Teaching

written on 12/3/14

Teaching is tedious and hard and wonderful. Specifically, teaching is wonderful and lesson planning and constantly thinking up ways to teach English creatively are hard and tedious. It’s such a ridiculous language.

I know that I won’t hate my job for the next two years because no matter how tired I am or how much I’ll crash after class, I always become energized in front of a classroom. I can always get excited when the students correctly turn a present tense sentence into the past tense or say that their grandmother is the mother of their mother or father, for example.

Until next Thursday, I’m teaching five classes a day (4 of English, and one of life skills), including one double period to those poor standard 4 students, all before 12. And then in the afternoon I eat lunch, lesson plan for the next day and have Sesotho class. At the beginning of the week I was crashing, but now I feel good at the end of every day. I think I actually feel more energized than exhausted by them now, which is definitely a good sign. The students are also getting more comfortable with me-comfortable enough to say when they don’t understand something, to joke around with me and to tell me when I’m speaking too fast.  I actually high-fived and emphatically thanked a student in Standard 6 yesterday for telling me to slow down.

That is one of the biggest adjustments that I’m having to make in the classroom. Along with learning how to write on a chalkboard, I ALWAYS need to speak slower and enunciate or else the students won’t understand a damn thing I say unless I speak Sesotho, which is helpful for a few words but is definitely not something I want to rely on in an English class. Basotho teachers already do too much of that and it’s definitely one of the reasons why students don’t usually speak good English. Why speak English if you don’t have an incentive to speak it? (except that it’s a very exam based educational system, and all the exams are in English, and if they don’t pass the Standard 7 exam they don’t go to high school). But those are stupid, big picture, long-term consequences. In the moment, there isn’t much incentive to speak English and so they don’t. Enter the makhoa (white person), holder of English fluency, white skin and magical hair (apparently I can make bank if I sell my hair-something to keep in mind in tight times). All of this is to say that while I think it’s a shame that there is such an intense emphasis placed on English fluency and that there are so few options for people who don’t speak English, that’s the reality. And the simple fact of my existence at St. Dennis primary will be as much of an impetus for the students to speak English as my actual English classes.

In regards to my current teaching schedule, it’s only temporary, and as of tomorrow we are finished teaching new topics. On Monday we review for the test, on Tuesday I invigilate (fancy word for sitting there while students take a test) and on Wednesday we go over the tests. And on Thursday, they “graduate” from summer school and go onto their regular summer things before school starts at the end of January. So while it’s true that I will be teaching English and life skills to 4, 5 and 6 at my permanent site this year, my classes will be more spaced apart and it won’t be the same thing every single day. Thank Molimo (God).

Funny moments this week/why I love working with kids:

-After life skills with the 5^th and 6^th graders yesterday, a 5^th grade girl said she liked my sunglasses so much and could she have them? “Uh, no!”, I said, “but you can try them on”, after which every fifth grade girl proceeded to try on my glasses and strut across the room like a supermodel. Then she comes over and hugs me and Hillary and says “ I like you so much”. Melt.

-Today in life skills when talking about trust, I ask the students if anyone knows what trust is. The same 6^th grade boy who told me to speak slower raises his hand and says, “trust is condoms”. Damn right.

-While teaching the concept of giving and receiving instructions, I ask for the students to tell me things they know how to do. One student says “milk a cow”, after which I proceed to mime milking a cow while they tell me what to do. We also spent a lot of time on the correct pronunciation of “udder”, which was hilarious.

So yeah, there are a lot of terrible things about the Lesotho school system that I’ll probably go into later, but today I just love these children and am excited by all the things that my first year of teaching in Lesotho will bring.

The sky was doing amazing things this week.

Khotso. (Peace).