Yu No Kick Part 13: Class Time

I usually teach in the mornings. Despite my general disdain for mornings, this is actually a good thing. Even in the thick of the hot season, the hours before 9AM are generally tolerable. It becomes difficult to teach a class when you can't even see what you're writing on the board because there's too much sweat dripping into your eyes. Heat also makes pretty much everyone want to be somewhere besides a tin-roofed classroom. Hence, morning classes are the way to go. Mondays and Tuesdays I get the prime 7:30-9:30 slots for my math class and so I get to check out and go sit in front of my fan as heat of the day starts to set in. Wednesdays and Thursdays I get the 10:00-11:30 slot, which is not as ideal, but still better than an afternoon class. Fridays is a half day and so I only teach from 7:30-8:30. I have one afternoon class on Tuesdays 1:30-2:30, which is invariably my most unpleasant and the one I'm most likely to curtail in favor of some small assignment for my kids to work on outside. At first glance, a school in Vanuatu may seem to be only a few steps away from total chaos. Upon closer inspection, however, it's revealed to actually be total chaos. Accurate timekeeping is important in maritime navigation as it allows you to determine your longitude by measuring the difference between the local time where you are and a reference time. Similarly, accurate timekeeping is important for maintaining an orderly school environment as it lays a groundwork upon which one can build things like schedules and lesson plans. Unfortunately, Vanuatu lacks a method of accurate timekeeping. It's not so much that accurate timepieces are unavailable (actually now, thanks to Digicel, almost everyone has a cellphone with a built-in clock), but rather that the numbers read off of a timepiece are not connected to reality in any meaningful way. So, while a person may be able to glance at their cell phone and determine that it is, in fact, 7:30, the connection isn't always made that school starts at 7:30 and thus they should be at school as opposed to still hanging out at home. Actually, the problem isn't so much of with the students as it is with the teachers, which isn't to say that the kids are always timely and punctual, but rather that since none of the teachers are timely and punctual, the student's punctuality is irrelevant. It's very much a top-down problem. Since not every kid can be counted upon to have a watch at home, the beginning of school is announced with three bells (which are the bane of my existence), one at 6:30, one at 7:00 and one at 7:30. This seems reasonable, except that the bell must be rung manually and thus ends up being rung whenever the headmaster thinks of it instead of being on a fixed schedule. Some days the bells are only a couple minutes off, some days they're half an hour off or don't happen at all. Mondays are especially patchy and we often don't get the last bell until 8 or 8:30.

How good the teachers are about showing up on time seems to be proportional to how far away we are from a weekend. Wednesdays almost everyone shows up at a reasonable time, Mondays almost no one does. Students tend to mirror this behavior, and it's hard to blame them. If their teachers don't show up, they just get to goof off outside anyway. On Mondays and Fridays we don't even get to start right away as there's an assembly. Everyone gathers in the sixth grade classroom (the largest classroom) and all of the teachers who've showed up sit down in front of them. We start by greeting each other. One by one the teachers stand up and say “Good morning everyone” and all of the kids chant back “goodmorningmister(or Miss) – (whatever the teacher's name is)” in a monotone that makes the robot on automated voice mail messages seems surprisingly lifelike. Then they all sing a few church songs and the teacher on duty, which changes every week (but is never me because I declined to be put on the duty roster), gets up and recites a bible passage and tries to relate it to a valuable life lesson. Now, it seems to me that there are a lot of very famous bible passages with a lot of very famous life lessons attached to them from which to choose, but most people seem to just pick a passage at random because they're always a really obscure verse from some really obscure book that no one ever talks about and generally seem to be, like, description or background information as opposed to an actual teaching. They then have to come up with some really convoluted explanation to draw a valuable lesson from a passage that goes something like “Then Jesus walked from one town to another.” Full points for creativity, I suppose. Finally, we come to headmaster's announcements, which is always the longest part of the assembly as the headmaster likes to expound at length about the importance of wearing uniforms and being on time to school. When we finally actually start school it's usually something like 8:15 or 8:30 (my class starts at 7:30 on Mondays, remember?) because the assembly for some reason isn't written into the school schedule. So, bottom line, when I walk into my class somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour after it was supposed to have started to give my lesson, I feel like I'm working at a fairly huge disadvantage. Assigning punishments to kids who walk in tardy (and yes, some kids still do manage to be late to class despite the fact that they've had an extra hour to get to school) seems just a little bit ridiculous and besides, if I punished everyone who was late, I'd pretty much be punishing everyone. It's also kind of difficult to call a class to order when half the school is still running around outside screaming because their teachers haven't showed yet.

