"You must do the thing which you think you cannot do"

The full quote is:

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.”

-Eleanor Roosevelt

There have been times over the last 2 weeks when I thought that I could not do this. It even came to crying and wondering if I should even be a teacher at all. But as Eleanor reminds me, I must do this. I must do this because I know how complicated teaching can be, I know how detrimental it can be when a teacher fails, and I care enough about teaching to beat myself up when I don’t achieve perfection.

I’ve been on a roller coaster for the last two weeks. There have been incredible highs and incredible lows, so I’m going to do the most teacher-y thing I could do and present them as my “roses” and “thorns.”

The Thorns

As a teacher, you have to anticipate as many problems as you can possibly think of. What if a child doesn’t know the definition of a word you repeatedly use in your instructions? How do you have an absent student learn the same things as the students who were there for a lesson that required acting scenarios or observing live animals? What if the students end up blankly staring at you when you ask a question? So it’s frustrating to encounter problems that you never knew could exist. For example, how do you continue your lesson when it’s pouring rain on the tin roof and no one can hear a thing?

One day, I brought in chicken eggs for a lesson on reproduction in birds. I had 3 stations where students could come up and observe the cracked eggs in bowls. I asked them to draw what they saw. More than half stayed at their seats, and almost all automatically drew a diagram that they had studied in prior grades. It had the yolk perfectly in the center, with the chalaza (squiggly lines that hold the yolk in place) perfectly on either side. “Is this what you see here?” I asked, “Do you see two lines like that? I don’t!” Eventually some of them caught on and began drawing what they actually saw. But I was left so perplexed. Why was this a foreign concept? Matt has had similar experiences in his P4 classroom. When you ask the students to draw something in science, they want to copy a diagram. Diagrams can be useful, but not when they cloud your view of reality.

My students were also unfamiliar with the concept of an opinion. It’s understandable that these students, still mastering English, wouldn’t know the definition of words like fact, fiction, and opinion, but I did not expect that they would be incapable of expressing opinions. I asked them to write an answer to “What was the most interesting thing you have learned about birds, and why?” and I mostly got a list of the topics we covered. If I got any opinions, they were poorly justified.

Similar issues arose time and time again. They did not know the definition of “wonder,” nor the concept of asking a question about something you did not know the answer to. They were bewildered by the task of discussing something with a partner. They are mostly unaware of how to ask a question to clarify directions given, which is incredibly difficult, since I can’t read their minds. One student, Benet, has been consistently saving my butt by asking great questions that reveal an essential lack of understanding. More students have started to catch on. And I’ve been working on re-phrasing things, because they are prepared to copy everything word for word without understanding any of it, so now it is easier to ask students to repeat the directions I give them.

Constant vigilance. I must constantly re-work certain skills, like re-phrasing things, into my lessons. Every step of my lessons must be carefully considered: will I have the resources for that? How will I know they understood the material? And then, things just happen. A new student arrives after 2 weeks of instruction and I have to catch him up (but it’s okay because Felex is adorable). A cooperating teacher does not teach what he said he would teach. I have only 45 minutes instead of 60. My students are missing because lunch ran late, they have malaria, or they just decided to go to the bathroom for 20 minutes. There’s a new problem every hour, it seems. 

After having students do a skit based on the road sign they were given, I hung them up in the room. They are almost all destroyed already.

Our posters of different types of birds, made by inferring their habitat and diet from their feet and beaks

The Roses

But, what’s nice about unpredictability is that great things are so much greater as surprises. I never expected to discover Thank you Madame” at the end of their papers or encounter tragically hilarious spelling errors, such as in “GOD BELLS YOU.” I did not anticipate to be told so often that I was welcome in their classroom. I did not expect applause when I announced that I had bought journals for the students to use for writing. During lunch one day, I walked past three of my girls eating posho and beans, and I certainly did not expect them to say, “Madame, come and sit with us, and we’ll share.”

There have been some really funny moments, too. Once, I was hanging up a poster of the male reproductive organ (not my creation- I was just moving it), and the walls are really dusty, so that, combined with my cold, caused me to start coughing pretty badly. One of my students was standing behind me, and he solemnly said, “I heard the white people die from the cough.” Turning around, I saw his wide eyes, so I could tell he was sincerely concerned and not being intentionally creepy, but I couldn’t help laughing.

I was pleasantly surprised during many science lessons; at their roaring laughter while watching a male Bird of Paradise perform a mating dance, at their disgust with a picture of a newborn kangaroo, and at their diligence and success while searching through non-fiction books for information on certain animals. A few stories from the first journal prompt I gave– asking them to describe a tree house they would build– were surprisingly creative. My favorite detailed a gold and silver tree house which was later bought out by President Obama.

My most successful assignment thus far was probably a journal entry in which I asked them to explain the biggest problem in their community. I allowed them to choose what “community” meant to them, ranging from their school to their country. This was something the students were familiar with and certainly had opinions about, since they live with complex and difficult problems on a daily basis. For the most part, they were even able to analyze the cause of these problems. Perhaps most importantly, though, I learned so much about their lives. Some problems included: poverty, cholera, AIDS, disease in general, lack of rain, drinking and smoking/drug abuse, lack of sanitation, lateness to school (because of the distance between homes and the school), selfish government leaders, floods, a lack of ports in Uganda for trade (I was proud of that one), and– most commonly– theft. I was surprised both at the frequency of “theft” as an answer, and the variety (I was scared of everyone writing the same thing). Of course, the fact that there are so many problems to choose from is really depressing. But the assignment went well and provided a great transition into talking about how communities attempt to be perfect, which led to reading The Giver (read it if you haven’t!). 

To illustrate the changes I must make to read this book aloud...

Anyways, I still have a lot of work to do. I still have to work out a regular time to play games like Boom Chicka Boom Boom (shout out to WCAC members), which they found so amusing. I have to get them to be able to describe places, thoughts, and feelings. I have to make them at least begin to question their notion that lawbreakers deserve to be beaten to death. I have to teach them about using punctuation marks at the end of sentences. And it’s going to be really hard. But I’m beginning to see some changes in my students, and in myself, and that makes all the difference to me. The roses are blooming, and I don’t mind if, while pruning them, I prick my finger a few times.

Fun fact: it was Cassie's birthday this weekend. We ordered a vanilla & chocolate cake and got this graham-cracker-tasting cake with raisins inside and a layer of rock-hard frosting. It tasted like s'mores.