School in Cameroon offers lessons for us all

By COREY BALLANTYNE
SPECIAL TO THE VINDICATOR
"Get out of here with your Peace Corps shoes," one schoolchild was once overheard teasing another.
That's how famous Peace Corps teachers are for being the dirtiest people at school, especially with their shoes. Cameroonians (like people in many countries, I believe) dress nicely to go anywhere in public.
For better or worse, Cameroonians have spent their lives acquiring the habits that let their clothes avoid the dust and other grime that Americans are not used to.
After all, "the ground" just doesn't stay on the ground here. The red clay owns all the space up past at least knee level, and schools are some of the dustiest places. You don't sit on anything in a Cameroonian school, even a table at waist level, without checking how much dust has settled on it since the last time someone wiped it.
If necessary (usually), you put down some kind of paper over it to sit on. You look like an idiot with your dusty brown rear until you start remembering to do this every time, and other teachers will be sure to tell you so.
Looking neat
You can't work in anything but a clean-looking, well-ironed suit-type outfit. Wearing traditional Cameroonian attire is a little like showing up "at the office" in the U.S. dressed like the pioneers, as in "Little House On the Prairie."
So you show up looking as spiffy as possible, and you pick your way over the puddles and around the bumps in the mud of the courtyard in your high heels. Then, if the rain is not beating on the tin roof so that students even in the front can't hear you -- and if the sun is bright enough through the windows that they can sort of see the board -- and if your principal doesn't spontaneously call some pointless assembly in the middle of class -- and if you speak in "special English" because English is probably no one's first language except your own -- and if you avoid the slick spots on the board where chalk doesn't actually leave marks ---- then you have a chance of getting your students to pay attention and learn something.
The younger they are, the more they resist. Did you know that there are at least 50,000,000,000,000,000,000 (50 quintillion) carbon atoms in the visible tip of graphite in a pencil? Well, my form 3 chemistry student sure didn't, and they roared with laughter as they waited to see where I would stop drawing zeroes.
It was my best lesson ever, a smash hit. It was the same lesson in which I demonstrated diffusion with dye and simulated random movement and collisions of molecules by shaking up several of the small, perfectly round local limes in a big pot. Students paid attention and (as quizzes later showed) understood a lot that day.
Time and creativity
But an excellent and exciting lesson takes a lot of time and creativity to plan, at least for the first time, and a teacher who has the energy to produce one every day is a miracle worker.
A lesson without these bells and whistles, however, is totally boring and breeds discipline problems, especially in Cameroon, where a typical class size for 12-year-olds (form 3 eighth-graders) is 80 pupils.
My very next lesson for the same class, in fact, was like that. Preparing a lesson takes longer the closer the grade level is to my own level of expertise.
First, here's how the grade levels are numbered. That is one of the many ways the anglophone division of the Cameroonian public school system is still modeled after the original British system.
As in Harry Potter's school, what you and I call grades seven-12 are forms one to five, lower sixth and upper sixth. So when I taught upper sixth form chemistry during my student teaching at Peace Corps summer school, I taught high school seniors.
However, "high school seniors," or final-year students, in Cameroon, as in most of the world, have covered more material than their American counterparts.
I studied, too
The particular topic I chose, from the official Ministry of Education syllabus, was material that I had learned in my third year of college, one year ago.
This of course meant that I studied hard myself, to have a deeper understanding than my students. You sure don't think of the awesome demos if you don't know exactly, maybe even by heart, what you are talking about.
So imagine giving a 50-minute presentation every day, to a class in which you are a student. That was the difficulty level of my life while teaching upper sixth. And to think I assumed that all-nighters would be a thing of the past when I went from college to Peace Corps.
And if you're not done planning your lesson early, you can forget about handouts. I think Cameroonian teachers just don't make copies of anything, but in Peace Corps, we learn to construct our own cheap copiers called hectographs.
A hectograph is a solidified pool of gelatin and glycerin. The gelatin provides the flat surface that you lay each sheet of paper on.
Glycerin is some kind of cooking product and has something to do with making the ink stick, as I recall.
I have made 20-25 copies in 20-30 minutes, not counting the time you spend hand-writing the original on a special carbon-copy type of paper (which we normally can only buy in Yaound & eacute;).
The hardest skill for me to learn as a new teacher is discipline. Like most of my fellow Peace Corps math/science trainees, I am a scientist, not a child psychologist.
Discipline? It's fun
I have quickly gotten tired of preteens' "issues" with adults. Cameroonian discipline methods can be fun, though. One of the few things working in a teacher's favor in Cameroon is that in a Cameroonian classroom, the teacher is boss -- absolutely.
You can make a student stand, kneel, lie on the floor, face the corner, or stand on one leg while taking notes.
You can smack or beat them. You can send them to the discipline master, who will beat them, sometimes assembling the whole school as an audience.
You can make them sweep the floor, clean the latrine, etc.
You can have them do your laundry or carry water for you.
You can send them out, where the bad ones will wander away but the better ones will peer through the bars of the window to catch the rest of the notes. (All windows in Cameroon are barred to keep burglars out.)
So far, most of us American teachers have refused to exercise the options involving physical pain.
Embarrassment works pretty well. Anything that involves getting dirty is an especially effective embarrassment because in Cameroon a clean appearance is demanded and students spend a lot of time cleaning their clothes.
I sure wouldn't want to kneel on the dusty floor either. I had no problems with my upper sixth form students talking after the day I made one of them kneel.
Pop quizzes
There's also the pop quiz option. One of the few things that's always fun about being a teacher is laughing at students' wrong answers behind their backs. As long as it's their own fault for not paying attention, we read the dumbest answers out loud in the staff room.
For misbehaving during our lesson on nuclear reactions, I asked my class, "Name one city in Japan that was bombed using a nuclear bomb in World War II." Guesses included Baghdad, Kuwait, Vatican, Nashville, Irak, Kobe (a real city in Japan), Kobo, China, U.S.A., Izekiel, Tokyo, Hinostory, and Nalagaska.
Mind you, the same thing could no doubt happen in a rowdy class of American students of the same age. You younger students might look up the right answers and the actual significance of some of these other places.
Interesting, "not so?"