Celebrity Teach

The only opportunity we G18 stagaires had to teach in Guinea was during practice school.  This three-week span was to be our ‘trying out’ period, to which we had slowly been  building through peer teaches, minor lessons in front of a handful of students, etc.   The turnout was quite incredible considering the kids had absolutely nothing driving them to sit for consecutive two-hour blocks in the incubated slow cookers we called ‘classrooms’.  We were literally seeing fifty students in attendance for voluntary classes.  I must note, however, that in a remote West African town during summer vacation, school pretty much was the only option for breaking up the mental lethargy.  And besides, what teen would choose another morning in the fields unearthing handfuls of rice over a chance to socialize with his friends.

Peace Corps had been holding Pre-Service Training in Forecariah for several years.  The community was somewhat used to our foreign antics.  A semi-private pagne-party (think colorful toga party) at the volunteer house was more of an annoyance than the complete cultural shock it must have been a few years earlier.  Still, we retained a certain celebrity status, and it attenuated very little among non-adults.  The youngest ones might not have remembered the last batch of trainees that were ushered in and out of the town.  These were the most adorable, as a baby could traverse his entire range of emotions (utter delight to sheer terror) in a matter of seconds.  Nothing builds confidence in a future father like a baby who shrieks at the sight of him.

The toddlers fell into a kind of ‘dancing bear’ mentality.  As we passed certain sections of the neighborhood, their token chant would start up from some hidden corner of a house:  “Fooooohh-tayyyyy!  Foooohh-tayyyyyy!”  crescendoing in the first syllable and snapping at the “t”.  Like crickets they’d multiply and build until we were surrounded by a unison chorus of petites calling out “white person” in Susu.   Obden and I would often comment on the quality of the surround sound.

                “What do you think, stereo?”

                “I’d give them a little better than that.  Good stuff, but that spot with the big tree in middle of the road still takes the cake.  They’re at least up to Dolby, just need a good adult to join in for added bass.”

The attention sure made my runs fun.  Once I got past Rock Thrower’s Row, it felt like I was in some inside-out reality where the white man always wins the African distance races.  Children and adults alike paused from their backbreaking labors to cheer me on.

In the heat of September and amidst the deprivations of Ramadan—forty days of fasting from sun-up to sundown, where individuals technically weren’t allowed to swallow their own saliva—student curiosity won out over the hardship of a packed, sweltering classroom.  We were foreign.  We were strange.  We were downright fascinating and scary.  They wanted to know more about us.  The shy ones just wanted to be closer to us, wanted an excuse to step out of the burning distance and into the shadows of a classroom.  More than a few truly wanted to learn.  Practice school was their chance. 

For us the three weeks were invaluable.   We finally had begun to coat our skeletons with experience.  With it came the joy of students’ comprehending nods and the pain of grading those same students’ failed tests.  We found nerves that had been buried since adolescence.  The cultural roadblocks began to appear, and though we had been reminded of them several times, there’s nothing like living one of those moments when you’re forced to spur another into deconstructing his own pile of educational and cultural experiences. 

I rode into the first day of physics class on a wave of ideals.  After all, we arrived in this country with honed tools of logic and reason that would utterly annihilate the years of rote training these kids had received.  Right?  The normal routine—lesson, boardwork, test—be gone!  Two nights prior to the start of classes I had pushed through the morning hours, struggling for a way to present electric circuits and the composition of white light in some way other than the usual passive transmission.  The second night, around 1 a.m., it hit me.  The scientific method!  They have to learn it anyway, but I’m going to make it leap off the page.  I revamped my entire week of lesson plans to incorporate the strategy:  instead of spending an hour on it, take them from start to finish; make it the basis of all my lesson plans for the year!  They were going to learn that every single one of these concepts was not just handed to those who discovered them.  They were going to make hypotheses and test them, just like the men and women who poured their lives into their uncovering. We’re going to do experiments!  We aren’t just going double voltage in the formula, we’re going to ask ourselves, “What’s going to happen to the lightbulb if I add a second battery?” and we’re going to test it.  In time these kids will be the most forward-thinking bunch in all of Guinea.  The curiosity will spread like wildfire.  Soon whole bands of youth will be begging for more, knocking on doors and asking, “Why haven’t we had those elections the junta promised us last year?  I lit another candle, always keeping one on each corner of my notebook to minimize the hovering shadows while I worked. 

With G16 volunteer Levi and my host siblings who participated in Practice School

Teen hormones and rote learning got in the way of this mini-breakthrough.  So did time; after all, we only had these kids for five classes.  Week 1 test results came back with a jaw-dropping variance.  Most failed to even grasp the concept I had dedicated the bulk of my time to (science is a process of questioning the world around us and taking steps to discover it).  The reasons are obviously multi-dimensional, and my fishing from a shallow bank of memories wouldn’t do them justice as I sit here hitting keys eighteen months later.  A few examples are enough:

• The 10^th graders in my physics class weren’t even able to solve a simple algebra equation (V=IR), despite having learned to do so in grade 8. 
• How some 10^th graders were able to make it this far without even being able to read raises one to question the quality of testing in the Guinean school system.  It might have something to do with the fact that some principals delay the release of year-end test results to make personal “visits” to struggling students’ families.
• Students don’t have books (which is also true here in Costa Rica).  An inordinate amount of time is therefore wasted copying a sentence to the board and waiting for it to be replicated in their cahiers.  The slower writers never even had the chance to think about what I was explaining.  These notebooks are normally checked by Guinean teachers to ensure their impeccability, so even physics is reduced to two hours of orthography practice.  I wish I had a photo of the looks on their faces when I asked my class for the first time to write their own hypothesis.  They were to guess which color would appear when I shined both a red and a green flashlight on the same spot of a blank white paper and then write it on the prescribed line of their cahiers.  Utter panic.  They froze.  Most waited until the experiment was over to enter the result (yellow).  Those who guessed wrong leaped for their neighbor’s white-out to quickly rectify the “mistake”. 
• Cheating is hilariously unchecked.  One volunteer trainer was so fed up the previous year with wandering eyes and consecutive verbatim test responses that he asked his class to write an essay on the importance of not cheating.  A particular student’s (paraphrased) response actually shed a new cultural light on the issue:  “In my family we are taught to share and help our neighbor.  If I have an answer and my neighbor is struggling, why not help him?”   The next paper in the stack began, “In my family we are taught to share….”