Teaching for me comes with successes and failures. I feel as though I’ve had both in Kenya but this week I feel like I failed my students at ACREF. I feel like I failed to educate a young man on the value of being human. The first problem is that no one in this world has all of the answers. If we did have all of the answers, we would live in a strange, euphoric utopia. When students are so desperately trying to get all of the answers, a teacher eventually has to be honest and say that they themselves don’t have the answers to all the questions that a student asks.
In May, the young man said that he would rather be a slave in Europe then live as a free man in Kenya. I understand that life in Kenya can be difficult; survival as a daily struggle is not something that I have been lucky enough to not need to worry about. It is extremely difficult to have any amount of hope when you feel that the system around you keeps you in poverty. The idea of giving up your freedom in favour of being owned by another person that has more largely because of the colour of their skin is inhumane and goes against the dignity of the human being. I have tried to teach social consciousness through English and have given students writing assignments to give them an opportunity to think about the world around them. I have also tried to be a coach and mentor to these students and assist them as best possible in their pursuit of knowledge and greater understanding. The world we live in is far from perfect but I want students to understand that they have a role in contributing to the world around them instead of them believing that the world is unchanged no matter how the student interacts with the world. The student came back on Wednesday (the last day of classes for Term II) with the exact same conclusion.
I feel as though I was unable to be a good enough teacher to this young man if he truly believes that being a slave is better then the life he lives today. African slaves in the 15 and 1600’s used to be placed in wooden barrels and brought back to Europe. Some suffocated on their own fesis, some were killed my the rampant disease while the others that made it back to England were forced to be degraded by English aristocrats. That is the reality of the African slave trade. I know that this is not the answer to what this young man is thinking about and pondering. Sometimes education is about assisting students in developing their own critical thinking skills but sometimes even the best students can be misguided in thought. I think it is the teacher’s responsibility to help the student figure out in this case what it means to be human and I failed to do that.
The greatest challenge I’ve encountered in teaching besides poverty is the inability of students to understand that my life and the lives of my friends are far from perfect. The students look up to me and in many ways think that I live in a glass house. It is fair to say that I have more and am far more fortunate to live in a country whose laws and systems make it easier for the average person to survive but this does not disqualify struggle from the western world. The students cannot understand that students in Canada use drugs and have drug problems or become pregnant at early ages or that students like themselves will wake up and go to school hungry and return home and go to bed the same way. How can these students understand that living on 1025 Kenyan Shillings an hour is difficult in Canada when if you made that in Kenya, you could live like a king. How can students understand that spending 160 000 Kenyan Shillings on an airline ticket is not a yearly salary like it is in Kenya?
I am not trying to make an argument for who is in greater need but these students desperately need to understand that corruption exists everywhere and that fairness is an ideal that requires a check and balance system no matter what country in the world it is.
I can’t explain to these students what fairness is. The world is not fair. The students know enough to know that. I can’t answer there questions on why developed nations give money to the African union and why the African union cannot pay it back. Why are Chinese firms building Kenyan highways? Why are students learning in classrooms that wild dogs won’t enter? I don’t have these answers, I believe very few people if any have answers to these ethical problems. What I do know is that it is a human responsibility to seek out answers and disqualifying yourself from the solution is not the answer. This is what the young man needs to learn and no matter how hard I tried I could not teach him this lesson.
It’s a lot easier to say that a teacher cannot assist every student they encounter but I believe that the very best teachers strive each day to reach every student. Anything less seems like a failure. Yes, I’ve had successes. When the students in this same class had to answer the question, ‘Do you believe that secondary education (Grade 9-12) should be free?,’ a student submitted his assignment and told me that I challenged him to think about the right to education and what it means. It made me feel that I had an impact, it made teaching totally worth it. Here’s the thing no matter how worth it that one student made me feel, I don’t need to worry (as much) about those students because they get it, it’s the students that are prone to falling through the cracks that need the greatest support.
I will try to treat this failure like all of my failures as a lesson. The lesson does not become easier especially when you’re dealing with precious people. The lesson currently haunts me especially because of its implications and the capacity of this student in facing the future. The lesson continues to make me think and hopefully my final words to this young man will make him think, “Your statement makes me feel like I failed you. If the only conclusions you can draw go against the principles of humanity then you have to look at your own self worth and deem its value and then look critically at the world around you.”
No comments:
Post a Comment