Sometimes three-and-a-half-hour meetings are worth it.

Today was our end-of-semester teacher’s meeting. Going in, I was prepared for the discussion of our students’ performances over the past five months to start late and last longer than I would guess.

I was right.

What I wasn’t anticipating was what would happen after.

About halfway through the meeting, we starting passing around a sheet of what we would like to drink. Martin, the history teacher, before me had asked for a beer. Following his lead, I wrote the same thing. There was potentially a light at the end of this tunnel of a meeting.

Three hours and 43 minutes later, we set out to the bar near my house. When I got there, I stood awkwardly, not really knowing where to sit until a group of three teachers called me over to sit with them.

Of the 13 teachers at my school, I am one of two women. I would like to say that I have experience breaking into boys clubs, but even five months later, I still wasn’t sure how this one would take me.

The three guys that called me over wanted to spend dinner trying to practice English. I spent the next 45 minutes fielding questions such as “How can I speak English like you?”, “Can you find me a pen pal in the US?” and “How can I maintain my woman?” I don’t remember the last time I laughed that much when I wasn’t with a group of Americans.

One of the best parts came later when, leaving the bar, we ran into several students.

“After the meeting you guys went drinking?” one innocently asked us.

There are times when I really hate being in my village. And then there are times when I couldn’t have asked for a better group of people with whom surround myself for the next 19 months.

Tonight was one of those nights.

You would be surprised how often I fake my knowledge of English.

You would think that as a native English speaker, I would be the rockstar of every English department meeting. That I would know the answers to all their grammatical questions. That I would know how to perfectly pronounce every word. 

But I realized today, as they argued over if clauses, that there are few rules to my English - just instinct. I cannot tell you why I put that verb in that tense or why that negative isn’t necessary, only that it isn’t. 

The English that we talk about at meetings isn’t my English. It is an English of rules and regulations that tries to reduce the language of Irving and Austen and Seuss and Foster Wallace to mathematical precision. 

I usually talk near the end of meetings. They think it’s because it’s hard to jump in the middle of nine Beninese men yelling at each other. It’s also because I’m trying to understand how they understand my language.

There's a new sheriff in town.

There are people at my school who I don’t recognize. There are people at my school who completely miss one of the history teacher’s jokes. There are people at my school who have changed the atmosphere.

Our new administration arrived yesterday.

I know I complained previously about not being able to accomplish anything without a director, but this may be the end of the dog-and-pony-shows that were my English classes. I took comfort in the fact that an absent director meant that no one could ever tell me I was doing my job wrong. An absent director meant I could teach and discipline my kids the way in which I wanted. An absent director meant I wasn’t concerned about someone telling me the friendly relationship I have with my students was inappropriate. 

I biked to school this afternoon expecting an easy class period. I was walking on eggshells as soon as I saw the director’s moto outside his office. Right now, we’re all not quite sure what to expect. Our old director was reliably unreliable. 

They say that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. It was gone the moment my students starting getting their hands hit as punishment for tardiness.

RIP: The Yoga Ball

The great, blue yoga ball of Madam passed away last night at approximately 19:18. The cause of death was rusty nail in an old fence post.

In its early years, it was used mainly used for the practice of yoga by an American volunteer. Recently, it had been commandeered by the children of the concession next to the Gouka middle school for playing during the three-hour school break on weekdays and the entire days of Saturday and Sunday, minus a two-and-a-half-hour period for church service on Sundays.

The ball is survived by dozens of children of the village of Gouka, who have never heard of yoga, and a soccer ball that has recently gone into hiding to avoid the same fate.

I am not alone.

It could have been one of those days.

My class this morning was so bad that I had to call in the disciplinarian. The preferred method of group punishment here is manual labor. The minimum is two hours. I left school this morning with several students cursing my name. 

I finished calculating the grades for my classes this afternoon with the class I was dreading the most because I knew the grades were not going to be good. I was left with 21 students out of 53 who passed my class this semester.

But it wasn’t one of those days.

After giving my class their punishment, Attissi gave them a lecture about respecting my authority, gave me a pep talk that convinced me to finish my class and then, in a endearing change of behavior for a man that spends most of his time yelling at students, played Penguin Catapult on my iPod for the 40 minutes it took me to fill out grade cards in his office after my class.

