Spring Camp- English Class 1

About six of us were teaching English and three of us ran clubs. I was responsible for an Intermediate-Mid English class and I helped out in a health club in the afternoon. We also had a SIDA/ART club, and an Environment club, we tried to tag team most classes and clubs because…well…kids are just that scary.

For my first class I decided to talk about gender roles and play a “gender-bender” game. I know, I know, I would incorporate that into my English class on the first day. For the activity I had 27 note cards with different jobs/gender roles on them. Some examples were: Police, cooking, cleaning, teacher, doctor, nurse, airplane pilot…and some harder ones (at least to explain)…determines the sex of a fetus upon conception, prostate cancer, breast feeding and giving birth. I created three categories, Mostly Women, Mostly Men, Both Common. In the first round I asked the students to put the different cards in the category with which they most closely corresponded.

I was working with an extremely helpful environment volunteer and both of us were surprised to see the results. Most of the students in the class were from Rabat. There were just a few from the bled (countryside.) But we still didn’t expect the students to say…Both mom and dad: cook, clean, become teachers, gendarmes and wash laundry. We both said, REALLY? REALLY?

This is interesting because we both live in the countryside and…we’ve never seen a female gendarme, a female doctor, our host dads don’t cook and clean…that is for sure. The Rabatis kind of shrugged it off and re-enforced the, YES GUYS, BOTH MEN AND WOMEN DO THESE THINGS. It was certainly news to me. And I’m pretty sure it was news to the students from the countryside that got extremely quiet at about this time.

The next step of the game, after discussing why certain jobs are more female specific and other jobs are more male specific, was to switch up the categories. The new categories were, Only Women Can (physiologically,) Only Men Can (physiologically,) Both Can (physiologically.) Of course when we did it this way, we found that both men and women are capable of doing just about every job. There were exceptions, Only women give birth and breast feed and only men get prostate cancer and determine the sex of a fetus upon conception but… the majority of all other jobs can be done by either males or females. A small discussion followed about why jobs are gender specific when both males and females are capable of doing them. It was a great class despite the fact that some of the language was a little over the students heads. They seemed receptive and hopefully it made them think at least a little bit.