On non-assembly days starting class is a little easier, but you never really get to walk into a classroom with all of your students calmly waiting inside for the lesson to start (don't confuse calm with quiet. I don't expect kids to wait quietly. Everyone likes to talk. I'd settle for there not being any brawls going on when I walk in the door). Grade Eight, which I teach, does not have one teacher, but several, each teaching different subjects. So at several points during the day, we have to change teachers. Except, since there's no one keeping an accurate schedule, there's no telling when this will happen. Sometimes the stars will align and one teacher will be leaving just as the next one is showing up, but more often one teacher will leave and it will be a good half hour before the next one comes. Or sometimes one teacher will come to find that the previous one hasn't finished yet and so head back home. Understandably, the kids don't wait in their classrooms for the teacher, the spread out to various corners of the school yard and do whatever it is kids do to amuse themselves. When it looks to them like a teacher's about to be entering a classroom, they start meandering back over. This takes a while. The school yard's not that big, but hurrying isn't really a concept here, so there will often be a long delay between receiving the visual information that a teacher is in the classroom and activating the motor skills needed to walk back inside. Simply walking into a classroom and starting a lesson tends to generate confusion, so I try to give the kids as much time as possible. I slowly walk from my house across the schoolyard to the office to get chalk, thus signaling to everyone that class is about to begin. I then go back to my house and putter around for a few minutes inside, pretending to get my things together. Then I walk into the classroom and put my stuff down on the teacher's desk, do a survey of the classroom, sigh and, pretending to have forgotten something, walk back to my house and return with a piece or paper or a pencil or a similarly school-related, yet unnecessary object. Then I pick up the eraser (actually just a piece of cloth) and start slowly erasing the board, which actually does take a while as cloth isn't the ideal board wiping material and our blackboard is especially sticky or something and thus is a real pain to wipe down. Even if the board is already pretty well erased when I enter, I pretend that the previous eraser did an unsatisfactory job and go about touching it up. By this point usually about 90% of the students who came to school that day have made it inside (on a given day I'll have 1-4 kids out of 32 absent, which is actually pretty good for Vanuatu). Finally, I write a warm-up exercise on the board, usually consisting of about five questions, to give the students who've made it to class already something to do and students who haven't a few more minutes to get inside.

Most of the lower grade's classes seem to be largely chant-based. When I finally get my kids quieted down a bit and working I can hear the other classes in progress around the school. “bananasareafruitfoundmostlyintropicalclimatestheyrequirelotsofrainandlotsofsunlighttogrow,” that's probably an agriculture class. “australiaisthesmallestcontinentintheworldandishometoonlyonecountry,” social studies. “threetimesthreeisninethreetimesfouristwelve,” math. “blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah,” that's French. By the time they hit Grades 7 and 8, however, they've advanced from chanting to copying. When I come into class right after another teacher has left, I generally find the kids hard at work precisely copying a blackboard full of text into their notebooks. They've grown somewhat comfortable with my science class, as it to requires at least some amount of copying from the board, but they're still flummoxed by my math course, during which I write relatively little on the board. Instead, I expect them to solve math problems, an expectation that some students have obviously never had a teacher expect of them. A healthy portion of my kids still try and translate math problems into copying problems. They try and spend most of the time I allot for solving a problem transcribing the problem into their workbooks. They use a ruler and red pen to draw nice, red boarders around each of the pages, then switch to a blue pen to write any words (if I'm giving word problems) and the problem numbers. Numbers and math symbols in the problem are written in red and then the solution is written in pencil, and all problems have to be copied before work can begin on the first one. Generally they'll copy one question and then leave just one ruled line blank to work the problem and write the answer in. This works fine if the question is something like 4x8, but doesn't really pan out as well for things like decimal division. Also, there's about 1 red pen, ruler, and blue pen to every six students so this procedure is significantly lengthened by the fact that they have to spend a lot of time shouting at/hitting their friend to get them to pass the pen/ruler and recovering the pen/ruler from outside when it is accidentally chucked out a window during the passing process. I always spend a lot of time emphasizing the fact that I'm not handing out any points for neatness and that 1) they should choose one writing implement and stick to it, 2) rulers should really only be used when measuring the length of something and 3) they should finish working out one problem before copying the next one into their notebooks. Actually, that last point is one of my very few class rules. Unlike other teachers, I don't care if they speak Bislama or wear their uniforms everyday (a problem because you can't exactly go to the uniform store around here) or curse or sweep the classroom at the end of the day. All I really want is for them to attempt to do some math as opposed to copy stuff from the board. Some kids do take my advice. They write only in pencil, forgo the ruler, go through the problems one at a time, and finish my exercises in record time. Others I think have yet to finish an in-class exercise.

Unfortunately, a lot of students spend all their time copying things incredibly neatly into their books not because they think that their teachers require it of them, which was my original theory, but rather because copying is really the only part of the class they're comfortable doing. This also leads to a lot of cheating. Interestingly though, a lot of teachers put work on the board and then leave the classroom as the kids work on it, even during exams. This means that most kids are horrible at cheating because they've never had to be subtle about it. There's never been anyone watching them. Thus, I tend to be angered by their cheating, not because of any ethical or moral stance on my part, but rather because I feel insulted that they think I'm dumb enough not to notice that they've got their head on their friend's shoulder and are copying his answers, or that they have their notes open next to them on their desk.

As an education volunteer, I'm supposed to be working to improve the quality of education in Vanuatu. Often I feel like this is kind of like trying to repair a car that's spent eight years sitting on the bottom of a lake: it doesn't seem like repair is really the appropriate solution, rather replacement sounds like the way to go. Sure, some problems are small and seem solvable, like shortages of school supplies, old or poorly maintained buildings and facilities, or insufficient curriculum materials. But many problems are far more entrenched and systemic, like the language of instruction being a language that many students and even some teachers do not fully understand, or the fact that teachers are employed by the ministry of education, not by the schools, meaning that headmasters do not have the authority to fire their teachers or even dock their pay for not attending. And some problems even stem into the cultural realm, like a drastically different conception of the meaning of time or the importance of education. As just one recent college graduate (in a field having basically nothing to do with education, no less), here for just a couple years, the idea that I'm going to somehow fix this system seems a little ridiculous. I usually de-scope this goal and instead see if I can offer a slightly better math course to a few kids than they would otherwise receive, although whether or not this would even be all that beneficial to them in the long run is anyone's guess. Bottom line, I guess, is that the best way to procure a top-notch western education in Vanuatu is to go to Australia. Fortunately, top-notch western educations aren't usually a prerequisite for enjoying a nice beach.