Baby steps

I have been wanting to do this post. Not only so you'd know what I've been up to this term but also to serve as a reminder for me, of my goals for the term.

It's been over two weeks since teaching resumed and I'm already enjoying it. A little more than I did last term, I'll add. This is because with now being more familiar with the students, and having a clearer understanding of the areas in which they struggle, I find that so far, teaching this term has been easier and less stressful. As some of you who have been following my journey might know, teaching my kind of students can at times be very difficult and frustrating for several reasons I've mentioned in previous posts. The mistake I made last term was that I focused on trying to strictly follow my lesson note plan. However, I have decided that this term, I will throw caution to the wind and just "freestyle". 

The long break helped me realise that as long as I keep trying to tackle their problem from the top, I will keep getting frustrated, so I've decided to start from the root, as one should with any problem. The problem my students have has eaten so deeply into their system that one can only/must fix it by tackling it from the bottom. For example, if essay writing is scheduled in the syllabus, it would be pointless teaching that when the students aren't even confident enough in their understanding of the basics of constructing a sentence, or of when to use verbs, nouns and pronouns. I realise that I must start by making them understand the smaller things before we can proceed to the more complex things, and we may never even get there seeing as I have about four months left here, but we can still make progress.

As part of the 'baby steps' plan, I've incorporated frequent dictation exercises into the syllabus. Last week was the first of many to come. It was with the JS3s. I dictated 20 words, one of which was 'uniform' and when the time for corrections came, I asked a student to step up and share with us how he had spelt the word. He wrote 'yulifomu'. His mates laughed and before I could even tell them to stop, I found myself chuckling a bit, not because he misspelt it but because he spelt it the exact same way their strong Yoruba accent permits them to pronounce the word. Anyway, I showed him the correct spelling. Knowing my lazy students, I had imagined that they would have forgotten what they had learnt, so the next day, I went to their class and asked the same boy to come to the board like he had done the day before, and spell the same word. What put a smile on my face was not only the fact that he spelt it correctly but the confidence with which he wrote the word on the board. It was a proud moment for me. I repeated the same test a week later (today), and he still didn't disappoint :)

I foresee this new method I've adopted being very time-consuming and putting me behind on lesson notes because topics which should normally be exhausted in one period would now require three periods. But the aim of teaching is less about sticking to lesson notes and more about ensuring the students learn, right?

A fellow corper, Jane, and I got talking the other day about what these students need. We decided that it isn't just about caning them but also about our patience and tolerance as teachers. We've weighed the results of caning them versus speaking sense into them. While the former might be effective in making them see in that moment that they've done something wrong, a lot of times, the latter is how one can truly get through to them. I've had to realise that I have to go easier on them as it's not always a laziness issue that holds them back; that it's not their fault that no matter how hard they try, their background will always reflect in their inability to pronounce the 'sh' sound, and that as much as they'd like to write lovely essays, the reality is that they don't even know how to construct simple sentences. Some of these are things you learn in primary school, which I'm sure for one reason or another, some of them skipped.

The system isn't helping either. Don't even get me started on the fact that 30% was the pass mark last term. I came back this term to discover that the students who were supposed to repeat a class, i.e. the ones who didn't meet the pass mark, have been put through to the next class. Why? Then, our public schools are filled with teachers with questionable qualifications. If their teachers are "tabon-ing", how won't the students do the same?

Like I stated earlier, we might not get through the syllabus this term and that's fine. I'd feel fulfilled leaving here knowing that Suli in JS3 can hold a 5-minute conversation in English. It won't be easy; a lot praying, caning, sweating, yelling will be involved. I've already started cutting into other teachers' periods sef, but oh well, lol.

I've gotten a couple of really good ideas from people on how I can do more with the students. Thanks ID and KK.

Jane and I have taken these ideas into consideration and added a few of our own too and with these, we have some helpful projects planned for the next few months. I'll share them here as time goes on.

Evenings are my fave here in Iwo. Since I love LOVE LOVE!!! evening breeze so much-and today's was exceptional btw-, I decided to type up this post outside. So calm, so yummy.

PS: It's a town, not a village! :P