Back in the Classroom

Although the school year officially started back in mid-October, it takes a while for things to get going around here.  Children drag their feet about  going back to classes and parents don’t always push them in this direction as it’s difficult to come up with inscription fees and, truth be told, some kids are considered more useful at home.  When things finally do pick up, they are then interrupted by the Muslim and Christian holidays in November and December.  So, in a normal year, the curriculum doesn't really begin to stabilize until January.  This year, however, in addition to the political strife we’ve seen (and maybe even because of it), we’ve had a series of strikes by teacher who are demanding higher pay.  These began in mid-January and just ended last week.  For over a month, public schools have not been functioning.  First, the teachers began a strike and did not show up for class, then the students went on a solidarity strike, and more recently, the teachers have been holding classes for just the first hour and then releasing the kids for the remainder of the school day.

After the initial “snow day” reactions of not having to go to classes wore off, the kids in my neighborhood started their own study groups in the classroom in our compound.  That was nice to see.  Anna, the French volunteer who lived with us for the past few months, tutored a group of young girls in French every morning, and I took on a student who needed help in English.  As the strikes continued, there was talk of having an “Année Blanche” (white year), which meant that school would officially be closed and kids would have to begin again in the same grade next year.  No one was happy about that possibility.  Thankfully, some agreement was made late last week and the kids returned to school full-time this morning.

The school where I teach wasn’t affected by the strikes because it’s run by the Department of Justice, rather than the Department of Education.   Why, you ask?  Well, it’s a technical high school and there’s a portion of students who are sent to live there by courts to learn a trade.   Others are there on their own accord, or because they just don’t fit into the regular school system (think, alternative high school).  Maybe I should re-watch that Michelle Pfieffer movie, “Dangerous Minds”, for some tips and pointers?  Anyway, this is where I’m teaching my Junior Achievement “Mini-Entreprise” class.  So far, it’s going fairly well.  I have 36 students from three technical sectors:  home economics, electricity, and metalworking.  I also have 4 teachers helping me out, so that’s helped with keeping the class in order and with much-needed translation.  There are 10 sessions in this course that covers the creation of a small company.  The kids elect a president and a secretary and form a board of directors.  They choose a product or service for their company and learn how to conduct proper meetings, deal with human resource issues, conduct a market study, understand costing/pricing, and develop a logo, among other things.

As I blogged about last year, teaching in the developing world is rife with challenges. The classroom is an empty, dusty room, with only a wooden chalk board and simple two-seater desks.  The first thing I did when starting this course is rearrange the desks so that the students would be sitting in groups.  This was a new concept for them, but they’ve embraced it and have been fairly good about working together in teams.  You cannot assume that kids will show up to class with pen and paper, and, I was surprised to discover, this holds true for the teachers who are helping me, as well.  Textbooks are a rarity, so it's a special treat for these kids to get the ones for this course that were supplied by Junior Achievement.  The pace of class is slow, for many reasons.  One reason is that getting the kids to show up on time is like pulling teeth.  Even the teachers who are working with me are hesitant to round up the students who are often milling about outside the classroom 20 minutes after the scheduled class start time.  Another reason is that everything I say in French, has to be translated and repeated in Wolof by one of the other teachers.  Also, kids are very deliberate about copying everything down, and they take great pride in their handwriting, so even passing around an attendance sheet can take up the first 15 minutes of class time.  One of the requirements of the program is that I submit a report with each kid's name, birth date, place of birth, and signature in order for their certificates to be created.  Sounds simple enough, but it's not.  25% of my class did not know where or when they were born.  The same held true in the Junior Achievement class I'm holding with a group of younger kids, but the numbers there were even higher, over 60% of the elementary school-aged kids did not know this information.  You can rest assured that nobody will be bringing in cupcakes for the class on their birthday.

A stark classroom

Working in groups

Teamwork

Visiting American grad students who
visited my class last week.

As I just mentioned, I've also been able to involve the kids in our Eco-Ecole in the Junior Achievement program.  These are the kids who meet at our compound every Saturday morning and who I've been working with on the paper briquette project.  Junior Achievement has developed a shorter program for elementary school-aged kids that runs for just 5 sessions and focuses on the concept of Community Economics.  In this course, we focus on the roles people play in the community, how the government and the private sector interact, and how money flows through a community.  Some of the classroom behaviors that I've noticed in my high school class are present with this group, as well, and there are some other interesting similarities.  Because we do a lot of group work, the groups are often competing with one another in activities.  I come prepared with candy prizes for the winning teams.  Last week, I witnessed an interesting phenomena in both of my classes.  The winning teams not only shared their winnings with each other, but then shared them with the rest of the class as well.  This was more easily accomplished in my high school class, as I gave the winning team a box of Nerds.  They passed it around so that everyone got at least a couple little pieces.  In the Eco-Ecole group, I gave each person on the winning team an individually wrapped Life-Saver.  I stood in awe, as they opened the cellophane wrappers and then bit each Life-Saver into several smaller pieces so they could share them with the kids on the other teams.  Forget the striking and cupcakes, now THAT'S solidarity!

This kids in this 12 second video are saying "Madamadamada.... (or Madame, Madame, Madame).  

The alternative is Meshurmeshurmeshur...(or Monsieur, Monsieur, Monsieur).  

This practice (and the snapping of fingers) is common in classrooms when kids want to be called upon.  

To me, it conjures up images of baby birds in a nest waiting to be fed.

P.S. - Check out the my recently updated Spare Time page to see the results of my latest crafting-craze.

