Teaching...

As I wrote just before I came back to the U.S., I spent a respectable window of time teaching English classes throughout the day and if it taught me anything, it taught me that I have no desire to be a teacher with a classroom, grade book, lesson plan, papers to grade, etc. To those of you out there who fit that mold, I say again: I do not know how you do it and can only assume it is out of an absolute love of the job.

Seeing as how I am not trained in any official capacity as an English teacher I often found myself at my desk at night reading up on what I was going to teach the next day. As many of you know I studied engineering in college, have always had a natural aptitude for math and science and that my interest in the written word has only come about in the last five to seven years. Had the fathers asked me to take over the math classes, I would not have been worried at all because I have seen the math they are teaching and its very easy for me: tangents to circles forming right angles with radii and all of the angles involved, polynomial expressions, matrices – God I love that stuff!

English, however, is a horse of a different color. Yes, I sit down and crank out these posts and for the most part they are coherent, structured, and make some sense but let’s be honest, if I were to be officially graded or edited within the confines of proper grammar, I tend to think my writing would be an abomination to whoever invented said rules. Let’s call a spade a spade here – I love commas too much, I don’t know when it is appropriate to use a semicolon or a comma, I’m jumping between past and present tense in the is post like it’s my job, and up until the other day, I had no idea that there are only four types of sentences.

Was that a run on sentence? Probably. Who cares?

I am sure Ms. Cote tried to drill all of the above into my head in 8^th grade but it, along with a lot of other information which might leave readers with the impression that I actually have a grasp on that which is my native language, has long since gone the way of the 8-track for me. Needless to say, this realization was a stark one and so I did my best to brush up on that which I was trusted to impart to the youth of Jamaica.

The lowest form I met with was third form, which is equivalent to high school freshman, and given the fact that there is a lack in educational consistency here, some of the students in this class are as young as 13 and some as old as 15 or 16 which makes things more interesting. This form focuses solely on basic tenants of English such as grammar and composition and it is not until fourth or fifth form that they start to hone their focus on prose, drama and poetry. The entire time I was with third form we focused on the art of writing persuasive arguments and the theory of having a topic sentence around which the entire piece will be built, an introduction, a body and a conclusion. Let me reiterate how much of what I was teaching them was almost like new information to me. It all made sense and with some reflection I could think of times where I had applied these principles myself, I just had not thought of them in these concrete terms and theories, I just did them. On the flip side of these proud moments however, were sobering realizations of just how mercilessly I can slaughter English and have practically zero grasp of the past perfect participle tense.

As we moved through the unit in the lesson book it was clear that absolutely nothing was holding their attention so I decided to try a different tactic and switched gears in the hopes that learning by doing might help. Given that there are two white boards in the room I decided that we would structure a persuasive argument on each board, arguments which were opposing view points. I split the class down the middle and the group on my left was assigned the task of arguing why homework should be abolished while the other side constructed an argument as to why it should not. I got only a little mileage out of this trick; as soon as we got past a topic sentence the wheels fell off and neither side could give reasons beyond “because it’s boring,” and “because it helps you learn,” respectively.

Muscling my way through the remainder of that class, as well as the rest of the times I met with the third form to ponder the mysteries of the universe, was not always easy and I found myself relying on what I have learned from my parents and former teachers when it came to restoring order to student behavior run amuck.

Fourth and Fifth form were beasts of a different nature because they were of the mind that since I was not Fr. Anthony the typical rules did not apply and they could therefore get away with murder. On one occasion while meeting with a smaller group of Fifth form students to study MacBeth, one student who is not particularly fond of me walked in, saw that Fr. Anthony was gone and then walked out and skipped class. This typically results in a student being suspended but I went a different route and he now owes me a 500 word essay on responsibility, making choices and the consequences that come about as a result.

What kills me about this kid is that he is by far one of the smartest in the school but given his small and scrawny stature and the fact that he has been transplanted from Canada, he knows he would be utterly ostracized and so he plays dumb enough to fit in but not so dumb that his grades will suffer too much. There are quite a few students of this ilk in the upper forms and it is painful to realize that some of them can wrap their minds around standard deviation but cannot spell the word “because.” Conversely, other students are able to point out dramatic irony in MacBeth but only complete one side of a two-sided math test – and she did not even start at the beginning. She completed the side numbered 26 to 43, not 1 to 25.

It’s an uphill battle, to be sure and there are days where it seems surrender would be easier. Of course none of this is really news to me having witnessed my mother’s life as a teacher but it takes on a new dimension now that I am the one turning off lights, standing in silence at the front of the room and keeping an entire class in silence in a room for an extended period of time at the end of the school day. Hell, this is probably God’s sadistic way of paying me back for just how much of a terror I probably was when my mother was my 3^rd grade teacher.

You read that correctly, friends. Mrs. Konold was my 3^rd grade teacher and I have no doubt that Our Lady of Cosmic Justice is exacting her pound of flesh from me in this experience as a teacher.