How the present simple can bring on God's wrath

Day 8 – May 7

The mornings are getting nicer and nicer and today we had sunshine as we went to school. It’s nice simply because there’s a better chance that our bus will take us most or all of the way to school and we won’t have to walk down any muddy road. But even there, with the rain dropping off the roads are drier and much more passable.

Today the headmaster was at the school for the entire day, and as he had predicted, it made a noticeable difference in the behaviour of the teachers. The were suddenly in class when they were supposed to be, there was quiet throughout the school during class time instead of student chatter, and things just ran a lot smoother in general. It’s too bad it’s not like that more often. It seems he often has things to do in town. Where in Canada a principal could simply send off a fax or a letter in the mail, here, without those conveniences, the principal must do the work personally, and as we are located in the countryside, he spends a lot of time going back and forth.

Today as I came back from teaching my first class the other teachers were sitting at their desks around the edges of the staffroom, with fairly serious looks on their faces. In the centre on the floor there was a student with a grimace on his face. He was just getting up as I walked in and quickly left. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but given the faces around the room and the stick on the floor, I guessed that some kind of punishment had been carried out – one that wouldn’t fly at all in Canada. Later, when I asked the headmaster about what happened, he told me that the boy had come to school in shoes that are not part of the uniform. It wasn’t the first time it had happened and he had been told repeatedly before not to wear the shoes to school. On top of that, he was a bit of a troublemaker of a kid and had beat up a smaller student the day before. So I asked what happened, and the headmaster said that he had told the student to hand over the offending shoes. The student refused.

“What happened next?” I asked. He replied that he had had to take the shoes from the student.

“How did you get them?” I asked.

“By force,” was the reply. I pressed a bit further, but he had no more to add, so I had to leave it at that. It’s sad to think that that happens here, and I would hate to think that the stick had had some involvement, but it probably did. I’m glad at least that I didn’t have to witness it.

On a lighter note, in my second class a student told me that God would probably kill me. Today I was teaching the use of the present simple to talk about daily routines, and I started off by talking a little bit about my daily routine in Canada. When I had finished, I asked if they had any questions for me. There was a short pause before one slim girl in the front row put her and up and said, “You don’t pray?” I explained that in Canada, some people pray every day and some people don’t, and that I was one of those who don’t. This shocked a lot of the students.

She looked up, smiled a little, and then said, “God might kill you.” She wasn’t damning me or anything like that. She laughed, I laughed, and then the class laughed. It was just a funny situation, and definitely a teachable moment about religion in culture.

I am now in possession of a syllabus for Form I-IV English. It’s a booklet in chart format that is basically a simplified version of the curriculum. It is created by the Ministry of Education to help teachers plan their courses, and is likely a quite necessary tool since a great number of them are like the English teachers at my school – nothing more than high school graduates with no education training whatsoever. The chart format has a lot of the headings that we would be familiar with: objectives, structure, outcome expectations, teaching strategies, assessment strategies, expected periods per topic, etc. Despite that, however, the actual content listed under those headings is extremely rudimentary and of very little value. Still, it probably helps a little in setting the teachers who have no clue on the right track.

In any case, it will at least give me a little bit of an idea of what I should be teaching the kids, which is more than what the teachers have been doing!