STATE OF EMERGENCE (Y)

Teaching is a job that, for anyone who realizes its gravity, is never easy. Inspiring, rewarding, edifying, yes, in so many ways. Easy? No. Teaching in an emerging nation adds to this a whole new set of challenges.

The seemingly impossible challenge of taking learners from false beginner levels in English to tertiary study within one year is one of these. Since the greater majority of our instructors are foreigners, and often westerners at that, there are many things about our students that we simply do not, will not, cannot understand, no matter how hard we try.

We simply cannot understand why our students do not read. We cannot understand why they do not do homework. We cannot understand why they believe it is their duty to “help” their friends cheat on exams, the blind merrily leading the blind into the abyss. We cannot understand why they are not intellectually adventurous.

Today I had an unusually successful outing to the capital – enough so that the usual annoyances didn’t disturb me too much: the rest-centered working hours, the lateral driving strategies, the shopgirls who seem to think that I am the one responsible for providing a service, the job creation candidates who pack my groceries with their appetite for destruction (especially when I can convince them to use ONE bag- and that alone is a breakthough). Because today I saw that all this incongruence is simply the most up-to-the-minute response of a nation that has had to wake up so rapidly to a time of such radical change in the world.

If English is a suitable alibi to take my students by the hand and show them other options, not as being better than their own way of doing, but as mere alternatives, then I am grateful for the chance.