Work, work, work!

It’s been over a month since I last wrote, and now I’m over halfway through my time working in St. Louis. The weeks go quickly here, and it’s strange to think how many have passed since I left Europe. Work has been increasing ever since I got here, but these last few weeks have really been packed full of it. Being in Senegal instead of at University, I thought I’d at least be spared the frantic revision and stress of exams. It turns out that I was wrong – I still get all the stress and hard work, but from the perspective of a teacher rather than a pupil. The 4ième classes that I teach all have exams at the end of the month. I’ve been trying to prepare the Telemaque Sow classes for their English exams; but there’s a lot of ground to cover.

I’m not a real English teacher. I have no TEFL, no degree and no real experience of teaching prior to Senegal. Despite this, at the moment I’m preparing and teaching about 14-18 hours of lessons per week, as well as helping with the lessons taught by Mrs Cissé and Mr Ndiaye, the school’s regular English teachers. It has been a steep learning curve, but I think I’m somewhere near the top of it now. Preparing a lesson is fine now, but it used to be a major worry. What do I want people to learn? How will I explain it (in French!)? How will I make them remember it? With the evening classes which I still teach twice a week, all these questions are quite easy to answer. I know what they have already been taught, and it’s so much easier to explain things when you’re working with a class of six pupils instead of sixty. Another big difference is that the students at the evening class are there because they want to learn. If anyone tells you, as an ex-teacher told me when I was on the train to Gatwick airport all those months ago, that African kids ‘love to learn’, then they really, really don’t know what they’re talking about. Considering the size of classes, everyone is amazingly well behaved, but because I don’t know how to joke with the pupils in Wolof, and I don’t like hitting them or making them kneel with their head against the blackboard for two hours, it’s quite hard to keep it that way. The best solution that I’ve found so far is to try to keep the lessons interesting, and not to give too many endless grammar rules and lists to learn. I think this approach is working. In the past week I’ve taught one 4ième class how to write a biography of American-Senegalese rapper Akon, and how to ask someone out on a date in English. As I said, we’ve got a long way to go… Classes usually last for two hours at a time, and I’ll spend most of this time talking to the class and explaining things. I usually have a couple of exercises in there, to make sure that people understand the lesson, but I don’t like to emphasize this too much. There’s no better way to lose people’s engagement with the lesson!

I still have about two weeks of teaching left before I have to stop (after the exams it’s the end of the school year). After that I still have over a month out here. How am I going to fill my time? An internship at a radio station! I’m not quite sure how this is going to work out, but I don’t expect it to be nearly as high-pressure a situation as Telemaque Sow. The emphasis is on me learning as an intern, instead of trying to do something that’s beneficial to others. Apparently I can also expect some airtime, if my French is good, and that really says something about the standard of local radio here.

I think my French should be good enough. It’s been steadily improving since I got here, and suddenly two weeks ago I found that I was able to make a class of Senegalese teenagers understand the uses of the present perfect tense, and why it’s different from the past simple. I didn’t even know that I could do it in English before. I have also made a good number of Senegalese friends, which is interesting. Three weeks ago, I went to a Ross-Bethio, a little village forty kilometres out of town with my friend Cheikh, and had a great day. I’ve also had the chance to play some Senegalese music ‘folklorique’, with Mamadoudjallo, a fellow guitarist.

My conversational French is now at the level at which I can spend a good five minutes exchanging greetings with someone without really talking about anything. In Senegal, greetings go on for a long time and if you see anyone on the street that you know (even on the other side of the street), you’re expected to give them the whole treatment before you go on your way. “Ca va? Et la journée? Et le travail? Comment va la santé? En forme ? Et la chaleur, comment tu-le trouves?” The list goes on. The Senegalese are very sociable, and it’s quite refreshing in a way. The only problem is that, in St. Louis, genuine friendliness can easily get mixed up with sleazy salesmen and chancers looking to make as much money as possible out of the ‘Toubab’. It didn’t take long to realise that anyone who comes up to you in the street and starts off the conversation with “Mon ami! Ca fait longtemps!” (My friend, it’s been a long time) definitely isn’t your friend. Recently, though, no one has really been bothering me too much on my normal route through the city centre – they probably recognise me by now.