A draft of
this entry was started, but not finished, 5 months ago:
Six
volunteers gathered recently to say good-bye to two of our number who are
COS-ing (PC jargon for close of service, i.e. going home having completed a two
year commitment.) That leaves 5 of us up
here in the north, all in various stages of our service. I am now the most senior and there’s a brand
new volunteer in the group. Whenever a
bunch of volunteers gets together, try as you might to avoid it, the conversation
turns to the difficulties of service. I try to be careful of the conversation
when there is a newbie present. Everyone
arrives on site with stars in her/his eyes to some extent, that is, scared but
ready to go, looking for the challenge, expecting to make some changes, to make
things better. After some time it becomes apparent that not all is possible and
that realization triggers an initial disillusion which most people work through
with a degree of pain and a dose of courage.
But it seems only fair that new volunteers have some time
disillusion-free. By the same token, it
also seems only fair that when you get to hang out with other volunteers, which
in places like mine doesn’t happen too often, you can vent a little. Hence a
tension.
The truth is that the
challenges make the job here, in the education sector, close to undoable. The institutional difficulties are
overwhelming. Example: school gets
canceled all the time. Next
month—July—there will be only 11 days of school. And on those days, if things run true to
form, at least 2 classes per week will be cancelled for a meeting or other
reason. The classes that are held on
those 11 days will start 10-20 minutes late and/or will be interrupted for any
number of reasons. Three of my teachers never studied English in
college. They taught other subjects
until they were assigned to teach English by the principal who had no trained
English teachers. They took a crash 6 month
course sponsored by the department of education (but not before they were
already teaching) and passed a test.
How, I don’t know since I tutored one of them and know her ability.
There are no books or instructional materials to help. The students are
charming and nice but noisy and there is no standard for classroom behavior. Most of the teachers never learned how to
control their classes although some few do.
This makes it hard for students to learn. You want to hear more?
The truth also is that
progress is possible, small steps, 2 forward, one back. I am close to the end of
service, and may be trying to protect my fragile ego from thoughts of
ineffectiveness, but I can see improvement. One teacher writes on the board and
explains to the students what they will learn during class. Big step forward. Another uses English a little during every
class. Big improvement. A third reads the sentences in an exercise
with the students to be sure that they understand them before they are asked to
fill in a blank or complete them in some way. Progress. All more or less get
the idea that students need to practice what they are taught. Yes, there is
massive backsliding (a tired teacher puts up a paragraph in English and tells
the kids to copy it and to translate it while she sits down to rest for the
period. A few kids do the translation,
more or less, and the others copy their work.) And I worry what will happen
when I am no longer here to remind people to do what they know they should do
but which the press of life makes hard to do.
But I can say it’s better right now, on the whole.
This is the lesson the new
volunteers will learn, all of them the hard way. I’ve talked about this with other
volunteers. In training, should new
volunteers be given more modest aspirations, be told how difficult it will
be? We conclude, no. Better they should learn than self limit to
begin. But we need also to be able to
say how damn hard is the work and how disillusioning and frustrating it is. In
a word, to vent a little. We’ll give the
newbie a few months, and then she’ll be glad we’re around to hear all about it.
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