In the past two terms, I’ve had students do things in our laboratory that would make my laboratory safety professional father faint. The most memorable, perhaps, was the day I was teaching my Senior 4 students about solubility using water, ethanol, and benzene. All you really need to know about the experiment is that ethanol and benzene are extremely flammable, and that there was to be no use of fire whatsoever. Leave it to 15 year-old boys to find out a way to start something, however, and suddenly you see a 4-foot flame on the sleeve of a bright blue sweater. Although the crowd of boys frantically beating the melting material thought they might put out the fire before their teacher smelled trouble, my nose and my eyes caught every bit of the fiasco.
I was livid. I marched straight over to the students, smothered the burning sweater, and sent the entire class back to the classroom. “What part of “this will burn” do you not understand?!” I scolded, using as many science-teacher-sign-language gestures I could think create. I got a number of puppy-dog eyes as the students left the classroom, and spent the next hour convincing myself that the big picture of flames I drew on the board had served as adequate warning for my francophone students.
The same afternoon, it was the girls’ turn. Same age, different class, but I caught out of the corner of my eye my girls playing with the pellets of a very strong acid from the chemical closet… with their bare hands. “Why do you take that?!” I shouted in my special English so as to be understood. “We want to see it.” The girls replied. “It can hurt you.” I angrily responded, “put it down now.” When I realized the students had passed the acid pellets all over the classroom, I made each student thoroughly wash their hands in front of me before I sent them back to their homeroom. “We are finished! You cannot listen, you cannot work.” I told them. “I will see you next week.”
The students look astonished. When they left, I put my head in my hands. Twice, in one day. Just as I was pulling myself together, two of my boys came back. “Forgive us Teacher,” one boy said, “it’s in our nature. We’re African.” I shook my head with more sadness than anger when I heard what he had said. “It’s not your nature to be careless.” I responded more quietly this time. “Return to your classroom.”
Perhaps the most frustrating and saddest part of teaching here is the fact that my students and colleagues insist that no one can make mistakes, and that when they do, they blame their mistakes on something as irrelevant as their continental identity. How long have you been told that you can’t learn or can’t progress because you’re African? And how are you supposed to overcome that stereotype if you don’t allow yourselves to learn and to make mistakes?
Don’t get me wrong; I’ve long labored under the delusion that my own mistakes somehow prove me to be unintelligent or incompetent, so I fully understand the flawed logic. But never have I been somewhere where this delusion is so rampant. My students use it to the point where when I ask them to write hypotheses in science class, they cross them out and correct them when they find their results disprove their hypotheses. They use it when my friend Rachael asks her girls in their “Creative Performance” class to draw self-portraits, and nine out of ten of them copy the example she drew on the board. And when I ask why my colleagues didn’t follow instructions and complete their class reports correctly, my teachers use it to tell me that because they are African, they can’t be expected to be on time or be computer-literate.
As a History student, I could take a stab at why this feeling is endemic to this part of the world. But as a teacher, it’s my biggest challenge. How, in nine short months of school, do you empower the people you work with with the confidence to believe they can do things, even if they might fail, and how in these short months do you get them to take responsibility for their mistakes, and to learn from them, without passing off blame to who they are or where they come from?
Everyday, I’m reminded several times about growing up and asking my parents to find my glasses or open my can of soda. “You can do it, Jenny, just try,” I used to hear on repeat, much to my consternation. But it stuck. The only thing, I’ve therefore concluded, I can do each day is to repeat, over and over, “you’re smarter than you think” and “you can do it.” “Jennifer, come and correct this report.” “No, Bosco, you can do it.” “Teacher, I can’t complete this chart.” “Marie Claire, you’re smarter than you think.”
If I do it enough, I pray, it might just stick.
Have Courage,
Jen
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