You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December, 2007.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Christmas in Benin is a children’s holiday. Beninese children dress in their nicest clothes and go from door to door, asking for food - a lot like Halloween in the U.S. New Year’s Day is the big holiday over here, with lots of food, dancing, and parties.
I’ll post a longer entry when I have time to write one up – for now, holiday wishes to everyone!
Happy late Thanksgiving! I’m in Cotonou right now on my way back from a weeklong training conference for new TEFL volunteers in Parakou, one of the largest cities in the north of Benin. I should’ve gotten back to post yesterday, but I’ve had to make a temporary detour to the Cotonou Peace Corps medical unit. I got sick the last day of the conference and haven’t quite recovered yet. The Peace Corps doctors don’t come in to the office for non-emergencies on weekends, so I may end up having to miss class tomorrow (Monday) morning so that I can get to the bottom of why my throat’s been swelling up off and on for the past few days. On the upside, the Peace Corps medical unit has toilets, showers with hot water, a TV, a huge movie selection, and is only a few feet away from the main Peace Corps office with its high-speed internet connection. (I should have gotten sick months ago!)
I got to have not one but two Thanksgiving dinners, the first at Phoebe’s house in Houegbo on the way up to Parakou, and the second at the Peace Corps Parakou workstation when I was waiting for the conference to start. Both were delicious! I’m glad I got the chance to head up that way. The North of Benin is very different from the South (in culture, climate, and geography), and this was the very first time I’d been able to check it out for myself since Peace Corps rules prohibit PCVs from traveling for pleasure during the first three months of service. While the South of Benin where I’m posted is very humid, the North is quite dry, life is much slower-paced up there, and Islam has a bigger influence than down South, where Christianity is the most popular non-native religion. The Beninese I met up North were friendlier and less aggressive than those in the South, and though I prefer the faster rhythm of life in the South, I appreciated the change of scene.
All the new TEFL volunteers from my training group were at the conference, so we got to catch up for the first time since swearing-in on how everyone is settling into post and into teaching. Most people seem to be having a good time and to be settling in well, though by the end of next week, we’ll have lost two new TEFL PCVs: one left a few weeks ago for medical reasons and the other decided to leave Peace Corps for personal reasons and will head back to the U.S. within the next few days. We’ll miss both of them very much, but thanks to e-mail, we’ll at least be able to keep in touch.
I’ve gotten some questions about what it’s like teaching in Benin. In short, it’s very, very different from any teaching situation you could find in the U.S., mostly because Beninese public schools don’t have the resources of even the most troubled, under-funded American high schools. Benin has faced a chronic teacher shortage in secondary schools ever since the 1980s, when the World Bank put a hiring freeze on Benin’s civil service as a national debt management strategy. For the same reasons, the national professional training program for secondary school teachers was also shut down. Now, two decades later, almost all Beninese public secondary school teachers are either contractuels or vacataires, both employed on a temporary basis with little job security other than Benin’s pressing need for teachers, are paid sporadically, and are largely untrained. This situation is the real reason that the Beninese government welcomes American Peace Corps Volunteers – mostly recent college graduates with minimal teaching experience – as English teachers; even though we may not have much training, we’re no less trained than the majority of Beninese secondary school teachers, and we’re native English speakers to boot.
Beninese secondary school students in each grade level are divided into classes of 50-70 students each, and each class follows the same weekly schedule of subjects. (There are no electives here.) Primary school is free in Benin, but secondary school - public as well as private - requires large tuition payments (plus required purchases such as school uniforms and supplies), so sending a child to school is a huge investment for parents who may have large families and not enough money to go around.
Classes at my post are mostly held in large rooms with bare concrete floors and ceilings and a roof made of corrugated metal sheeting on a wood frame. There are metal doors on each classroom and instead of windows, we have latticeworks of holes in the concrete walls. The desks are wood and not terribly comfortable for the children who have to sit on them for two-hour-long lessons. None of my classrooms have electricity, so all the lighting in the classroom must come from the sunlight that reaches in through the open doors and the holes in the walls. There’s one blackboard at the front of each room. My school has 11 classrooms for more than 1,000 students. To ease overcrowding, classes are also held in covered open-air areas called pailotes off to the side of the school grounds. … And my school is in relatively good shape. I know another TEFL volunteer who occasionally has to hold classes under a tree on her school grounds – her students sit on the ground, and she writes the lesson on pieces of brown paper and tapes them to the trunk of the tree for the students to copy into their notebooks.
Each Beninese teacher receives from the school administration at the beginning of the school year: their work schedule, two blank notebooks for writing down grades, two blue pens, two red pens, and a box of one hundred pieces of white chalk. We receive nothing else, not even a list of our own students’ names or the textbooks for the courses that we’re teaching.
The level of English that I’m teaching right now doesn’t actually have a textbook. The Beninese government switched over from a rote-education system to a more learner-centered model a few years ago, but the textbooks are still under development. What we do have is a photocopied document (provided to me by Peace Corps) with the curriculum and suggested texts and activities. Students can have copies if their teacher gives it to them for photocopying, but it’s so badly written that I and most other Peace Corps TEFL volunteers don’t think it’s worth the extra expense to our students.
In short, being a teacher in Benin is difficult. Being a student in Benin is also very difficult. Students have to be extremely hard-working, motivated, and aggressive to succeed in a school environment where securing a seat at the front of the classroom can mean the difference between passing and failing. (I’ve actually seen students fight over seats with good views of the blackboard.) For this reason, the quality of the students here is generally great; most are eager to learn. Also, respect for authority is very big in Beninese culture, so most are also very respectful, and this respect makes teaching classes of 60 students doable. Unfortunately, the enormous class size means that it’s hard to give students individual attention, and many students fall through the cracks. To give you an idea of just how many, there are about 60 students in each of my four 5e classes, for about 240 students in the entire grade level. Four grade levels up, in 1ere (about 12th grade), there are only 30 students in the entire grade level, and many of these students won’t pass the very difficult Baccalaureate examination that will give them their high school diploma.
How do I like teaching in Benin? I won’t lie and say it’s lots of fun. There are many enjoyable moments, but you can’t get around the fact that it’s a bad teaching situation. The students deserve much more than the school system or I am able to give them, and it’s discouraging to go to work every day and wish that I had more time to grade lessons, fewer students per class, better classrooms, etc. I can see the quality of my lessons improving every week as I get more experience, but it’ll be a slow process. My students respect me and many like my class because I actually do prepare lessons and I actually do show up every day to teach them (unlike many overworked, underpaid Beninese teachers). I knew going in that Peace Corps would be a tough job, and no one in Peace Corps Benin disputes the fact that the TEFL volunteers have it tougher than any other sector. I’m looking forward to getting into the groove of teaching, getting to know my students better, and getting started on secondary projects in my school and community. I’ll keep you all updated - wish me luck!
