Cameroon: Classroom Comedy

I left off the Cameroon story after we completed our French training. From there we trainees went out in pairs to visit volunteers at their sites for a week, and then to Bamenda to learn how to teach.

Recall that our crew was a bunch of recent math or science college grads, with no teaching experience; here we were going to get 5 weeks of training, and then head off to be real teachers at real schools. Yikes!

The first week was the basics: breaking a syllabus down into lessons, creating lesson plans with "behavioral objectives", classroom do's and don'ts, practice lessons and critiques, cultural aspects of Cameroonian education, etc. The joke at the end of the week was, "Well, that's how to teach. We're not sure how Education majors stretch that into 4 years of college..." (Just a joke, of course -- everyone knew how raw we still were.) This all took place while they were setting up the "model school".

I'm not sure how they got students for us to practice on, but it worked -- we accepted around 200 local high school kids for the 4-week summer course, turning quite a few away. (Truth in advertising would have required the ad to say "Math/Science Instruction by Rank Amateurs with Funny Accents! Sometimes a Little Unclear on the Subject Matter!") What was in it for the students? Free additional schooling, in a place where education is pretty highly valued.

The well-established model school program had each of us teaching 2-3 lessons per day, with at least one trainer sitting in the back of the class, taking notes on how we did. We'd review each lesson with the trainer right after, picking up what we'd done well and what needed to be improved. After a week the trainers switched so we could get a different perspective on our work, and after two weeks we switched classrooms and sometimes subjects (within the math and science area).

It was a humbling experience, both teaching a roomful of eager minds and getting critiqued on everything you did for 40 minutes. A quote from one trainee made the chalkboard in our teachers' lounge: "I just walked into the classroom and everything went blank." I knew that feeling...

And Dan M. came back to the lounge after one lesson with a funny story about himself: He noticed a little chalk mark on his pant leg, and without thinking tried to remove it using the chalkboard eraser, leaving a huge chalk blotch on his dark pants. The students in front chuckled just a little, but these were model students; at a real school he'd have been roasted, even in Cameroon.

(Note that another common embarrassment is referring to your "pants", which in British English means "underpants". You're supposed to say "trousers". Even more mines in the classroom minefield...)

Yet somehow after 4 weeks we felt ready to go do our thing -- ahh, the arrogance of Youth! We'd been matched up with schools in the Northwest and Southwest (English-speaking) provinces based on subject matter need and our own preferences for class level and climate. (The Northwest is elevated and rather cool, believe it or not, and the Southwest is hot and humid.) I wanted to teach "Advanced Level" physics, and that got me assigned to Mamfe in the Southwest, near the Nigerian border.

The final act in Bamenda was our swearing-in ceremony. Technically we weren't U.S. government employees, we were unpaid independent contractors who got some U.S. support, but we still had to take the same civil service oath, swearing to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic". It might have seemed a little "establishment" for our somewhat anti-establishment group, but no one had any heartburn over it. Patriots of a different kind, in sandals.

On to Mamfe, my home for the next two years...


Pat