Liar, Liar Pants on Fire

Learning objectives seem to be universal. No matter where you are in the world, the branch of government in charge of education always seems to measure education by the learning objectives it sets fourth. In many countries, learning the hard facts and memorizing the figures aren't the only objectives. Education is as much about social graces as it is about learning. Social graces in this sense is not becoming a lady or gentleman or learning proper etiquette; it is about character development: sharing, cooperation, mutual respect, enthusiasm for learning and obedience to name a few. I would strongly argue in Ontario, the classroom aims to promote diversity, understanding and mutual respect through the many lessons teachers plan and exectue each day. In Kenya, character development is strongly centered around obedience.

Obedience is a strong principle in the schools I visit each day. Obedience is centered around adherence to policy and discipline for wrong doing. It is more important for students to sit silently in their desks without fidgeting than it is for students to ask questions to help them comprehend the material. At the government schools, food is sometimes provided through international aid organizations. The food needs to be prepared and is prepared by paid labourers. Students are expected to cover the costs of the workers and depending on how many student attend the school, the average student will pay 300 KSH per year (this is an affordable number for those wondering). If students forget about the scheduled payment periods, they are sent home. A teacher today sent a student home because they arrived twenty minutes early instead of the usual fifty minutes early. Adherence to this policy is difficult to handle. I believe suspending children for skipping school is a bad punishment because the reality is these students are getting rewarded for bad behaviour. Adherence here is acting in much the same way. Students are not getting to learn for trivial forgetfulness.

Adherence is the easy part of obedience --- think about discipline for a minute. Caning in Kenya is illegal but teachers continue to do cane. A teacher told me, 'how else does the government expect me to manage all of them....there's too many.' Truth be told, I have yet to go to a government school with less than 45 students in a class. The highest number of students in one class was 88. I understand that it is difficult to manage that many students and one on one attention is extremely stretched but I would still hope that caning would not even be an option.

Students live in fear of their teachers. Even lifting the cane gives the students fear. This brings me to my final point- the title of this blog. Every week I do a spelling pre-test and test based on the units. This resembles what many grade school students do in Ontario each week. On the pretest, the students in the class informed me that a student was cheating. My worst nightmare had come true: I knew I had to act but how? I refuse to cane the children but I also don't want to send them to the office without knowing what the penalty would be. The students in the class started to chant, 'Mr. Red,' the name of the cane. I took the student aside while the students did quiet work and she explained to me the reason she cheated was because she was ashamed of her previous spelling test grade, a 7/11 or 77%.

Although I have no problem with this grade, it mattered to the student enough so to cheat. She started to cry for fear of what I would do to her. I decided to have her write each word of the pretest twenty times as punishment. For me, the lesson behind it was not punishment but rather to teach her that you can get better test grades by studying and working hard and you do not need to cheat. Friday's spelling test will hopefully determine if the lesson was learned.

It was an interesting situation. What struck me the most was the fear in the child's eyes. This term more than anything, I want to teach confidence. I want to show these students that the possibilities are endless. Obedience does not teach dreaming or passion and it certainly does not teach failure. I have learned all of these lessons within the confines of the classroom and life continues to teach me these lessons along with resilience and greater understanding. Some of the best teachers let me dream big and fail big but there was always a lesson behind the dreams and failures. Hopefully, my students will learn from their shared experiences and be able to build a wide range of characteristics that extend far beyond the old, tired and wore out world of obedience.