Reflections

            So, I’ve pretty much reached the year in service mark (not counting the two months of training), which means I have about a year left to go, probably a little less since our exit dates are scattered such that the last people leave after exactly two years.  I don’t yet know which end of the leaving period I’ll tend towards, for a long time I thought I wanted a later exit date, but given how work dries up after about the middle of April that seems less important now.  We still have a year to see.

            As you might expect around the year mark I’ve been quite reflective these last couple of weeks about my service thus far and what I’ve done, successes and failures.  Leaving aside the C.L.I.M.B. program, which I write about all the time and which is obviously my big success, how do (or, simply, do) students benefit from my day-to-day presence in their town?  Interestingly, I’ve had a bunch of new students recently who’ve really helped put things in perspective.

            As you may recall from posts of a year or so ago, Moroccans have a huge test at the end of high school, the Baccalaureate Exam, which pretty much determines the rest of their lives, where (if) they can go to university, vocational school, what have you.  Needless to say it is a time of great terror for many students.  Although I’m quite popular in town among kids in their first year of university (who I gave Bac review to last year when I first got to town) and among students in the year before their Bac (high school juniors), I’ve only had one consistent student in her Bac year come to my classes this year.  Now, with the test looming, a lot more of these high school seniors are coming to my classes, which I’ve moved over entirely to Bac review for these weeks proceeding the test.  At the suggestion of their teacher I’m working a lot with writing and with usage of different tenses, rather than the mechanics of grammar, which they are quite good at.

            On the one hand working with these new students has been a bummer.  Many of them have fantastic grammatical knowledge and vocabulary, but they have no idea how to use these either in speaking or in writing (and have a hard time with listening too, because they haven’t heard much of a native accent).  There’s a lot of lost potential, ways I can see that they would have much better communicative English if they’d just been coming to my intermediate classes throughout the year.  However, the juxtaposition lets me really see what I’ve done for the students who have been coming.  Already, pretty much across the board, my consistent juniors write as well or better in English than these seniors.  Since they’ve spent more time with me they can comprehend spoken English much better, despite their smaller vocabularies and knowledge of tenses.  Most importantly, a lot of them, though by no means all, have reduced or eliminated their hang-ups about trying to speak in English, even when they don’t know if they can pull off the sentence.  Although I still worry about not giving as much as I get, it’s nice to have this visible reminder that I’ve done good things for students that don’t involve mountains or trust falls.

            This also helps me to plan ahead for what I’m going to do next school year with my students.  For my intermediate class I hope to keep the kids I’ve been working with in their senior year and, hopefully, attract more students, doing more of the same, though increasing the emphasis on writing, both for greater variation from our speaking classes and because I’ve finally found a way to teach writing that I think works well.  As to my basic class, I’ll see if there is interest in keeping it up.  If there is I’ll keep it going, if not I’ll either replace it with another intermediate class (to give kids more options of times to come), or with time to do a non-English extra-curricular.  My elementary/middle school classes finally completely fell apart; we’ve just been playing Frisbee and cards for weeks, which they seem to prefer.  As elementary school students who spend seven hours in school doing other academics I can’t blame them.  Next year I think I’ll allow what few of those students who actually want English lessons into the older Basic class, something I’d already started, and instead use the time to try and start a music club inspired by the one I saw the Moroccan counselors running at the Taroudant Spring Camp (see my post “Let It Shine” from April).  I think the kids would like it and find it much more enriching and interesting than the English lessons their parents insisted on.  Probably help their English pronunciation in the long run anyways, since we’ll keep to English songs.

            So, that’s that.  Not really too much more to say in this post, but I’ll leave you with a joke from my local Joha, the man I call Nasreddin in previous posts.

            Paying for my tea the other day, Nasreddin asked me what I’d be paying.  Tired, but aware I was walking into a joke, I warily responded “five.”

            “Five, five what?” he asked a glint in his eye.

            I responded, “five dirhams,” and I gave him a five-dirham coin.

            “That’s not five,” he declared, “that’s one!”

            “You know,” I threw back, catching on, “I should know better, you Moroccans give prices in ryals (the equivalent of nickels to the Dirham).  I’ll give you a hundred!”

            “You better not give me a hundred ryal, they’d scatter all over and I’d end up counting all night.  You know, there was once a man who paid me in francs (the equivalent of pennies to the Dirham), it took him days to clean it up, though I gave him his coffee on the house.”