Model School

(Photo: Our thanksgiving 'bird': a sheep, roasted and stuffed with cous-cous)

Teaching is weird. After about 17 years of looking at the blackboard suddenly I'm on the other side, and its eye opening. The past 3 weeks of teaching english in N'Djamena brought my past years of schooling rushing back at me in waves of revelation. I now understand that when Mr. Herbert dragged my desk and chair out of class (with me in it) and left me in the hall, what he really wanted to do was club me over the head with a textbook and scream SHUT UP. And when Mr. Foret didn't appear to know that we were all cheating in bio, he actually just didn't have the energy or the drive to police us. And when teachers had us playing corny 'learning games' that made me wince, they were actually just trying really hard to make learning 'fun'. Point is, these past three weeks made me realize a whole lot about both sides of the education game, and that there are just some things about 'school' that are universal.
I've been teaching at the Lycee Sacre Coeur, a private combined middle and high school (in American terms) that is considered to be at the very high end of Chadian schooling. (It's actually considered to probably be the best Chadian lycee.) To give a quick overview of the Chadian educational system: It's the French educational system. Adopted or imposed, however you want to look at it, it's the system that prevails. They start with 6 years of primair, then move on to 4 years of college (called 6eme through 3eme) then 3 years of lycee, then they take the BAC which is a big standardized test that determines whether or not they can go on to 3 years of university.
For model school I was teaching 2 classes of 3eme and 1 class of 4eme (Sacre Coeur is actually a college and lycee combined). To translate, I was roughly teaching 8th and 9th grade which was respectively their 3rd and 4th years of learning english, for a total of 10 hours per week.
The way it worked was that for these three weeks I was just taking on one of the english teacher's (Mr. Guerdjibaye's) classes. Good experience for me and good deal for him. Each class had 50-60 students who for the most part wanted to be there (as you have to qualify to get in to Sacre Coeur). To say the least the classes were all quite active (at times riotous) and both the students and I seemed to have a good time.
The students here actually have textbooks at their disposal (to be used at school) which is a huge leg up on the schools we will all be teaching at out at site where resources will most likely be limited to chalk and a blackboard. In truth, textbooks are a bit of a mixed blessing, because while its great for the students to have the written words out in front of them, it also curbs any creativity on the part of the teachers. This is to say, on the first day when I asked Mr. Guerdjibaye if I could see his lesson plan he looked at me like I was crazy and just said, 'we're on page 38'. Most teachers just progress word by word, trusting that 'Go For English' will do the job, when in truth 'Go For English ' is both a poor and bizzare representative of the english language. We question whether it makes sense for chadian children to even be learning english, does it really make sense for them to spend three days learning about the cornea, retina, optic nerve, and the anatomy of the human eye? I decided 'no', and took the initiative to skip that lesson.
Some things we did cover: A text on AIDS; nouns, verbs, and adjectives related to the 5 senses; using verbs in the 'simple past' vs. the 'present perfect' (do you know what that means?); a text on bullies; how to use question tags.
WEIRDEST PART: So I'm a teacher now and teacher's have authority. That's weird because other than growing up in the states (and speaking english as a native language) what have I done to earn authority? When I walk into each classroom 60 students simultaneously stand up, greet me with an echoing GOOD MORNING TEACHER, and won't sit down until I tell them to... that's weird... ok, it's kind of cool too.
SURPRISING MOMENT: I gave each class the opportunity to ask me any questions they wanted. The first question is invariably, 'are you married?', and from there its usually fairly predictable, 'where do you live?', 'what do you do?', 'what is your favorite singer of pop?', 'who is your favorite food?'; but then I called on a boy who stood up, glanced pensively at the ceiling for a second and asked, 'you are American, so, are you for or against the war in Iraq?' I looked at the boy for a hard 5 seconds, gulped, thought about 'my' answer, though about the 'right' answer, realized I didn't even know if there was a 'right' answer, stalled another 15 seconds by commending the boy on his phrasing of the question, finally I mumbled some ambiguous answer about being opposed to ALL war regardless of its nature, and then moved on quickly to field 'what kind of car do you run?'
SOURCE OF FRUSTRATION: Just about every current volunteer has told us that their least favorite part of teaching is giving tests, solely because students put 5 times the energy into cheating as they put into learning the material. How do they do it? Well it doesn't hurt that on average they speak 3 to 4 languages that I don't understand, but beyond talking they reportedly will: sneak in cheat sheets, write answers on the desk, write answers on clothes or body parts, write answers on the ceiling, change answers after the test has been returned, add answers after the test has been returned, change grades... their ingenuity and communal spirit is really admirable, but its still really stressful to deal with as a teacher. I gave a test in each of my classes and seemed to observe the norm; steady hum of talking, papers being passed and thrown, classwide answers (both right and wrong) that were suspiciously consistent. The advice we've been given is, take a hard line, don't take it personally, and move on. Apparently cheating is deeply ingrained in the educational system and is something we'll have to get accustomed to.
UPSIDE: The last three weeks have been a blast. Teaching feels a lot like peforming, and I think I did a pretty decent job as Curly (the lead) in our 5th grade rendition of Oklahoma, so maybe I'll do a decent job here as well. I gave my audience all the energy I could muster and for the most part they gave it right back to me. Moussoro's going to be a world apart from model school, but hopefully I can still keep the audience interested... we'll see.
Nearly a Volunteer,
Zach