Five periods of English. Or six. Or nine.

Day 9 – May 8

Classes went off without anything noteworthy today, which is to say they went well. In the staffroom, I had the misfortunate of witnessing more physical punishment as a student was made to kneel on the concrete floor by the door for about 30 minutes. Apparently, he was a truant and had only been to school 4 or 5 days since the academic year had started in January. I can’t see how physical punishment will help the student or make him want to come to school any more, however.

At break time today, I was heading to the washrooms (outhouses at the far end of the school ground) and I saw a circle of girls involved in a lively game of some sort. They were in a big circle and it looked as if they were tossing a ball around the ring. As I got closer, however, I noticed that it wasn’t a ball at all, but a soft-ball-sized rock, and they had about 3 or 4 of them going around the circle at various points. I guess the fun of it all was not to drop the rock as it was being tossed to you. After smiling at the enormous fun they were having with all of this, I couldn’t help but think about the odds of seeing a bunch of Canadian high school girls at lunch in a circle, tossing rocks to each other. It was one of those things that really make you realize what a different country it is that you’re in.

I’ve mentioned already my amazement at a teaching staff that seems to require the principal to physically be at the school in order to do their duties properly. Today I was equally amazed at another oversight of professionalism. I was starting to look ahead to my two weeks teaching the Form II students, and had begun to draw a rough chart on a piece of paper to plan out my lessons. I went to look at the timetable (a large piece of green construction paper with a hand-drawn table on it) to count the classes and noticed an incredible discrepancy: the 2A class was scheduled for 6 periods of English, the 2B class was scheduled for 5 periods of English, and the 2C class was scheduled for a whopping 9 periods of English! How could one class be getting almost twice as much English instruction as one of the other ones? Had nobody noticed this difference?

I brought this discrepancy to the attention of the headmaster in the form of a question as to why there was such a difference between the 2B and 2C class. He seemed equally surprised and came over to look. So I proceeded to show him all the differences and he looked at the time table and did his own math.

“We must correct this,” he said, and he took my pen and started to cross out a few lessons for the 2C class and add a lesson for the 2B, as the standard number of periods of English for Form II is six. So in short work the error had been rectified, but I was left there in amazement at the fact that they had been teaching following this timetable since the beginning of the school year in January. How was it possible that no one, especially the English teacher who has to teach these classes, noticed this huge error? I suppose you could perhaps chalk it up to the oversight of teachers who are rarely teaching their classes anyway.

One thing which is a bit annoying, but over which I have little control is late students. I often begin a class and have a student or two walk in 5 or 10 minutes late. There’s not much I can do because there are no such thing as daily class lists or attendance records (as far as I know) and the same thing has occurred in some of the other classes that I’ve observed. Today in the 1A class, I had the students working on an exercise and I noticed that one student at the back didn’t have a notebook open on his desk. When I approached him and asked him about it, he said that he was from the 1B class. “Aren’t you supposed to be doing something in your own class?” I asked. He didn’t really have an answer, so I sent him back to his proper classroom.

Controlling the coming and going of students is also difficult for one other embarrassing reason: most of the students look remarkably the same. I know all that business about “cross-cultural identification.” People asked me about that when I was in Japan, but I never really had that problem in Japan – I never really found that all the students looked the same. Here, however, it really is remarkable. With few exceptions, the students all have the same dark skin colour, most are slim, the girls (more than the boys) are of similar height, and all of them, boys and girls, have hair cut almost right down to the scalp. In fact, the girls here aren’t allowed to grow their hair until after they have graduated from high school. This, along with the fact that they all have smooth skin and narrow faces makes it very difficult to tell them apart, and even sometimes to tell if a student is a boy or a girl. Occasionally, I have to take a quick glance down to see if they are wearing a skirt or pants to tell the difference. It’s embarrassing to admit, but you can’t really understand until you have 200 of them in front of you.

Well, tomorrow finishes my first week of teaching. Slowly, especially with the 1A class, the students seem to be getting used to my style of teaching, as well as to the fact that English class doesn’t just have to be blackboard lecture and note-taking. It’s a shame that I’ll only have one more week with them after tomorrow.