After contemplating my abilities as a teacher, I headed out into my village to try to find one of my colleagues to ask him about the situation. (One thing about life here, if you wander around village long enough, you will find someone who will help you even if you don’t quite know where you’re headed when you leave your house.) I stumbled across Pierre, a history teacher, grading papers in front of his house. 

I explained what I was worried about. He just laughed. “It’s like that here,” he reassured me. “It’s not all you. The students have to work as well.” I then took a seat across from him, and we spent the next twenty minuted chatting about life in Benin.

It wasn’t one of those days.

A body without a head.

“The director gives you advice? The director is never here,” said Esther, one of my students, in our Girls Clubs discussion tonight of how they can accomplish their goal of passing all their classes this semester.

“In the attendance notebook, it says, ‘Director, classes abandoned’” she continued, referencing how we document students who have quit coming  in the documentation of students’ attendance at school.

While it was one of the first blatantly disrespectful statement of someone in authority that I’ve heard here, Esther is not misrepresenting the current situation at my school. 

About three months ago, the director of my middle school was transferred to another middle school. Since then, we have been stuck in this limbo while we wait for the new director to arrive. 

Administration being transferred is not uncommon. Waiting this long for someone else is. As a complete outsider to the academic culture here, it would have been nice to have someone to tell me what I should be doing, but I’ve been getting by on the advice of others. 

I’ve talked about this situation with several of my colleagues. Until today, what I didn’t know was that we weren’t the only ones who had noticed. 

An end of semester reflection

I cannot tell you the number of times over the past semester that I’ve thought to myself, “I am not going to do this next time.”

My teaching schedule, class discipline, participation grades, quizzes in class, giving students their grades, my syllabus, I’ve thought that about all these things.

In the past, I’ve wanted to change how I’ve done a particular thing. But, usually in the past, the person this has had the greatest effect on is me. When the academic future of 133 students is partially affected as well, the odds feel a little higher to me. Until now, until I had to write down (in red pen) whether a student is passing or failing my class, I’m mainly felt like I’m just making it all up. Just playing school four days a week.

What my students have yet to figure out is that this semester was a learning experience not just for them.

“But Madam!”

I have this complex where I don’t like people to not like me.

When you’re giving out semester grades to students, you have a lot of people who suddenly don’t like you.

I haven’t quite perfected the authoritative demeanor of the Beninese teachers. What they say goes. With Madam, it’s a little more it’s what she says and then maybe we can try to reason with her so something else goes.

What I realized today in class, surrounded by students trying to get me to add more points to their participation grade, is that sometimes you just have to walk out the door. Before your students can walk all over you.

Is it me or them?

It’s exam season here again. And with the change of season always comes a great existential crisis as a teacher. When you grade test after test of failing grades, you begin to question your effectiveness, method and purpose at school.

What’s hard for my mind that was trained in the grade-inflated halls of the US school system is that many of my students don’t have the time, let alone understand how to study, and many expect to fail at least one class over their academic career.

Redoing a year is not uncommon, and it doesn’t quite carry the same stigma as it does in the US. This thing is, as their teacher, I want them to succeed. I cheer internally every time I mark a student with a passing grade. I still feel like their performance is a reflection on me.

Or is it just that I don’t want to have to teach the same students again next year?

“…Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

“But how?” was the most common response I received at the first meeting of my Girls Club today.

After 10 minutes of telling the boys at the middle school they were not allowed to stay (Beninese boys are not used to being told no), I told the group of 13 girls assembled to complete the phrase ‘Because I am a girl…”

Most filled in the sentence with things they wanted to do at the club: play soccer with me, make dinner with me, hang out with me in general.

I filled mine in with “Because I am a girl, I can change the world.”

This threw them for a complete loop.

“How can I change the world?

“I can’t do that.”

“It’s God who changes the world.”

One just laughed.

I’ve written before about the differences in the Beninese and American mindset. I think very differently than my colleagues, but I usually chalked that up to them being mostly male and mostly 10 years older than me. I never thought that with a group of females with some of whom there is a less than five-year difference in our ages that we would think so differently.

I grew up in a family who told me I could do anything. I grew up thinking that I could change the world. But I saw the world, I learned about the world and I had the support system that could allow me to reach the world.

My girls have not and do not.

No on has told them they can do anything they want. No one has told them they can leave their village. No one has told them there is so much more they can want from life.

I guess an American telling them this now is better than no one ever saying anything.

