (as students are expected to do when talking to professors here) she said, “Thank you,” before running off to meet her friends outside the classroom.

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.

New trail

It’s grade calculation time here again, which means that students are realizing that simple math does not allow for the magic that needs to happen for some of them to be able to pass their classes. The fact that usually about half a class does not have the grade needed (10/20) is rarely seen as the fault of the professor here. “The students are lazy,” is the mantra of most of the discussions that happen after it is realized that the statistics of grades this semester is no better than other semester.

I used to believe this as well. I didn’t understand why students didn’t realize that they needed to study. I didn’t understand what students did when they went home. I didn’t understand how students thought they were going to pass if they are continuing to write in French on an English exam.

The students, though, aren’t lazy. They are being raised in a culture that doesn’t place as much of a value on education as the American one to which I’m accustomed. Most of my students are of the first generation in a family to go to school. Their parents don’t speak French, they don’t know how the school system works and they don’t understand what this piece of paper with a number out of twenty means.

My students aren’t lazy. They’re trying to figure it out all by themselves. 

Faking it

It was 5 minutes before I started my first class of the day when I was left in one of the most terrifying positions to be in as a teacher: two hours and no lesson plan.

Beninese people are very particular about doing things in the order in which things should be done. And at the appropriate time at which they are designated to be done. So, this morning, my director asked me to suspend calculating semester grades (what I had planned to do in class: all grades are an average of quiz and exam scores; it sounds like a waste of class time, but to do it in front of the students is the fairest way to do it.) until next Monday, because, mainly, next week is the week that has been designated as the week that grades will be calculated. 

And so, at the 15-minute break between classes, I sought out my work partner and best friend at school and person least likely to judge me for the predicament in which I had found myself. Also, he is supposed to team-teach this class with me, so half the burden was also on him.

I found that Kande had been caught in the same position I was: a class and nothing to do. “Don’t worry,” he told me as we walked together to the classroom. “We’ll find something to do.”

And so, we started class. We talked for a while, then had a student write the date and then Kande put a matching activity and told my class to recopy the activity, something that I normally don’t make my students do to save time.

I caught him in the back of the classroom.

“Do they really need to recopy the activity?”

He shook his head slightly. “No. But it will waste time.”

Already got it covered

“But Madam,” Suzane is saying to me during tonight’s Girls Club meeting, “there are plenty of people who sell at the market or sell food who make more money than people who work at an office.”

And with that one statement Suzane shut down one of my major points of my discussion of the value of education for girls.

I had to stop for a second and regroup. I knew that education was important. I knew it was how these girls would not spend their lives how so many had spent their lives before them: mothers at a young age yielding to the demands of their husbands. But how was I supposed to convince this 16-year-old who lived comfortably on her father’s salary that what she was missing out on (not just materially) was worth not missing out on?

Suzane is smart. She’s driven. And she speaks her minds. I believe if she continues her education, she will be successful. The question is how I convince her it’s necessary when she sees people being what is generally successful everyday, without a high school degree.

A short list of items my director discussed at this morning’s flag ceremony:

-Students should pay their school fees

-Students should weed their portion of the schoolyard

-Students should shave their hair before Wednesday in order to meet the school’s dress code or else he will do it himself

-Students should rub lemon juice on their underarms before taking a shower so they don’t smell bad

-The upcoming exams

When a name isn’t a name

In each of my classes this year, I had my students make name tags in a sincere effort to learn all of their names. Some names here are hard. So, when I saw the name of a student in my 7^th grade class was spelled “Geoffrey,” I thought I had it in the bag.

Turns out, pronouncing his name like the American “Jeffrey” is not how you’re supposed to pronounce his name. And turns out, he doesn’t appreciate it when other students pronounce his name like the stupid American teacher does.

In class yesterday, we had a lesson for Madame. “Jay oh fray, Jay oh fray, Jay o fray,” I repeated to myself over and over again during class. Much like the sports and games vocabulary that Geoffrey had just learned.

Things that happened in/outside of/around my class in its first 20 minutes this morning:

-Ten students were late because they forget to bring water from their home to water the plants at the school. (We don’t have running water or a well, so this responsibility falls to a different class each week.)

-Five students were late because they hadn’t swept their portion of the schoolyard dirt yet.

-One student was severely punished by our director for walking through my class and then trying to get another student in trouble for calling him a “bandit” for interrupting my class.

-One student almost threw up.

#justanotherdayteachinginBenin