Education

The school year got off to a pretty chaotic start. So far I Have about 35 3rd graders ranging in ages 8 to 13 who randomly selected themselves to be in our classroom. There was no class list, no text books, and not enough copies of the Ghanaian approved syllabus to allow teachers to plan and many are not in that practice of doing so in any event. The drill is that in the absence of textbooks, the kids bring “copy books” and the teacher writes a lesson on the board for them to copy. This, however, is largely an exercise in futility as most of the kids cannot read and just copy letters. It does keep them busy and quite for a stretch and that is enough of a reward for many of the teachers to keep this dysfunctional system in place. The kids do not seem to have been taught to sound out words phonetically in order to read or spell them, but just memorize the way a word looks. Many times they’ll just recognize the first letter and guess at the rest. “Period” could just as easily be “person” or “pencil.” They really do try though and it breaks my heart to see them struggle.

Because of this we are trying to introduce phonics into the curriculum, and everyone was pretty excited about this, but the problem is that Liberian English is so different that they just don’t pronounce words phonetically. I learned this the hard way when I designed a spelling lesson around “th” words. I called out the first word “this” and was met with blank stares. I asked my co-teacher to call out the word, and upon hearing “dis” the kids all nodded with recognition and attempted an answer. The word “book” is pronounced “boo” and “blackboard” is pronounced “blackboh”, so I fear teaching them phonetics might actually make writing and reading even more nonsensical and mystifying.

On top of the general challenges of teaching poor, restless refugee kids of widely varying abilities (some are bored, others clueless) in a classroom that has pretty much no resources and with teachers that may have had interrupted or meager education themselves – some of the kids clearly have learning disabilities, like dyslexia. I fear that these kids will almost certainly fall through the cracks. I just have to keep remembering that this year the kids actually have classrooms and small classes. Last year, hundreds were crammed into a church where effective teaching and personal attention was practically impossible. I now know my kids names, abilities and how to motivate them individually so I hope to be able to help each one of them improve in some way. I am already getting quite attached to them and know leaving will be hard.

As challenging and exhausting all of this is, I find it incredibly and unexpectedly rewarding. These kids do badly do want to learn. They understand that not everyone can afford an education and even the little kids understand that they would have little hope without it. In a lot of ways this makes it easier than my experiences working with kids at home. They respond so well to just the slightest bit of encouragement and thank me profusely for any visual aids I bring into the classroom. In so many ways they are “with the system” It’s just too bad that the system is not always with these kids.