A Teacher’s Helper
Seeing as how I needed something to do today, I offered to do some work for Akilah. For one of her classes, she collected the students’ notebooks so she could add a chart to each of them. Of course since photocopying is far too expensive for 104 notebooks, they had to be done by hand.
Yes, one hundred and four students; and that’s just one class. People in the states argue about a teacher being able to handle a classroom of more than fifteen or twenty students, here a class size like that doesn’t even exist. I believe her smallest class is in the sixties.
So anyway, this chart’s not too difficult to do, and since I’m bored I don’t particularly mind drawing a few lines and filling in columns of one hundred plus books. Not at all. Once I finally get started I knock out like over thirty books in less than two hours. This is between my occassional, “Oh, lemme take a break for a moment,” so it could’ve been quicker. By the time she’d come in for the day, I’d done about fifty of the books, and decided to save the rest for later this evening.
Earlier this morning, I was fiending for a voice from home. It was getting to the point that I just wanted to see how things were on the other side of the earth and kind of “download” what was going on with me over here. So at 7:30 Foumban time, I pick up the phone to call someone. Hmmm, April didn’t answer the phone; so I called Kiva. By the time I awakened her (we’re six hours ahead) I had to make sure she had a pen, it would be too expensive for me to have paid the cost on this end, so I gave her my calling card number and that of the cabine where we make our calls.
Within three minutes or so she calls back. You know, not many friends will even answer the phone at 1:30 in the morning, nonetheless be coherent enough to make an international call. I think we ended up talking for about forty-minutes or so. I didn’t mind, I would much rather pay the forty dollars for that call, than have to pay the rate of calling from this end. My initial call cost me 10125 CFAs for less than four minutes, that’s $14.46 USD! Geez! The long distance companies at home don’t gouge you that much.
But the call was worth it, it maintained my mental state. Very important here. If I needed to do it after two weeks, I’d hate to think how often PCVs need to do it. There’s definitely gotta be some post support for them; but most of all, there needs to be home support. They can’t do it without it.
Today was her day to just purge events that were “quasi-frustrating,” so I sat and listened. Once she was finished, I kind of did my own analysis of my theory on how the PC handles placement of volunteers. Don’t know if I’ve mentioned it previously, but it would seem that placing people in a totally new environment, alone, without an immediate support network may not be the best way to have an impact.
Yeah, I know some volunteers (like Akilah) choose to be posted alone, however. There’s something to be said for having the ability to find someone of your own culture, in less than an hour’s walk, ride or whatever, to kind of keep a firm grip on reality. Not to mention the many possibilities of what can happen if someone doesn’t have any relationships established with neighbors or the community. But, that’s me, maybe there’s a totally good explanation for why its done this way.
Anyway, not only are the class sizes just different than what they are in America, the discipline of the students is as well. Cameroonians are big on protocol. Here when a teacher walks into the room, the students stand up as a sign of respect (kind of like when a judge enters the courtroom). Can you imagine that being done in the states? Especially with the current level of disrespect going on in some of the school systems.
Then there’s the way teachers are greeted if they see the students in the community or somewhere. At one point I was wondering why all the students did a slight bow and hand motion. Well, first of all, everyone here shakes hands, however, when a student shakes a teachers hand, he or she is supposed to support that hand with the other; or its a sign of disrespect. There are some other things that appear to occurr also, but those are what I really noticed. Wow.
During our conversation yesterday, I remember Akilah stating that when disciplining students its often difficult getting them to understand their responsibility. Simply because in trying to speak to them, it becomes obvious that the responses are conditioned ones, and not the true answers. Apparently there are quite a few who adore this protocol system and the power it imposes over another. Wow.