This year, in addition to teaching one math class with my students from last year, I took on an English class. I thought it would be a fun change of pace, just something different to do. I have 41 English students, making my English class less than half the size of my math class, and most of the students are in their late teens/early 20's. Classroom management is a breeze. I say "be quiet" and...then they're all quiet! It's like magic. The oldest student, to my knowledge, is 29. I met him last year, and I thought he was like 17 at the time, because why else would he still be in high school. Then I found out that he's a lot older than me. Awkward.
Anyway, teaching English has been challenging. Part of the reason that I specifically asked to teach Première, aside from the smaller class size and the ease of classroom management, is that there's no set curriculum. The students are supposed to have already mastered all the major points of English grammar, so at this point, they're just supposed to be reviewing and expanding their vocabulary. Of course, this being Burkina, the kids actually have no mastery of English grammar or vocabulary and struggle with the most basic things, like the difference between "his" and "her." Anyway, I figured that at least I'd have more liberty: I could freely adapt my lessons based on the needs of the students, without having to follow something irrelevant.
While I do appreciate the freedom, it's been a little scary, especially because the students have none of the basics. At least if we had a textbook, we could work our way through it and I'd have some way to measure progress. As it is, I just kind of make up lessons based on what they need, and I hope that they're learning something. I didn't really know what I was doing at the beginning of the school year, so the first several lessons were pretty rough. My teaching didn't really match their level initially, plus none of them had ever been taught by a native English speaker before, so they had a really hard time with my accent. I think it's gotten a lot better; we've established a routine to the way that classes go, and I can feel their faith in me as a teacher grow with each class. (Nothing worse than trying to learn from someone you don't have faith in.)
Still, I feel like I'm just treading water a lot of the time. We can spend an entire 2-hour class period going over one grammar point over and over again, and at the end they'll appear to have gotten nothing out of it. For example, I noticed that in their homework, a lot of them were writing things like "I want that you go" instead of "I want you to go," so I spent 3 hours in class last week going over that sentence structure very carefully with them and then practicing it over and over and over and over. Then, for homework, I had them write very simple sentences using that same structure, only to find that at least a third to half the students just wrote "I want that you go" again. (Except now some of them wrote "I wanna that you go." Not better.) Am I actually accomplishing anything? My goal for this year is for all of the students to master basic sentence structures and agreement between nouns, verbs, and adjectives, but that's looking like an awfully high goal right now.
I guess at this point, the biggest persisting problem is that I don't have a lot of faith in what I'm doing. It's not that I think my teaching is inadequate, I just think that it's pointless that the kids are studying English. When are they ever going to need it? Unless they manage to leave the country to go somewhere English-speaking, which is highly unlikely even for high-school graduates, they're never going to need it. Burkinabes point out to me that the students might someday use English to talk with foreign aid workers or to read labels on medications or something, but that seems like a totally lame reason for studying a language for 7 years. Any foreign aid worker worth their salt in Burkina will already speak French, and you'll figure out the medication labels if it's that important whether or not you speak English. How can I convince them to make an effort to learn something that they're being forced to study but that they'll never need? (Notice that I say they're being forced to
study it, not forced to
learn it.) One might argue that my job is to make the subject relevant and exciting for them, but I'd really rather see them learning about science or computer skills or entrepreneurship or
anything else.
Lest I sound too hopeless, I will point out for my benefit as well as yours that the kids have to study English anyway, whether it's me or a Burkinabe teaching them, so at least I can make it more interesting for them. Plus, I have my secondary projects, so not all is lost. Still, it's an uphill struggle, and it's hard to make it up that hill when the students and my own self are pushing back down.
