(Don't forget to help with our field trip!)
Sometimes I'm torn about my existence here, oscillating back and forth. Certain days I want to go home, but then other days all I care about is leaving this place. (rimshot please). Yesterday I went to the rather pricey English course given in town every Saturday morning since mid-October, eager to see a Malagasy person teach English and how it differs from what I do. I've been meaning to go since it started, but have never managed to either be in town when it's happening or get out of bed in order to attend. I left questioning on an even deeper, abysmal level why I am here.
I met the teacher hanging outside the classroom before class started and he immediately said "Ah! Mr. Adam is here!" Which is an odd thing to hear from someone you've never met, but I guess I'm not too difficult to describe or pick out of a crowd. He (I didn't catch his name) is a city-bred 20-something who studied English at the University of Antananarivo for two years before dropping out, but he seemed fluent enough to me to have a conversation and seemed to be fond of languages. Someday, he told me, he'd like to also learn Italian and German, on top of Malagasy, French, and English. I tried to explain to him that there might not be any people left speaking Italian by that point, but "fluent enough" doesn't encompass discussions of low reproduction rates and increased immigration from North Africa. Sometimes you just have to let them figure it out for themselves.
Anyway, I was also curious to see who came to this class, particularly since I live in the town for no other reason than to teach English for free. Here, they pay a certain amount per class to be taught be a non-native English speaker. Did they not know me? Did they just prefer a Malagasy person? I was on an investigation, and also needed a distraction for Saturday morning. When I entered the classroom then, I was surprised, and then immediately not surprised, to see that the vast majority of learners were not only middle/high school students, but my middle/high school students. I say I was immediately not surprised because they weren't just any kids, but a group composed of some of my best students, explaining how they know some of the surprising things that they know.
I was quickly reminded of a facet of my experience here that I've tried to suppress, namely that the list of my best students is strongly correlated to that of my (relatively) wealthiest students. Those that can afford private tutoring are the ones the seem to succeed. Needless to say that not present in this course was 16-year old Caliste, a child so malnutritioned that he looks 7, and about whom it was revealed, during the "family tree" lesson, that he has no mother or father. Caliste falls asleep in every class of mine without exception, though if you manage to wake him up and give him a piece of chalk he can usually pull out a decent answer.
In this class, each student gets a 20-page (double-sided) handout with vocabulary lists, example dialogues and scenarios, and a page full of formulas to create sentences in different tenses (e.g. subject + to have + past participle + object = present perfect). Today's lesson started by talking about the use of "just" in a sentence, in the sense of "I just woke up". The teacher explained it in Malagasy, which I only sort of followed, and gave the example "Mr. Adam has just been from his house." I didn't say anything because I can't rule it out that this is unfailingly incorrect, but I did make a note to perhaps tell him later that this isn't a construction anyone would ever use--'to be from one's house' meaning to have come from there. He wrote one other example sentence on the board, equally poorly phrased, and then moved on to a new topic.
"At the restaurant" was the context for the dialogue, though despite having three speaking parts and 15 lines of text, the only thing that is ever ordered from the waiter is "an apple juice with ice." The dialogue was riddled with typos, incorrect grammar, and things that no English speaker would ever say. "I just to accompany my daughter. She would like some drinks." While the class was made to tediously repeat it all, 7 or 8 times, I skipped ahead to check out some of the other grammatical points the page talked about, my favorite of which was an explanation of the use of other/others/another. Here is the entire lesson from start to finish:
USING OF OTHER, OTHERS, AND ANOTHER:
I caught some other fish all the others were caught by the others even I need another.
Well if that isn't the pinnacle of clarity I don't know what is. But the point of this isn't to nitpick or criticize. (Don't get me wrong, I love to nitpick and criticize and I do that freely here, but it's not the point.) Rather, I walked away from this lesson (halfway through; I couldn't stomach an hour or two talking about prepositions of movement) thinking how this is exactly what these kids, and all the students in town, need. How will they ever pass the end-of-senior-year, nationwide, standardized English exam if they don't speak this sort of standardized broken English? How can they communicate with other English speakers here if they don't, also, speak in the same mangled dialect? (This teacher pronounced 'movies' as rhyming sort of like 'toffee'). And I'm not being facetious, either.
The thing is, after three months of a once-a-week course, all of these students can communicate better than all of the rest of students in town who have studied for years in school, and at least one year with me. Whether my students understand grammar and vocabulary or not, they don't have a tenth of the confidence in the language that these course-takers do or the ability to initiate a conversation with someone. The course-kids might botch every sentence, pronounce it like they have marbles in the mouth, but the fact remains that they speak English and I understand them well enough to chat with them. This is the case with maybe 1% of the 500 students I teach in class.
Part of this has to do with the teacher being Malagasy. First, the students have a much higher comfort level speaking in front of him and having the courage to make mistakes. (Not that the Malagasy/French style of education leaves much room for student participation in the lesson; it's primarily lecturing and note-taking). Second, he can speak Malagasy and explain different complicated concepts far better than I ever could. I do my best, and I happen to think that I'm not too shabby at explaining English grammar and vocabulary in Malagasy, but it's still night and day.
Our role here as Peace Corps Volunteers, as admitted by one of the highest administrators in the program, is as a 'temporary stop-gap' for the lack of English teachers while this generation graduates from school and fills up these jobs. But even this dismal rationale for why I've been here for almost 2 years doesn't acknowledge that this is only a valid proposition if I'm actually helping these students to become the next English teacher. And I'm not. Maybe I can help, minimally, some rich kids who have the resources to learn the language with or without me, and who need no inspiration, but the rest, I believe, sincerely need someone that they understand and teaches in a way with which they're familiar. And still, saying that we're only a stop-gap also doesn't recognize the fact that there already are plenty of English speakers who could take over our jobs. However, they're smart enough not to quit their job teaching private courses, or just selling sugar, rope, and grease in the weekly market, for which they are paid four times as much. It's no wonder there are no English teachers; in fact, it's a downright surprise that there are teachers for any subjects at all considering how low their salaries are.
So, contemplating all of this as I walked home, I decided that today was one of the days I don't care about going home, specifically, but rather what's important is just not being here anymore. (This blog just keeps getting more and more inspirational, doesn't it?)