The time it took me 41 minutes to get home otherwise known as the time I had three double takes

The students finished with the exam I was proctoring at 16:12. I turned in the tests to the director of my middle school, signed that I was in class that afternoon and climbed on my bike to head home forty-five minutes earlier than I normally leave school on Tuesdays.

I didn’t get very far. At the end of the side street that leads to my school is the house of my CA. As I pedaled by, he called to me from his front porch, so I turned around to sit with him for a few minutes. It was that or continue grading exams.

The second double take happened not soon after I left the CA’s house. I was headed into a boutique to buy toilet paper when the French teacher at my school pulled up on his motorcycle. I chatted with him for a moment before heading back into the boutique.

After the boutique, I started daydreaming about cold water, so I took the long(er) way home in order to stop by the boutique that has a refrigerator. It got even longer than usual when I ran into the history teacher at my school.

I chatted with him for a few minutes, then stopped 20 feet later to say Hi to my host family at their store.

The longest stretch I went was between their store and the second boutique. A few moments later, my desires for cold water satisfied, I headed to my house.

I pedaled into my concession at almost the same time I normally would on a Tuesday night.

Well just get me an apple and sweater embroidered with the alphabet and call it a day.

A couple days ago, I was talking to one of my friends, another volunteer who also teaches English. It was really one of those conversations where you only really understand or care about the conversation because you are in the same situation. When I was in college with a bunch of journalism majors, the subject would usually drift to the newspaper. Now, my conversations tend to drift to my middle school.

I was telling her about how the day before I had tried to teach my students the comparative of equality (He is as tall as Florent. She is as smart as Aziz.) when I had to improvise my lesson plan after realizing I couldn’t teach them how to use adjectives to make comparisons when they didn’t understand the concept of an adjective.

This class was normally the smarter of the two classes at this grade level (5eme), so I had not been expecting much when I started my 5eme class that day.

When I began my lecture on adjectives, I had 41 faces staring back at me with a look like, “duh Madam. Adjectives.” I was telling my friend how pleasantly surprised I had been in class that day, and for once, they had ended the class period ahead of the other class.

It was when I uttered the phrase, “Amazed by their knowledge of adjectives” that I realized how much of an English teacher I’d become.

Mefloquine Dream of the Week

One of the side effects of my malaria medication is vivid and dramatic dreams. Why I never thought to share them here is beyond me.

I am biking down the highway with one of my friends toward his village. About halfway through the ride, I recognize the hills and trees on the side of the road,  I realize parts are falling off my bike.

I lose the back wheel first, then the front. The pedals follow.

I am left with a handlebars and the seat on which I’m sitting. But I’m still traveling down the road.

It’s only when I look down I realize there’s nothing underneath me.

I think I can, I think I can

The man has been tinkering with the engine for about 10 minutes before he decides to give it a try.

The truck does not start.

After a few more minutes, he is joined by three other middle-aged Beninese men who have decided to push the truck in an effort to use gravity to get the engine to take.

They first push the truck backward, then the driver turns the wheels as they push it back forward – a manual three-point turn.

The three men then push the truck down the hill, out of my line of vision.

The truck did not start.

The next thing I see is the rear of the truck moving back up the hill, followed by the three men now pushing on the hood. At the top, they try the same maneuver again.

The truck did not start.

By this time, the kids washing clothes in the courtyard in front of me have also noticed these failed efforts and suppress giggles as the rear of the truck appears once again backing up the hill.

Once again at the top of the hill, they try again.

The truck does not start.

This time, they don’t try to get the truck to the top of the hill, only back in the spot where it initially rested. They’ve given up on driving anywhere today.

“Good work!” I yell from the shade of the porch where I’ve been sitting during the spectacle. 

Please don’t eat your brother.

I have my second four-legged houseguest, the dog of one of my friends who is currently biking around the country, so my house has once again turned into a battleground of cat vs. dog.

I feel like the parent of two unruly children – except that one of my kids wants to eat the other one. Mealtime is a carefully orchestrated event of who gets fed what, where and when. Sometimes it involves me picking up my cat, holding him over my head (out of the reach of the dog) and placing him in front of his bowl.

As I write this, we’ve reached a momentary peace. Both are standing guard in the sun in front of my house.

But it makes my arguments with my siblings when I was younger seem like simple disagreements.