Teaching #3

I feel that as a blogger, I’m not very good at keeping this updated. We are now in the 6^th week of our semester, and I have not talked once about how school is going. I have to preface this one because it became more of a therapeutic rant about the troubles of teaching. So sorry...

To be quite honest, the past few weeks have been rough as far as school is concerned. I had really high hopes for this semester. I thought that teaching would be a breeze. I knew my students, they knew me, I knew what I wanted to teach, and I had a grasp on how things were run at the school. Boy was I wrong.

There are three problems that have run rampant in my classes. Laziness, attitude, and apathy. These have made my class and life full of frustrations. Allow me to elaborate.

Laziness is one of the most trying things for any teacher to deal with, but especially myself (I was a super overachiever in my youth.) There were 24 students in my English class and 28 in my Religion class, all with unique hopes and dreams, as well as unique personal struggles. In a country like Belize, it isn’t n any way required to attend high school, yet it is a huge opportunity if you want to more in your life than just drive a taxi or sell tacos on the side of the road. And I know that most of my girls want much more for their lives than just selling tacos. But they refuse to do the work. I will assign a simple assignment: Read two chapters of the book Matilda, and the next day I will come in and quiz them on those 15 pages, and it turns out none of them have read it—well, a majority have not. And to them its not much to fail. A 0% on a quiz is not of much consequence. Another example of this laziness is the quiz I warned them about for a week and spent the whole day before reviewing for it. The next morning I walk into class.

“Class, find your seats and clear your desk, its time for our quiz.”

“We have a quiz today? On what?”

“I told you this, capitalization and punctuation; we reviewed yesterday”

“Hay, miss, but I didn’t study!”

I wish I could say that was only one student. But it was several. And they just don’t care about homework, about any work, and about success in general. How do you teach a student to want to work, to want to succeed? The mindset here is to just pass. A 72% is good. But in my youth, there was nothing good under an 85%. These are the people to settle for just enough.

I pause to wonder why that is. I’m so used to America, where every person dreams of the “American Dream” and try to follow in the footsteps of Abe Lincoln and the hero of “The Pursuit of Happyness” and, who made themselves great from nothing. The people of Belize do not live under such delusion and with no such inspiration. I haven’t been in this country for too long, but it seems that the kids grow up with the impression that what their parents have will inevitably become their inheritance, no matter how much or how little. There is no climbing up the ladder of betterment and fulfillment; at least not to their knowledge. The boys will inherit their fathers’ taxis and the girls will become mothers and sell tortillas out of their houses.

It’s difficult for a person coming from a very goal-oriented environment, where one is always working towards the achievement of their dreams to have to fight just to get people to want something, anything for their selves. I want so much for my girls. I want them to graduate, I want them to become biochemists and teachers and fashion designers—anything they could ever dream of, and I just don’t know how to make them want it enough to try. It’s terribly frustrating.

My second struggle is with attitude. It seems with the three-week break my darling, sweet, innocent girls forgot how to be darling, sweet, and innocent. There are countless times that my girls have had to be corrected for talking back and giving ‘lip.’ At the moment it’s difficult to recount a specific attitude episode, but they have been trying as ever. Oh the joys of teenage girls. One minute they want to be your best friend, the next day they are cursing your name in Spanish under their breath.

Apathy. One of the most frustrating of all the diseases of this world, and this one runs rampant in Belize. Perhaps it is the lack or news infiltrating Benque streets, or that there is just too much to worry about in their own lives that its difficult to think of anyone else, but its here to stay, and I’ve now become determined to fix it. One of the examples I have to share is the showing of the movie “The Human Experience” It’s a documentary about 3 men who went out into the world and tried to discover what it means to be human and how we can make the world a smaller place. I was so excited to show this to my students and see how excited they could become about gong out into the world and make a difference. Boy was I disappointed. They were distracted, were more concerned with trying to sneak food and not get caught, and could have cared less that there were people in the world who suffered much more that they. (This is especially difficult considering that these kids have really rough lives themselves. I often wonder if its too much to ask them to be more worldly minded, when they have experiences in their lives that I have never had to have or ever want to have…) And when the class was over, and I asked “Doesn’t this make you want to go out and do something with your lives that’s so cool and so beneficial?” They just shrugged their shoulders.

For these issues I don’t know how to fix them. Is it just enough to show my passion, and hope that they can catch a little fire? Or can I simply accept that some people aren’t meant to feel passion, ambition, and a burning desire to make their lives great and worthwhile—at least not in high school?

Such is my teaching struggles. Not every student is lazy, and not every student spends all of their efforts to make my life more difficult than it needs to be. But, like in every situation, the whispers are drowned out by the shouts, and their voices get lost and forgotten….