I’m asked to help with secondary schools and am given two weeks at a key school in the city. The proper papers are stamped in red with consensus of all parties, including the provincial head, the local teachers and the 3rd year students at the Teachers Training College who are doing their long-term practicum. The treaties are nice, but the details are fuzzy. Should I only observe like a no-flly zone? Will there be ground battles?
Many students have never taught before and since most don’t speak English, they’re terrified – for good reason. I decide to guide them through a class using sign language and it works for the students as well as the student/teachers. Toward the end of the week though I need to see what an unassisted teacher would do. I need to see what they’ve learned after three years and need to know what these soon-to-be teachers will be doing in countless rural schools throughout the province.
I need to know, but the truth is not pretty at all. It’s a school play where nobody knows their lines. Most of the students go along with the ritualised pantomime, being good sports because this ia all they've known or worse yet, because they really believe this is how to learn. They shout in response like parrots in joyous oblivion.
Pockets of students, either at the very back or against the wall, have given up and either entertain themselves by acting goofy (boys in the back), using their phones, gazing into space or chatting incessantly (girls near the wall).
Then there are those, too bright for their karma, who sit in reincarnated agony, stuffed into a shoe size five times too small.
I am astonished that the student/teachers seem to have no idea how ineffective they are, or worse, how little what they’re teaching resembles the English language. On the other hand, they’re already incapacitated by the experience of playing a role that they’re miserably unprepared for.
Five minutes before class, someone asks me how to pronounce “us”. She makes a stab at it pronouncing it as “use”.
In class, I catch a student/teacher translating, “I will go by car.” as “I will buy a car.” I intervene. We have a bloody mess and nobody even seems to think there’s been an accident.
I’m not going to spend the rest of my life attending to these problems one band-aid at a time. I’ve been at the Teachers Training College for more than a year and I know now that’s not the epicentre of change. Everyone says they have marching orders - as if there is some wizard living in Oz somewhere. It’s a broken bus that nobody dares get off, but that’s partly because there’s no nice bus waiting for them.
After talking to myself through the night, I decide the only solution for now is to design lesson plans for each lesson, packaging content and teaching methods in one simple page. The thought that it would be accepted is inconceivable because of the unimpeachable orthodoxy of Oz.
I meet with the provincial head and he approves so quickly I’m bewildered. We will start with one pilot school, present the results to all the other municipal schools and then they can choose themselves. I've already prepared the lesson plans for eight months of lessons. They are simple and can be understood in one glance. The teachers like what they see. They want lesson plans for the other grades, want more audio files to practice with and want video examples. I’ll let them play with the material and I’ll see them again after two months.
I still have to think about how to help the student/teachers before they grab their sticks of newly minted authority and blight the rural schools with their “let’s-pretend-I-speak-English” nonsense. Many admitted that the last thing they want to be is teacher. So what does someone do if they graduate from a Teachers Training College and don’t want to be a teacher? They become police. And are well qualified.
