Child's Play

Based on what I'd been told before arriving, I was expecting the most difficult things about working at this school would all be tied to life in a developing country: frequent power outages, periods with no running water, difficulty accessing the internet, safety, etc.  From my arrival in Conakry, however, I've been pleasantly surprised to find the people of Guinea friendly, the walk to school dusty but safe, and the housing comfortable if not exactly without excitement.  The teaching, on the other hand, was immediately way, way harder than I'd anticipated.  Working with my mentor teacher, I'm only teaching nine students (soon to be ten), and compared to the kindergarten classes I'd observed in Kansas and the kindergarten I'd taught at in Osaka, nine students sounded like...well, child's play, if that's not too clever.  I was a little anxious about starting to apply all the skills I'd been learning in my grad program related to differentiation, assessment, collaboration, etc., but classroom management would be no big deal, I figured.  Kindergarteners like me.  Kindergarteners are sweet.

That was the biggest surprise, one that had me in literal tears (the worst kind) after my first day teaching: even though there are only nine of them, classroom management was way, way harder than I'd anticipated.  During those first few days, six of the nine students would be crying, running away, or punching the other children at any given time.  I felt horrible at my job, especially with this apparent failure to keep control of the class in front of my mentor teacher.  I could come up with several reasons these students behaved the way they did, and I tried to let these ideas inform my response (not that it helped me feel much better): they came from vastly different cultures from my own, most of them have low levels of English, most are still unused to school, all of them were getting used to a new teacher and new routine halfway through the school year.

Along with my crisis of confidence, I began to have a real crisis of conscience: why was I so bothered that it was so chaotic in the classroom?  They weren't obeying me, but did I really want to be an authoritarian, a force for telling these students to sit down and shut up because I said so?  That's certainly not the teaching philosophy I'd studied for the last year and a half in my education program, and it's not what I had imagined I'd be doing as a kindergarten teacher.  And to put it bluntly, I didn't want to be the white guy yelling at a room of nine black people (children, but still people) to stop talking!

Perhaps most critically, I think I had been comparing these nine international students to Japanese kindergarteners who were in a culturally homogeneous, strictly regimented school environment.  These students are from Guinea, Cote d'Ivoire, or were international school brats.  What do I know about the school or home culture these kids come from?  What if...well, what if yelling is what these students know as a sign to be quiet?  What if my mild-mannered, touchy-feely, hippie-dippy persona doesn't register as an authority figure as them?  Or worse, as a teacher?

Well, last week, this particular crisis came to a head.  I decided I didn't want to be the yelling teacher, the overwhelmed, frazzled teacher.  I wanted to be the hippie uncle teacher, the one with the dopey ponytail and the ukulele and the dumb print shirts.

Easy fix: I brought my ukulele to school.

And how did it go?  Well, a bit anticlimactically.  My students enjoy the ukulele, and they enjoy singing, and while there's still a lot of punching etc., when I can get them on board with "Down By the Bay" or "The Green Grass Grows All Around," for a minute or two, I can stop shouting and get them to behave like adorable little children instead of complete maniacs.  For now, that's enough.