My Friday Night

I previously wrote about an example of one of my better days.  Most days are great but every once in a while I feel like I just walked off the plane and I’m shocked all over again.

It seems that the majority of my students are very smart and are picking up on what I am teaching.  But a few of them just don’t seem to get it at all.  Sometimes I wonder if they are dyslexic.  There is a spelling test every Friday and a couple of the students do not even come remotely close to spelling the words correctly.  I realized that the handful of bright students were taught by the previous volunteer and she did a damn good job with them.  The others are the few students who were not taught by that volunteer.

A friend brought to my attention something that I never thought of before.  Its not only that they never had a good teacher present the information in a useful way but most importantly, those few students never had someone to help them develop their brain when they were younger.  They’ve never had a person work with them to help their brain grow.  She told me that the simplest concepts probably was never introduced to them and makes it more difficult for them to learn anything since they do not have a solid foundation.

I have also found that the students have no ambition to study or try to learn on their own.  They do not even understand what it means to study.  This occurred to me one night when my students were in the classroom.  We recently had lights put into the classrooms so the students are supposed to “study” every night from 7 to 8:30.  All they do is look through the books and I’m sure they do not even know what they are looking at.  Furthermore, why would they have any ambition to study?  I mean, think about it.  Most students in America, even at an early age know that you need to get good grades and do well in school if you want to get a good job someday.  We are always told that if you go to college, you’ll likely find a better job as opposed to not going to college.  I’ve wondered lately if some of the students even know what college is.  I have tried to think of ways to teach them how to study.  Sometimes for homework,  I will write something on the board and just have them write it over and over in hopes that the repetition will help them memorize it.

I had this conversation with Patrick earlier this week.  He was saying that one of the problems is that the students do not have any role models.  Hopefully I can change that by arranging for some successful deaf adults to come and visit.  And maybe I can somehow portray myself as a good role model, but I think its more important that they meet Kenyans who are deaf. 

Finally, the teachers really are not that bad but they don’t change their ways.  Before I just thought they were bad teachers, but they are trying hard and they genuinely care about the students.  I had an interesting conversation about this with another volunteer on instant messenger recently.  I felt it would be a good idea to post part of that conversation since it provides a good insight to what our lives are like as deaf education volunteers:

Matt(9:50:47 PM): its like there is no light going off in their heads saying "man, these scores suck, we need to try something else because what we are doing isn’t working."

Charlotte(9:51:14 PM): yeah but that’s the thing - they don’t have anything to compare the scores with

Charlotte(9:51:19 PM): that’s the way it always have been

Charlotte(9:51:30 PM): we come from the US - we know that the scores can be better

Matt(9:51:37 PM): very good point

Charlotte(9:51:44 PM): it took me a few months to realize that

Charlotte(9:52:07 PM): and then i started talking with the kenyan teachers about my educational experience

Charlotte(9:52:07 PM): about my deaf friends

Charlotte(9:52:10 PM): and they’re shocked

Charlotte(9:52:35 PM): so it’s an interesting process for me - maybe it’ll help some of the teachers think about how they’re teaching

Matt(9:53:05 PM): i realized something similar too

Matt(9:53:21 PM): i think we have all complained about how bad the teachers are

Matt(9:53:51 PM): but at my school, some of them show up every day, sure they start their classes a little late but everything starts late in Africa.

Matt(9:54:36 PM): i found one teacher falling asleep on her desk after classes were finished because i know she was trying so hard all day, but like you said, they just don’t know and they haven’t seen what we’ve seen in the US

Matt(9:54:54 PM): they don’t know to try something different.