Polyglot by chance

Googlemania

To all of my gmail friends (and gmail-wanna-be friends),
Gmail has this cool new feature that happens to work in Senegal.  Basically, you can send an SMS text, FOR FREE, to my Senegalese cell phone (221 77 673 0064).  When I receive your text, a local Senegalese number is created for you that I can save along with your name.  I can then text you back at my local rate.  Brilliant!  If you try this, be sure to sign your name to your text so that I’ll know who you are as the numbers in my US cell phone did not transfer over and I haven't re-entered all of these yet.  Hope to hear from some of you from time to time.

Polyglot, by chance

So, as some of you know, ending up in Africa was a bit of a surprise for me.  For an entire year, I prepared for life in the Peace Corps in Latin American and spent many studious hours re-learning the Spanish that had been buried in the depths of my brain since high school.  Last July, I took a 40-hour immersion course, studied for and passed the CLEP (College Level Examination Program) exam, and spent every Tuesday evening for the next 12 months in a conversational Spanish class.  However, six weeks before I was due to depart, I got the call from Peace Corps asking if I’d change my plans and come to Francophone Africa instead.  “Sure“, I said.  “Flexibility is key, right?”  I was so tired of waiting for a placement that I thought, “just assign me already!“  In that flash of a moment, I thought that since I’d studied French in high school and college and had spent a semester in Paris and had successfully re-learned one language that I was up for the challenge.  “Bring it on!”

So, five days after arriving in Senegal, I began immersion French classes.  Aside from the obvious problems of trying to speak French with a Spanish accent, learning it from someone with an African accent, and trying to replace all recently-learned  nouns, verbs, and verb tenses with new ones, I was actually doing okay.  Because my host-family in my training village spoke Wolof, and very little French, I got a break from daily immersion each night as I sat around our dinner platter and listened to them speak a truly foreign language.  In a way, I was able to shut language out completely and give my mind a rest at the end of each day.  I did a lot of smiling, pointing, and nodding with my family and although it didn't promote great conversations, it served as effective communication.  Ahh, those were the days. 

In a rush to get us fully prepared to live independently and be able to communicate with people in our assigned posts, the Peace Corps, after just 4 weeks of training, decided to move those of us who reached an Intermediate-Low level of French to Wolof classes.  Aack!  Unfortunately, immediately after this decision, I spent our first day of class sick in bed. When I returned to class, on Day 2 of Wolof training, I felt completely lost.  While I was feverishly sweating in bed and making hourly runs (pun intended) to the bathroom, my classmates had banded together in solidarity to master Wolof without me, putting me at a linguistic disadvantage.  I kid you not; after just one day, they were carrying on lengthy conversations with each other while I stared teary-eyed at the chalkboard. 

What I haven’t really mentioned thus far is that our physical learning environment is a challenge in itself.  Language classrooms at the Training Center are concrete-walled huts with thatched roofs and sheets of wood painted black that lean against the wall and serve as chalkboards.  In the training village, we usually meet in one or two of our host family compounds.  We meet from 9am - 1pm, break for lunch, and then meet again from 4pm - 6pm.    Aside for the unbearable heat of the day or the afternoon deluge of rain, there are many other distractions to effective learning, like: 1) family members that walk by one-by-one as they arise for the day to greet us (greeting is very big here and with large families of 10-15 people this becomes a constant activity), 2) flies, which come in many shapes and sizes, that make sport of landing on us and require constant swatting, 3) random animals that wander through the classroom on their way outside to graze for the day, and 4) our teacher who frequently stops to answer his cell phone or return a text.  Last week, we actually had this strange old woman wander into the compound, interrupt the class, and ask our teacher for some money so she could buy bread.  When I asked him afterward if he knew the woman, he said “No, that’s just what we do here in Senegal.”

Immersion training in action

Language Hut @ Training Center

Classroom in Training Village

Sheep wandering through class

Rooster checking out the lesson

Okay, so now that you have a picture of my daily classroom distractions, let’s go back to imagining me, foggy-headed, dehydrated, and on the verge of tears, trying to absorb my third language in just 12-months.   Let’s just say it wasn’t pretty.  It wasn’t until the following weekend that I had any grasp of Wolof what-so-ever.  But that’s the funny thing about total immersion.  Once you have that grasp, as slight as it may be, you can immediately begin communicating.  I’ve since had successful, albeit short and elementary, conversations with my host-family and with the women at the market.  How ‘bout me?!

My Host-Dad (closest to table) learning Polish

Last week we had a Counterpart Workshop for our Small Enterprise Development team at the training center that was attended by the people we'll be working/living with at our permanent sites.  During this 2-day seminar, we had a session on language to help gain some empathy from our local hosts regarding how frickin' difficult it is for us to be communicating and conducting business in another language (in another country) after just 2 months of training.  We asked for three volunteers to come to the front of the lecture hall and had them experience a 30-min immersion class in Polish (one of my fellow trainees speaks this fluently).  My counterpart and future host-Dad was one of the brave few to participate.  It was rather fun to observe them completely lost in words and phrases they'd never heard before and was effective at driving home our point.

Yup, that's me teaching in French

Also at this workshop, we put on an American Cross-Cultural fair to help our host-country partners understand our cultural differences. My group presented Women throughout the 20th Century and outlined things such as the womens' suffrage movement, women taking on industrial roles during WW2, the womens' rights movements, the working woman, and women in politics. We also spoke about the Modern Woman and the concepts of independence, choice, balance, and partnership.  This was quite eye-opening session for a group of people who are used to women staying at home to cook, clean, and share their homes with multiple wives.  Needless to say, we had lots of questions.  Oh, did I mention that we gave this presentation in French?  We had six groups cycle through our presentation, so by the end of it we were a bit tongue-tied.  In the end, Awa, our Cultural Awareness trainer asked us for our presentation so that she could give it to Language and Cultural Facilitators that join the staff.

We head back to the training village this afternoon for one last week of Wolof.  Wish me luck!