Lessons Outside the Classroom

            I sometimes wonder, given my lack of training as a teacher and the weird nature of my classes, how much of a difference I’ll really make in my Dar Chabab students’ English abilities.  The young women at the cooperative are a different story since they don’t go to school, and hence don’t learn English there, have class with me twice as often as the DC students (four times rather than twice a week per class), and are a consistent class, so I know that they, at least, are benefitting from my classes.  This self-doubt is part of the reason I work so hard at my other activities, the writing club taught jointly in English (by me) and Arabic (by a Moroccan) to improve writing skills in any language, the library to promote literacy in any language, ultimate Frisbee, just sitting around playing chess during off times, and the hiking club, as these are, in the long run, probably where I’ll have a bigger influence on these kids.

            One place where I know I’m making a difference is in some student’s behavior, both inside and out of class.  As I’ve complained countless times before, the Moroccan system of behavioral correction centers on corporal punishment, a method I think is utterly ineffective.  I’ve also mentioned, I think, the strange phenomenon where some boys would rather ruin everyone else’s chance to have fun than have fun themselves.  I’ve come to realize that this also has a root in how some adults work with children here.  When I tell a young boy, “I’m sorry, today I’m playing Frisbee with the girls, but tomorrow I’ll play with you,” he hears, “I’m sorry, today I’m upending the social order by putting girls first, but next time I see you I’ll make up some poor excuse explaining why I wasn’t there tomorrow.”  An interesting thing I’ve noticed is that while girls will always come to an activity we planned in advance, young boys almost never do.  I think it’s because while the boys are used to adults making plans and then bailing the girls so rarely have an unrelated adult male make a plan with them that they don’t know to expect him not to follow through.  I even once had a boy who hadn’t shown up to an activity complain that I hadn’t come, and it took me calling over two boys who had been there to get him to concede that no, he’d been the one not there!

            This was a major hurdle at first, I wouldn’t hit the kids, and they thought my attempts at bribing them into good behavior were honeyed lies.  The obvious solution was to keep pushing through and showing up to planned activities, even when I had to collect a new group of boys to play there, and now, since kids know I keep my promises, there’s a much larger group I can get to behave by promising them the same activity another time.  Of course, there are still setbacks and kids who are resistant—one time a reclaimed boy asked if he’d been as annoying as the boys who were now stopping him from playing—but slowly this combined carrot and stick method (behave and you get to have fun, misbehave and you don’t) is gaining ground.  One particularly recalcitrant boy spent so much time interrupting girls’ games and flinging the Frisbee onto rooftops that I eventually had to make good on a threat and ban him from all my activities for a month.  For the first week his behavior was even worse, but it got to the point where no other boy would play with him and would even leave whenever he showed up rather than deal with him being a brat.  In the second week he begged me to let him play again and said he would ban himself for three months if I even once thought he was behaving badly.  I gave him the deal, and so far I haven’t had a problem with him.  While making a kid into a pariah is not an ideal form of discipline either it’s still a big step up from beating him and seems to have had the needed long-term effect.

            Perhaps the biggest success with this method was in the selection of students for the hiking club, which with the expense of transportation to Toubkal and other sites and the need to have a number of students we could handle on the mountain, had to have limited enrollment.  My Moroccan counterparts (mainly local teachers) and I held a lottery of interested students, but before the lottery we’d culled the list of students we knew tended to either make commitments and not follow through or who misbehave consistently in classes.  When we made the announcement of who made the club two of the culled students refused to accept the decision, noting, astutely, that the lottery had not been done in front of them and this “was not a democratic process.”  As they continued to storm and refused to leave the room so we could plan logistics with the students who were in the club I made a long-shot gamble and told them they were right, we had taken them out of the lottery, and this temper tantrum they were having proved we’d made the right decision. 

For the next few days one of them looked very sad, and the other very angry.  After that the angry one started coming out to play Frisbee with the other older boys and, since he seemed contrite I let him back into classes, which he’d been banned from since before the club selection.  Although before he’d never spent long enough in class not being a major disruption for me to know I’ve now learned he’s quite bright.  Now, about a month later, I’d call him one of my best students and a good influence on other boys.  The other has started participating again as well.  It’s a pity they had to miss out on the rare opportunity of the hiking club to learn that their actions have consequences, but I’m glad they’ve learned the lesson well, and plan on taking local, unfunded hikes with them and the other disappointed students come Spring.

While the young girls don’t need many lessons in behaving well I’ve had things to teach them as well, though sadly less successfully than with the misbehaving boys.  Since they are unused to playing team sports the simple skills of getting themselves open and thinking strategically about how to move downfield have been major hurdles that the soccer mad boys already knew—though these boys are obsessed with “Hail Mary” passes which in the long run make them almost as inefficient players as the girls.  These also allow opportunities for the standard “pre-teen” angst to manifest itself.  “She never passes to me,” becomes double edged when it’s both a sign of middle school exclusion and the simple fact that the complaining girl never gets herself open enough to receive a pass.  I’m hoping that, like the boys’ behavior, I can eventually turn the Frisbee pitch from an arena of middle school melodrama into a learning environment, but it’s slow going!

No discussion of outside the classroom learning would be complete without a report on the second environmental/hiking club meeting, which, as I’ve mentioned, literally happens outside in an olive grove.  This time we discussed pollution and its effects on the environment.  To demonstrate how various activities accumulate into disastrous pollution a few brave volunteers drank from a water bottle I slowly “poisoned” with more and more Kool-Aid mix (half a packet for each activity that reduces water quality that the class suggested), until they couldn’t stand it anymore.  We then discussed why the “animals” they represented had died, ways of reducing pollution, and ways of recycling.  We ended the session with a trash pick-up.  Although this isn’t really “outside the classroom” to Americans it’s a wildly new way of learning for the Moroccan students, and one that I hope the teachers working with me will take back to their classrooms.

Joha always gave lessons of the classroom too.

Joha and a friend were returning to their village when they stopped for lunch.  They spread out a few things to eat, including a pot of yogurt.  Now, this friend was well known as a very stingy person.  As Joha took out his spoon, the friend sprinkled sugar on half of the surface and told Joha, “I like to eat yogurt with sugar on it.”

“May I have some on my half?” asked Joha.

“Oh no, I don’t have much and it’s expensive,” said the friend.

Joha thought for a moment, and then pulled a bottle of vinegar from his sack, and started to pour it on the yogurt.

“Wait!” said his friend, “What are you doing?”

“I happen to like vinegar on my yogurt, and so I’m pouring some on my half,” Joha said, as the vinegar slowly spread across the surface of the yogurt.