Teaching English

For the past three weeks I’ve been teaching my own English class. I am teaching a class within the Bright Morning Star English Club (colloquially known as BMSEC) and I am specifically working with the advanced students, helping them improve their conversational English. The class is taught twice a week for an hour after school. I know enough Creole to manage the class pretty well, but I instruct the students in English mostly. I think (or at least I hope) the student have improved their English speaking and writing abilities. I have enjoyed teaching the class, and the experience has been an interesting foray into the world of Haitian education.

I have never taught in a public school, but I spent a decent amount of time teaching SAT prep for the Princeton Review and teaching computer classes for Project Easton, so I like to think that I was not totally unprepared for the class. I am also a fluent English speaker, and I like to think (though some of you may disagree) that I can make conversation pretty well. The actual teaching of English was not too difficult. Though limited, my Haitian Creole did help me better understand why the students made some of the mistakes they made. Haitian Creole does not really have a word that means at. Where we would use the word at, the Haitians use the term “nan”, which best translates to the word in. This was confusing for the students, because they couldn’t really differentiate between the two ideas. They would often use at when they were supposed to use in, and vice versa. Haitian Creole also doesn’t really have a term that means to be, and there fore don’t have a verb like “is”. The students knew to put the verb am after I, or is after he, but they struggled when working with other pronouns. “The school good”, or sentences like that were quite frequent. Haitian Creole also has a limited vocabulary, and thus has to use idiomatic phrases much more than we do when speaking English. The term “vire dwat” means turn right (“vire” translating to turn, and “dwat” translating to right), but ale dwat (ale translating to go) means go straight. The word dwat has an entirely different meaning depending on the word before it. These types of linguistic differences posed certain problems, but I was fortunate because I had the advanced students, many of whom had been speaking English for quite some time. The better prepared students were able to help the less experienced students grasp these differences.

The much more difficult part of teaching English was the classroom management. Like American High School students, Haitian high school students can be pretty rowdy, especially around their friends. I try to be “respectfully authoritative”, I’m not too harsh but I let the students know that I am in charge and that I will be quick to call them out when they are out of line. This worked pretty well at first, until one student began to give me a little more trouble than I expected. This student was one of the best students in the English club and he was answering the questions I was asking the other students. I couldn’t get anyone to give their own answer because this student was consistently answering before the other students had a chance to speak. I was getting perturbed, and after the third interruption, I told the student that the next time he spoke I would kick him out. Without fail, the next student I called on wasn’t able to say so much as a syllable in English until the disruptive student blurted out the answer. I told the student that he had to leave, and then the other students started to cheer me on. I was a little confused with the situation but I wasn’t going to give up any ground as I firmly pointed to the door.

I took a step closer to the student and right as he went to get up, his friend next to him quickly jumped up and whipped off his belt. Now at this point I was totally confused. I had one defiant student who was beginning to listen to me, I have a class cheering me on as I discipline him, and now I have another student whipping off his belt. The disruptive student saw his friend (these two students were quite good friends I might add) and shot up out of his seat. They were sitting at a bench, so there were bodies moving around in all directions and the bench almost fell down on me.

I did everything I could to keep a straight face, but I couldn’t help but be scared from the peaceful class I was confidently in control of turning into the Roman Coliseum in sixty seconds.

What I soon realized was happening was that the student removing his belt was encouraging me to hit the disruptive student with his belt, and the other students were cheering me on to hit him. Now I am so politically correct that during almost my entire first year of college I never used the term “freshman” because it could be perceived as sexist. There was no chance in heaven or in hell that I was going to hit this kid, but I had the entire class cheering me on to give him a hard whack. This put me in a very difficult position. In order to teach these students I would need them to respect my authority, but I was unwilling to do the one thing that most Haitian teachers did to assert their authority. I refused to hit anyone.

I would like to think my authoritative stare was the push that caused the disruptive student to back down, though in reality it was probably the fact that the class was cheering for his hind side to meet the business end of a belt. Fortunately there was not too much time left in class, and after wrapping up with the last few questions I dismissed the class.

Sandy, one of the people who oversees all of the work that I do here, once said that certain aspects of Haitian culture are reminiscent of America back in the 1950’s. This would be one of those times. A teacher in the US can get fired for hitting a child, but here it is commonplace, so commonplace that I almost lost the respect of my class for not doing it. I feel that part of this cultural disparity is rooted in the stark poverty of so many Haitians, and that as the poverty subsides, people will begin to adopt less harsh practices of discipline. As for now I just have to keep a stern face and make sure the students respect my regardless of the consequences.