Teaching English

I’ve been teaching an English class once a week. The first couple times were very impromptu but they went okay. It really just made me realize how much more I have to learn.

After that I started doing more formal classes and had about 15 students coming regularly. At this time I also had an hour dedicated to doing art with the kids, an evening dedicated to games and hanging out and a couple evenings dedicated to a journalism club. The moudir however started enforcing the enrollment fee of 25Dirhams. I now have about 7 students that come regularly.

Right now I am at my Post-Pre service training and hoping that when I go back to RoseValley I can just start over. It is time to get a class going for the BAC students in the area. (the BAC is the end of the year exam for high school students that dictates whether they graduate or not. They have two tries to pass the exam at which point they either graduate or are kicked out of school. ) Women in the area have been asking for both an English class and an aerobics class. Inchallah.

I am getting excited about teaching English though because I am starting to understand the concept of content-based training. Through teaching English you teach about different topics that can also create awareness about important things.

For example something as simple as teaching the conditional: would, should, could and asking students to create a sentence using “If I was a boy, I would _______________________” and “If I was a girl, I would___________________,” you can create a discussion about men’s and women’s roles in society.

This works with introducing lessons about gender, environment, health and any number of other issues. Again, Inchallah.

RoseValley Dar Chebab

My Dar Chebab is a concrete building with 5 rooms. One room is a little bigger and has been used as an exercise room or a room for theater activities in the past(until the roof started caving in). There is a room to teach English, a little English Library, the Moudir’s office, and a storage room.  It also sounds like a new Dar Chebab is in the works but it is unclear yet as to when it will actually be built.

 I am hoping to set up my schedule next week. I’d like to teach a few English classes a week, an art class, and to hang out in the English Library a few hours a week to give the kids a place to read, study, or play. This is kind of my projected plan while I get to know my community and I start to talk to them about what they are interested in, for the future.

I then want to set aside a couple hours a week to do a leadership club and workshops on different health issues or social issues but that will come later. Right now my main goals are learning the language and integrating. I think once I get into a groove at the Dar Chebab time will start to fly. 

The Value of Community Mapping

As volunteers we are expected to work with a community in helping to identify assets within and difficulties surrounding said community. To accomplish this we have started to collect a repertoire of different tools, especially useful in creating discussion. One of the first tools we experimented with, as a CBT group, was community mapping.  

One of our first days at the D.C. we divided the students in into one group of boys and one group of girls. Each group was supposed draw a map of their community and identify which places they spent the most time at.  This week we got the maps out to compare them with one another. The girl’s map had the high school, the dar chebab, the hammam, the mosque, the hair salon, the market, the s-suq and a coffee shop. The boy’s map had many of these things but also included the soccer field, a swimming pool, a night club and as you can imagine didn’t include the hair salon.

We asked the students to look at the main differences and first asked the girls if they played soccer. They did play soccer, but only at school. We asked them if they swim. They said they do swim but they only swim in other towns. They would not swim in there community.  Why would the girls be allowed to swim outside their community but not within their community, however the boys could?  As the discussion unfolded this is what we found:

The community that we live in is rather small and everyone knows everyone. The girls said they felt more comfortable going to a club or the swimming pool elsewhere. They said that if they go here (in what will from now on be known as CBTville) everyone knows their business and they are harassed about it. They said they felt more respected by people that didn’t know them than the ones that do.

This also opened up discussion about another topic. One, 17 year old, girl pointed out that in CBTville the number one problem is prostitution. She has 5 friends that she could think of, off the top of her head that prostitute themselves. You can make $2.00 every time you have sex with someone. The prostitutes in CBTville have created a bad reputation for all women in the community. The girl pointed out that if you go out at all it is assumed that you are a prostitute so it is better to go to a city ten or 20 minutes away (to go dancing, swimming or whatever it may be) where you can avoid the situation entirely.  It was a very interesting discussion.

The gravity of the topic however did not bring anyone down, in fact it also created a forum to discuss solutions. Some ideas were to create a training center for men to give them skills, keep them in work and off the street where they can get in trouble. And more importantly create a girls center where the girls could learn different crafts such as weaving, so that they could support themselves.

It is fascinating how just by asking these kids to draw maps and then by asking the right questions a whole debate can be started. We didn’t tell them that prostitution was a problem or how they should attempt to fix it. They told us. And essentially it is our role to give them a safe space to have those discussions. 

The Dar Chebab

A Dar Chebab is a youth center run by a Mudir (the director.) Mudirs contribute to their Dar Chebab’s to varying degrees. Some Mudirs feel their responsibility is solely to unlock the Dar Chebab at the hour of opening and to lock it up in the evening.  Others feel more inclined to organize activities. Associations in the area take on the responsibility of organizing most activities. If there are no associations collaborating with a D.C. to set up activities, then there aren’t any.  

The Moudira (female Moudir) at our Dar Chebab has been very friendly and forthcoming with information, although it seems inflated with positive characteristics and bled of any negative characteristics that might exist.  That said she has been very cooperative in letting us take charge of the activities we wanted to do in the D.C. in spite of the knowledge that we would only be there for a couple months.

Our main activity so far has been to establish a Friend’s club. Our goal was to create a safe space for both girls and boys to hang out, work on homework, play games, practice English and make friends. For us it was an opportunity to learn Darija, explore the culture of Moroccan youth and to get some experience teaching and interacting in such an environment. 

There have been several diligent students that actively participate and others that just come to play and check out the new Americans.  An average of 20 people come a day, a nice number easily distributed between the 6 of us trainees.  We start with an energizer, some kind of game to “energize” people and get them excited to learn. Recently it has been tossing a ball around and introducing ourselves, or saying our favorite subjects in school. After that we usually break into smaller groups of 5 to 10 and talk about culture or work on homework. At the end of this week we hope to facilitate a discussion about Maps we had the youth draw the first day we were at the D.C. That explanation will follow.